The New Thin for Notebooks

A new wave of lightweight notebooks promises to be more livable for the road warrior, by offering more advanced features and built-in optical drives.

Among them are new entries from Lenovo and Toshiba, each of which announced on May 31 a new business-oriented notebook line built around a 12.1-inch wide screen and an internal optical drive. The new machines each weigh about 4 pounds.

Smaller is usually thought of as better, when it comes to business notebooks. Lightweight machines are easier to tote to meetings and on planes.

But the more diminutive machines—often called ultraportables—have generally forced compromises, including asking buyers to use cramped keyboards and to carry peripherals such as CD-RW drives separately, in addition to selling for higher prices than somewhat larger notebooks.

The two newest machines, however, eliminate many of those drawbacks, observers say.

"Manufacturers are trying to attract consumers to what's always been a highly coveted form factor" in ultraportables, said Richard Shim, an analyst at IDC in San Mateo, Calif.

"The limitation has always been price. Now with competition, prices have come down. What's also notable is that these are coming with optical [drives] built in. That's a very new feature. It's not just that they're pricing it down, but they're actually adding innovation to the systems."

Lenovo is aiming its Lenovo 3000 V100 mainly at small businesses. The 4-pound machine, which starts at $1,099 and ranges up to about $1,650, packages one of Intel's Core Duo processors with a 12.1-inch widescreen display and an optical drive.

Among its other standard features are a 5-in-1 memory card reader and a built-in 1.3 megapixel camera for videoconferencing, Lenovo executives said.

Toshiba's Tecra M6, at 4.1 pounds, includes a 12.1-inch widescreen display, an Intel Core Duo processor as well as a multi-format DVD writer drive as part of its standard configuration. The machine will start at $1,059, Toshiba said in a statement.

Ultraportables, which generally weigh 4 pounds or less and have a 12-inch screen, have always been a relatively small niche in the overall notebook market.

The category, which historically represented around 10 percent of shipments, could benefit more than others from a changing market that's expected to see worldwide notebook shipments rise from about 65 million in 2005 to about 140 million in 2010, by IDC's calculations.

Generally, "We're seeing prices come down in all notebooks as competition heats up the category," Shim said.

However, manufacturers "are not just taking a 12-inch ultraportable from two years ago and pricing it down. They're adding new technologies to it and they're lowering the price. This is a sign that the manufacturers recognize...just dropping price isn't going to be enough."

Manufacturers such as Lenovo certainly hope they hit a nerve with their new machines.

Lenovo executives in Raleigh, N.C., characterized the V100 as a no-compromise ultraportable, as it also offers options such as 100GB hard drives.

"We wanted to deliver a product that really caters to the segment…so [customers] get value—at good weight and a good price point," said Frank Kardonski, worldwide product manager for Lenovo 3000 products.

"We really feel that this is going to be a very fast-growing [market] segment and this is going to be a successful product."

Lenovo will offer the V100 alongside its smaller ThinkPad X Series, which offers a standard aspect ratio 12.1-inch display and weighs between about 2.7 pounds and 3.5 pounds, sans an external optical drive.

But even lighter-weight ultraportables may receive a boost, some PC executives have said.

Gateway, which began offering its 3-pound E-100M notebook March 30, believes that the combination of light weight, wide screens, WWAN (wireless WAN) capabilities and longer-lasting batteries, will all work together to foster greater growth of ultraportables.

Ultraportables are "positioned for growth now. It's very reasonable to suggest that this segment could be twice as large as it is now," said William Diehl, vice president of product marketing at Gateway, in Irvine, Calif.

"People are starting to understand the benefits of mobility," Diehl said. "When I say mobility, I mean form factor—thin and light [weight]—wireless—with Bluetooth, wireless LAN and wireless WAN—and, lastly, battery life. Wireless is useless if the battery doesn't work."

Indeed, IDC's latest forecast projects that ultraportables, which saw worldwide unit shipments of about 5 million in 2005, will increase to about 11 million by 2010.

But, even with the increase in shipments, the ultraportable category will still be under 10 percent of total notebook shipments by 2010.

The market will be continue to dominated instead by so-called thin and light models, which have 14-inch or 15-inch screens.

