The New Table Top System: Microsoft's Surface computer

The first example of Microsoft Surface is a table, just short of two feet high, with a 21-by-42-inch top. Under a sheet of acrylic is a 30-inch hi-res horizontal display. That's all you see—the five camera-sensors, the DLP light engine, and the Vista computer that makes it all run are hidden, encased in the body of what looks like a more-fashionable version of the original Pong game. (Presumably, the device runs a version of Vista that doesn't ask you all the time if you're sure you want to proceed.) But the impact of all that hardware is evident as soon as you touch the "massively multi-touch" surface. The machine can process dozens of inputs at once, from one person or a group. Whether you're doing virtual finger painting, moving digital images around like physical pieces of paper, or pointing to something on a map and getting information on that spot, it's clear that the standard sci-fi movie vision of having people interact with virtual surfaces as if they're real (see "Tron," “Minority Report” and many other flicks) has now arrived.

In an era where just about every possible cool name for a company or product is taken, startups and entrepreneurs find themselves dipping into the strange, the wacky and the just plain weird. I have no idea what the heck a VelvetPuffin is supposed to be--other than perhaps an extremely tacky piece of wall art--but the service itself is as cool as the name it might have had, had it debuted before the nomenclature land rush began in earnest. Still, I digress.

The VelvetPuffin service is one of an increasing number of concepts that I've seen over the past 12 months that makes me say, "Wow. I don't know whether this company is going to succeed, but it just works the way things should." So, what is it? It's an instant messaging-based social network for mobile phones, coupled with a socially active desktop, according to R. Chandrasekar, co founder of Singapore-based Radixs, the company behind the service. In plain English--and this is the brilliant simplicity that impressed us--the interface on both the phone (Java 2.0 phones with GPRS or 3G connections only) and the desktop (just Windows for now; the Mac client is forthcoming,) look just like a typical IM client: a vertical rectangle. This makes it an optimal interface for instant messaging. But it also ends up working well on the phone for managing your photos, blogs, video and polls (an easy way for you and your VelvetPuffin-equipped peers to vote on which restaurant to eat at or which movie to go see.)

Once I first got my hands on Sony's PlayStation Portable back in 2004, I tossed the flash music player that I'd been using in favor of the new gadget on the block. But I quickly discovered that the PSP wasn't exactly a booming system when it came to audio output. For music and videogames, turning the sound all the way up mostly did the trick when armed with regular or noise-canceling headphones. But for video, typical New York subway noises would overwhelm its dinky maximum volume, to say nothing of the engine sounds on a cross-country flight. What to do?