Filed under: Laptops

It looks like Intel has more than just wearable computers and newfangled UMPCs in mind for our future, with the company also recently showing off this slightly less far fetched "metro notebook," apparently aimed primarily at women. One of the most most conceptey elements here is the SideShow-esque e-ink display embedded in the laptop's lid, which promises to let you view your email, calendar, and other information even when the laptop's powered down. What's more, Intel also sees the entire laptop acting as a charging pad for your other gadgets, though it seems you'll still have to charge the laptop itself the old fashioned way. Even without those less-than-imminent additions, however, the laptop appears to be a pretty decent unit, measuing just 0.7 inches thick and packing a Core 2 Duo processor, along with Bluetooth, WiFi, and WiMAX connectivity.

[Via Tech Ticker, thanks Benaam]

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BOLD MOVES: THE FUTURE OF FORD A new documentary series. Be part of the transformation as it happens in real-time

Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

There's an interesting, if not altogether surprising, article written by a professor who recently did a study on "cumulative advantage" which suggests, effectively, that popularity begets more popularity. On its own, this shouldn't surprise anyone. We all know that once something starts to get popular, word of mouth discussions and just the fact that people tend to hear or see that thing more often tends to expand the market even further. The study done by the researchers suggests that there's quite a bit of randomness involved. They found that hit songs tend to become hits almost by accident (which probably won't make the folks at Hit Song Science very happy). Basically, once a song catches on, it tends to snowball into popularity -- whether or not it's actually any good. As the author notes, this has many different implications.

One implication that isn't discussed in the article is that this actually supports the idea that giving away content for promotional purposes is a very important strategy in developing a brand. The results of the study suggest that obscurity is a major force in killing the prospects of just about any creative work -- and the real trick is to promote the hell out of content until it starts to catch on. So, if you're trying to grab attention, why not give away the content to build up the name and make it easier for the content to gain the necessary popularity to hit that tipping point where popularity snowballs? At that point, plenty of new business models are apparent, because now, as the creator of a "hit" you're in demand, and there's only so much of you to go around (basically, access to the hitmaker is a scarce resource, while the content the hitmaker makes is not).

Web-based email has made quite the comeback in the past few years thanks to massive increases in email storage offerings, as well as revamped user interfaces. However, it appears that all of the big players have run into some problems actually keeping email systems online. This past week there have been stories of both AOL and Yahoo losing a ton of email (thousands of emails for AOL, millions for Yahoo Japan). This comes just a few months after Google had some problems with mass email deletions in Gmail. While the convenience these services provide is fantastic, all of these stories of lost emails should act as a reminder that you probably shouldn't trust any of these providers alone to care for your email. It's almost surprising that we haven't seen more of an effort by these or other providers to position email backup services as well, promising to keep you running, should your main account get knocked out or deleted.