Still, given the trend illuminated by Lenovo's V100 and Toshiba's Tecra M6, there is potential for the ultraportable category to see greater-than-expected growth during IDC's forecast period, Shim said.

IT could come in part because manufacturers have begun courting consumers more aggressively with ultraportables.

The two new machines, though designed for businesses, have many consumer-like features, Shim said. Meanwhile, Gateway offers a consumer version of its E-100M, dubbed the NX100.

"We're still looking at slightly higher prices and, realistically, these things have always been viewed as sort of secondary systems," Shim said.

Although, "Adding optical to the box changes that scenario. But many users will still want a bigger machine."

AMD Live! PC Launch Backed by Free Media Apps

Advanced Micro Devices partners are expected to announce the first PCs based on the AMD Live! entertainment platform on May 31, the day that AMD will begin to make available a number of specialized, free applications to improve the multimedia experience on Live! PCs.

Initially, Live! PCs will be not much more than existing computers designed around the Athlon64 X2 microprocessors that AMD manufactures. Over time, however, OEMs including Acer, Alienware, Fujitsu Siemens Computers, Gateway, Hewlett-Packard, Sahara and Tsinghua Tongfang will preload the five new AMD Live! Entertainment Suite applications, which AMD plans to add to over time to build out the new Live! platform.

The new Live! Entertainment Suite will rebrand existing third-party applications, tie them into the AMD brand name and offer them to consumers for free. AMD is also considering whether to capitalize on any brand equity the new applications earn by pushing consumers toward a future Live!-branded portal, AMD executives said.

Both AMD and its rival, Intel, began to embrace the concept of the PC as a consumer device in 2004. In 2005, Intel announced its consumer Viiv brand. While AMD waited until this past January to unveil its AMD Live! strategy, the company's only announcement to date has been the hardware specifications underpinning Live!. But what Viiv and Live! are, and what they will mean for consumers, is just now becoming clear.

Like Apple, Tivo, or a host of other consumer electronics manufacturers, AMD and Intel hope its chips will form the foundations of the home entertainment device or media server upon which digital photos, music and video will reside.

The difference between the two companies, however, lies in the attitudes toward digital content: Intel's Viiv program has tied itself to premium content, including first-run movies that are only available from online video rental agencies. AMD, on the other hand, has initially designed Live! with user-owned, DRM-free content in mind.

When Apple Computer Inc. opens its newest store Friday on the same New York shopping strip as Prada, Tiffany & Co. and Saks Fifth Avenue, it'll mark five years of a distinctive retail style that both reinforces the company's brand cachet and pays off handsomely.
Like most other openings since Apple unveiled its first retail outlet in McLean, Va. in May 2001, anxious visitors will be lined up outside, waiting. Some began forming a queue on Thursday.
It's not because of Black Friday-like markdowns. Other than free computers and commemorative T-shirts being given to the first wave of visitors, the attraction is Apple itself. The company, with its Macintosh computers and iPod music players — and now its stores — has built its empire on simplicity and a user-friendly approach. And other retailers have taken note.

“The stores have been super successful and a real contributor to Apple's success,” Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs said in a phone interview a day before heading to the New York opening. “It's bringing a whole new generation of customers to Apple and the Mac, and that's really important to us.”

Analysts predict the latest store will be a magnet. Others already draw more than 10,000 visitors a week, on average. Altogether, Apple's stores pulled in $2.35 billion in sales in fiscal 2005, making it one of the fastest growing retailers in the world, according to Retail Forward, an Ohio-based consulting and market research firm.

The stores' growth rate in revenue per store — an increase of 44 percent from 2004 to 2005 — eclipses industry norms. By comparison, major retailers like Target Corp., Wal-Mart Stores Inc., and Best Buy Co. Inc. saw growth rates of 3 percent to 6 percent in 2005.

Apple's stores also reap more revenue per square foot than others: Its annual sales of $2,489 for every square foot of space is more than eight times that of Target and 2 1/2 times that of Best Buy, according to Forrester Research Inc.

The stores, along with innovative products like the iPod, helped Cupertino, Calif.-based Apple reach a record of nearly $14 billion in revenue last year.

“What the stores have done is really build the Apple brand,” said Charlie Wolf, an analyst at Needham & Co., an investment banking and asset management firm. “It's so consistent with what Apple is that it has really added value to the entire enterprise.”

