Holiday Gift Guide 2007: Best Technology Bling

Five fabulous gifts for the tech lover in your life...even if that's you!

By
Thu, November 08, 2007

CIO — You've been good, right? Check out our five suggestions for your holiday wish list, or get some gift-giving ideas. From portable GPS units to Swarovski crystal-encrusted USB memory keys, our 2007 holiday gift guide glitters.

Callpod's Chargepod

Solve Your Power Charger Problem

Enraged by that tangled mess of power charger cords in your briefcase? Callpod has simplified it all in a hub ideal for travelers. The Chargepod uses only one outlet for charging six gadgets, such as popular-brand cell phones, MP3 players, iPods, BlackBerrys, Bluetooth devices and more. Weighing only 1 ounce, the device comes with a carrying pouch. $100.

Oakley O ROKR PRO

Looking Good

Walk the walk, talk the talk and look the part in these sporty shades. Motorola and Oakley have teamed up to create O ROKR PRO Bluetooth Stereo Eyewear—sunglasses that connect you (wirelessly, of course) to your mobile phone and Bluetooth-enabled music player. Built with adjustable speakers for each ear and boasting smudge-resistant lenses, these specs promise protection from harmful rays, and up to 100 hours of standby time. $249.

Swarovski USB Drive

"Mr. Flash Drive, I Presume"

Its name is Key. IronKey. And it's the world's most secure flash drive. Designed so you can safely browse the Web and transport data, this James Bond-worthy flash drive also protects against phishing and pharming attacks, ID theft and keystroke loggers. Forgot your password? You've got 10 consecutive tries before—yup, you guessed it—the device (internally) self-destructs, wiping everything on its drive clean as a whistle. $79-$149. If more glam is what you seek, check out Swarovski's crystal-encrusted USB Memory Key. $178.

TomTom ONE

One Smart GPS

Everybody hates traffic, but now you can say goodbye to all that gridlock thanks to your new best friend, TomTom. The company's ONE 3rd Edition GPS Portable Navigation System comes with real-time traffic and weather information and allows you to choose your route—the quickest, the shortest, the most scenic or the toll-free. The wallet-size device features a 3.5-inch, anti-glare touch screen. $250.

Palm Centro

Palm's Smallest Smartphone: Centro

Still not willing to dish out the cash for Apple's iPhone? Palm's wallet-friendly alternative—the Centro smartphone—sells for a mere $99 with a new contract from Sprint. Centro is Palm's smallest handheld—measuring just over 4 inches in length and weighing 4 ounces. It comes equipped with a full keyboard, AIM and text-messaging capabilities, and speedy Internet for Web searches. $99.

As you know, everything is mobile, connected, interactive, and immediate. This is exactly why organizations need a highly agile IT infrastructure in order to keep pace with extreme fluctuations in business demand. This book will help you understand why infrastructure convergence has been widely accepted as the optimal approach for simplifying and accelerating your IT to deliver services at the speed of business while also shifting significantly more IT resources from operations to innovation.
For this white paper, IDC performed an in-depth analysis of the business value of VMware View, defined as the expected ROI associated with the use of the solution as a platform for the targeted deployment of a virtual desktop infrastructure.
This paper explains virtualization, its benefits for mid-sized business and how IBM's virtualization strategy can help these companies reduce costs, improve services and simplify management.
Forrester Research makes recommendations on best practices to optimize branch virtualization and consolidation initiatives. See how a "thin" branch architecture, with key servers, services and applications in the data center that relies on a high-performing WAN connection, can offer the greatest efficiencies.
When trying to achieve continuous compliance with internal policies and external regulations, organizations need to replace traditional processes with a new best practice approach and new innovative technology, such as that provided by IBM Tivoli Endpoint Manager.
IBM Tivoli Endpoint Manager helps organizations automatically manage patches for multiple operating systems and applications across hundreds of thousands of endpoints regardless of location, connection type or status.  
Download this webcast to learn about the design considerations for virtualizing SQL workloads, performance and scalability information and high-availability options, as well as support considerations
Many enterprises have discovered that the use of virtualization to support desktop workloads creates a range of significant benefits. These benefits include price efficiencies, improved IT management and greater agility and choice for end users.

This VMware sponsored webcast with IDC will provide both quantitative measurement of the business value -- defined as the expected ROI -- and qualitative analysis associated with the use of VMware View™. IDC will also provide an analysis of the View Composer and ThinApp™ features of VMware View, including the business value of these solutions and an overview of how they work.

Attend this webcast to learn about:
- Challenges and barriers that might impede the adoption of desktop virtualization
- Navigating roadblocks to facilitate a strategic implementation
- Optimizing qualitative and quantitative benefits to IT and your business
Applications are changing - they're increasingly web-oriented, global in nature and run from multiple device types. Additionally, the volume of data is growing exponentially every year. How do you ensure your applications have fast, accurate, up-to-date information in this new world? Modern applications are data-intensive; delivering data the old way using monolithic databases isn't working. What's needed is a modern approach to data. One that scales-out as needed and delivers predictable high performance, but without sacrificing data consistency or integrity.
VMware View™ 5 simplifies IT management while increasing end user freedom by delivering desktop services from your cloud. Building upon VMware's leadership in desktop virtualization, VMware View 5 delivers a high-performance user experience while giving IT greater policy control.

View this webcast and find out how VMware View 5 can help you:
- Deliver the highest fidelity experience of desktop services across any device and any network
- Simplify and automate IT management, security and control of desktop services
- Reduce the costs associated with your desktop environment
IT professionals are being asked to deliver faster "time-to-value" than ever before. An IDG Research survey found that CIOs are eager to invest in technologies that will enable them to get new applications and services up quickly, achieving faster time-to-value.
Learn how to reduce IT management overhead, ease revision control, guarantee data security, scale systems more quickly and reduce server and software costs.
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