Touch-screen laptop is top tech

A sleek touch-screen laptop, a voice-to-text service for the iPhone, and various tools to help employees work more efficiently are being unveiled at the Demo 09 conference in Palm Desert, California this week, states CIO.

A start-up called Always Innovating will reveal the Touch Book, a portable device that works both as a netbook with a small keyboard and a touch-screen tablet.

About the size of an 8.5-by-11-inch sheet of paper folded in half, the Touch Book is for those times when the iPhone isn't quite enough but a notebook computer is too big, says Demo executive producer Chris Shipley.

Qualcomm's Mems Technologies group at Demo 09 is showing off its evolving Mirasol display technology, which is based on micro-mechanical control of a reflective material, reports CNet.

The pitch is that Mirasol displays take much less power than standard backlit LCDs, and are also readable in daylight.

At the moment, screens on the Mirasol-based devices look like black-and-white watch LCDs.

In a joint demonstration at CeBIT, the ICT event taking place in Hannover, Germany this week, IBM and SAP previewed a technology that enables the live migration of SAP applications across remote IBM Power6 systems via cloud computing, writes CNNMoney.

The technology, developed as a part of the European Union-funded Reservoir cloud computing project, is designed to provide companies with a range of cloud computing solutions to meet their specific business needs.

Cloud computing is an emerging approach to shared infrastructure in which large pools of systems are linked together to provide IT services.