Apple stores feature stark white walls and wood floors. Web-connected computers and iPods are arranged sparingly on tabletops, beckoning for a test drive. An abundant staff of knowledgeable salespeople — who don't work on commission — are there to help when needed, but otherwise hang back, adding to the low- to no-pressure sales environment.

The larger stores host free how-to workshops, while all stores have “Genius Bars” where technicians fix Apple equipment and answer questions.

“Other retailers are also increasing the hands-on experience, but no one has done it as well as Apple,” said Mary Brett Whitfield, a Retail Forward analyst.

Apple Computer's corporate symbol hangs in a glass box entrance to the company's store in New York Thursday, May 18, 2006. The Apple store is scheduled to open Friday.

A recent visit to a bustling store in San Francisco yielded only positive comments:

— Mike Greaves, 28, used to drive miles to get to a shop that serviced Macintoshes. “And you didn't get as good quality of service,” he said, picking up his Mac Mini from a free repair at the “Genius Bar.”

— Sarah Bunje, 67, sat through her sixth in-store workshop on iPod-iTunes since last November. “I always learn something new,” said the Foster City, Calif. resident.

Apple stores have been profitable since September 2003, but when Apple first launched its retail initiative amid a declining PC market and other failing electronics retailers, most notably Gateway's stores, it was viewed as a risky move.

Apple saw it as a way to improve its reach.

“The stores offered a much better way to deliver the product than being in the back of a Best Buy,” said Andrew Neff, an analyst at Bear Stearns & Co. Inc.

Jobs and his lieutenants paid careful attention to every detail — from the nuts and bolts of the stores' designs to its operations and customer service. Ron Johnson, a veteran retail executive who worked at Target before Jobs recruited him to lead the Apple stores, still personally interviews each store manager.

“A lot of people thought we'd fail,” Johnson said. “But five years later, there's a lot of evidence we're successful.”

The popularity of the iPod helped drive traffic and sales, but computer sales have also steadily grown. In fact, more than 50 percent of the computers sold at Apple's stores each day go to customers buying their first Mac.

The new Fifth Avenue store, next to FAO Schwarz and across the street from Bergdorf Goodman, will be Apple's 147th, and its first to stay open around the clock. It will also have the largest staff of 300 workers.

Other Apple stores are scattered throughout the United States in high-traffic shopping locations. There also are six each in Japan and the United Kingdom, and two in Canada.

The striking Fifth Avenue entrance — a 32-foot glass cube emerging from a gray and white marbled plaza — was inspired by I.M. Pei's glass pyramid at the Louvre in Paris, said Jobs, who helped design it.

Wide doors lead pedestrians down a circular glass-and-steel staircase, swooping them into the inner sanctum of the subterranean but well-lit store.

The property's owner had solicited Apple to set up shop there, Jobs said.

And now, Johnson said, “in the city that never sleeps will be this store that never closes.”

James Bankoff, AOL's Executive Vice President for programming & products,
talks about the release of AIM Pages in New York. AIM Pages is an evolution of AOL's popular IM platform,
adding photos, blogs, music and other tools.

It's only natural for companies large and small to want to capture some of the social-networking magic of MySpace.com, a Web site that has risen out of nowhere to become the Internet's second busiest by successfully figuring out what teens and young adults want.
AOL joined the pack this month with its own take on social networking, a loose term for services that help users expand their circles of friends by exploiting existing connections, rather than meeting randomly or by keyword matches alone.
The rapid growth of MySpace and last year's purchase of its parent company by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. for $580 million “definitely accelerated something,” said Greg Sterling, an industry analyst with Sterling Market Intelligence in Oakland, Calif.

“MySpace went from being this curiosity to a cultural phenomenon,” Sterling said. “People started to think this is a really, really big opportunity.”

MySpace offers a mix of features — message boards, games, Web journals — designed to keep its youth-oriented visitors clicking on its advertising-supported pages. The site has successfully built communities around music, becoming the go-to place for emerging bands, and it wants to replicate that success in film and comedy.

Driven largely by word of mouth, MySpace grew astronomically since its launch in January 2004 and is now second in the United States among all Web sites by total page views, behind only Yahoo Inc., according to comScore Media Metrix.

