Network World — 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 theDEMO 09 conference in Palm Desert, Calif. this week.

View a slideshow of these products.

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.

Based on open source hardware designs, the Touch Book weights two pounds, offers "never-before-seen battery life," and is ideal for typing e-mail, opening an Office document, or playing games and watching videos, according to DEMO's company guide.

"This device will find a ready market among people who want a more capable read/write device with which to navigate cloud computing," DEMO says. "And with its ARM processor, Linux and commodity components, we won't be surprised to see an ecosystem of applications grow up around this product."

Always Innovating will be one of about 40 companies demonstrating new products and services on Monday and Tuesday at DEMO, a launch pad for emerging technology.

While the show has a big focus on consumers, it will also showcase numerous tools IT pros and businesses may find interesting.

Symantec will launch Project Guru, which will appeal to IT pros whose family and friends expect them to solve all their technology problems. The project is a Web-based remote support tool that lets "tech savvy individuals" provide remote support to family and friends.

"It's kind of like the nerd in every social group," Shipley says. "It's software that is going to make it easy for you to provide remote long-distance support for all the people who count on you to do it."

Business users of the iPhone might be interested in ShoutOUT, a voice-to-text Short Message Service (SMS) application that will soon be available in Europe through a major wireless carrier.

"Built on Promptu Systems Corporation's powerful speech recognition technology, ShoutOUT lets users dictate messages in natural language, quickly check their text message and send the SMS to their intended recipients," DEMO says.

ShoutOUT sends the speech file to a remote server for transcribing, but lets users review the transcribed message for errors before sending to intended recipients. While the product is targeted at the consumer market, it could be useful to business users especially if it is extended to e-mail and calendaring, as the company promises.

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