MySpace's user base more than quadrupled to nearly 80 million over the past year, with as many as 270,000 joining every day.

Yahoo even announced a home page redesign this week in part to fend off the rising threat, adding recommendations and insights about cultural trends culled from its community of 402 million users worldwide.

Others, mostly startups, are hoping to become the next-generation MySpace, offering more-robust, easier-to-use tools or specialized features for niches.

CollectiveX Inc. launched this month as a network for professionals and other pre-organized groups. Famoodle started in April as a MySpace for families. Relative newcomers Tagged Inc. and Varsity Media Group Inc.'s Varsity World are billing themselves as safe havens for teens.

Even the British Broadcasting Corp., seeing rival News Corp.'s successes, is revamping its Web site to incorporate more user-generated features.

The most notable of the newcomers is AOL's AIM Pages, which is building upon its already substantial instant-messaging base of 49 million active users worldwide. Still, MySpace's number is higher — the active subset of registered users who logged on in March was 56 million, according to comScore.

“MySpace is doing phenomenally well,” said James Bankoff, AOL's executive vice president for programming and products.

Nonetheless, Bankoff denied AOL was positioning AIM Pages as “a MySpace killer.” Rather, he said, the entrance by Time Warner Inc.'s Internet unit “points to the trend of consumers wanting to express themselves in a more powerful way.”

AIM users get a page customizable with any number of drag-and-drop modules for maps, Web journals and other features, including those from rivals like Yahoo's Flickr photo site. By contrast, MySpace users must deal with HTML programming code to customize.

The offering, available in a beta test mode, underscores AOL's history of playing down innovation in favor of waiting until the masses are ready. It wants to be easy, not necessarily first.

MySpace wasn't first, either. But it surpassed Friendster Inc. in monthly visitors just a half-year after formally launching.

Analysts note that if Friendster can fall, so can MySpace.

“It's like the one hot bar or restaurant everybody descends upon,” Sterling said. “Then it gets cold and people leave it.”

MySpace, whose press representatives said executives were unavailable for interviews, has been continually adding features, including just recently a test version of an instant-messaging program and the hit TV show “24” as free and for-pay downloads.

Potential rivals insist they are doing more.

TagWorld Inc. and Freewebs Corp. let users build entire Web sites, not just single profile pages. Both see themselves as people's hubs for music, photos and video, while many MySpace users embed in their profile pages digital items stored elsewhere.

A Microsoft Corp. spinoff company, though mum on specifics, plans to launch Wallop later this year with promises of helping people better interact more like they would in the real world.

That's also the thinking behind CollectiveX.

“CollectiveX doesn't expand or create communities,” founder Clarence Wooten said. “It empowers existing communities.”

So members of pre-existing groups, such as a homeowners association, could use CollectiveX to communicate and meet one another — but only if someone they already know introduces them.

Groups are visible only to their members, and even within groups, a person's friends and colleagues are described only by title, not by name. By contrast, MySpace makes most profiles publicly viewable and users easily reachable.

Meanwhile, some startups see MySpace as the new mass media — too big to appeal to any one demographic group well.

Adir Levy figures that once people get married, they're no longer keen on meeting new faces on MySpace, where about a quarter of the users are minors. So he developed Famoodle as a site for families to connect and expand existing relations.

“We definitely don't see us as becoming as big as MySpace, but we see ourselves as being the MySpace for the more mature crowd,” said Levy, 25, who's getting married this year.

Others are targeting teens, the group that has turned MySpace into a lightning rod for warnings about the dangers posed by sexual predators on the Internet.

At Varsity World, moderators screen most writings, photos and other materials before posting. Tagged has features — among them, a weekly celebrity lookalike contest — likely to be seen as immature by even college students, said its founder, Greg Tseng.

“MySpace and the industry as a whole is really in the first inning,” Tseng said.

MySpace's 80 million users is but a fraction of the estimated global online population of 1 billion.

Charlene Li, an analyst at Forrester Research, said users also can have multiple profiles at multiple sites — the way they may belong to separate school, work, neighborhood and church networks in the offline world.

But not everyone will have time to keep up. In fact, only about 60 percent of MySpace's U.S. registered users visited the site in April, according to calculations of data from MySpace and Nielsen/NetRatings.

“You may have four or five e-mail addresses, but you use two of them,” Sterling said. “You're going to go to one or two places. You're not going to go to four.”

TXpress

Yahoo Inc.'s Web site is unveiling a new look Tuesday as the Internet powerhouse strives to remain the world's most popular online destination and strengthen its advertising appeal.
The overhaul marks the first facelift to Yahoo's home page since September 2004.
The redesigned page, initially available in the United States and Europe at http://www.yahoo.com/preview includes more interactive features that reduce the need to click through to other pages to review the weather, check e-mail, listen to music or monitor local traffic conditions.
Another addition, called “Yahoo Pulse,” offers recommendations and insights about cultural trends culled from the Web site's 402 million users worldwide.

Yahoo is making the upgrade as it battles for traffic with longtime rivals MSN, AOL and Google Inc. while also trying to fend off an intensifying threat posed by the rise of social networking sites such as MySpace.com.

“Our goal is to have the best page on the Internet,” said Dan Rosensweig, Yahoo's chief operating officer. “We feel like this (redesign) does something great for everybody.”

Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Yahoo regards the latest changes as the most dramatic renovations made to its front page since the site's 1994 debut as a bare-bones directory developed by Stanford University students Jerry Yang and David Filo.

The new look is long overdue, said Jupiter Research analyst David Card. “The site was getting pretty long in the tooth and looking pretty old fashioned,” he said. “Now, it looks clean, crisp and modern.”

Even so, Card believes Yahoo's upgrades won't impress younger, cutting-edge Web surfers who are spending an increasing amount of time hanging out at MySpace.com. “They didn't really push the envelope very hard.”

The most notable changes will allow Yahoo users to pull down interactive menus giving them snapshots of weather, traffic and movie information as well as providing instant access to the site's popular e-mail, instant messaging and music services.

Like other widely visited Web sites, Yahoo must balance its desire to keep pace with the Internet's constantly shifting trends with the recognition that changing things too dramatically might alienate a large number of users comfortable with the status quo.

Yahoo settled on the final redesign, code-named “Spirit,” after months of testing with selected users. As another precaution, the new look won't show up as the default page of Yahoo.com for several more months.

“Any time you touch the most visited page on the Internet, it's going to feel like a big change and we think this is a really big change,” Rosensweig said.

Microsoft Corp.'s MSN and Time Warner Inc.'s AOL, the two most visited Web sites after Yahoo, also have tweaked their looks during the past year.

Although Google still provides a page featuring little else than its Internet-leading search engine, it also offers an option that enables users to customize the home page to suit their personal tastes.

In April, Yahoo led the pack with 105.4 million unique U.S. visitors, an 11 percent increase from last year, according to Nielsen/NetRatings Inc. MSN ranked second with 92.8 million visitors, a 6 percent increase from last year, followed closed by Google, whose traffic surged 27 percent during the past year to 92.1 million. AOL's traffic remained flat at 70.4 million, Nielsen/NetRatings said.

Meanwhile, MySpace's traffic — consisting mostly of teens and young adults — has more than quadrupled during the past year to 38.4 million U.S. visitors. What's more, MySpace's visitors viewed a total of 19 billion pages on the site in April, surpassing Google (11.9 billion pages), MSN (11.5 billion pages) and AOL (6.8 billion pages).

Yahoo remains the Web's most viewed site, serving up 31.2 billion pages in April, but some analysts believe MySpace's rapid growth foreshadows a changing of the guard.

“The bar keeps getting raised,” said Gartner Inc. analyst Mike McGuire. “I think you are going to see constant tweaking because of sites like MySpace.”

Remaining the most trafficked and viewed Web site is important to Yahoo because those measures are critical to the advertisers that provide the company with most of its profits.

As it is, Yahoo's earnings haven't been growing rapidly as Google's — a factor that has weighed on Yahoo's stock price, which has dropped by 21 percent so far this year. Meanwhile, Google's stock price has declined by 9 percent.

Yahoo's shares gained 22 cents to close Monday at $31.03 on the Nasdaq Stock Market, where Google's shares rose $2.07 to finish at $376.20.