A lady painted “Avatar” blue posed right past the entrance of DesignCon 2010, handing out cardboard 3-D goggles, but equally vibrant visions of the future could be found toward the back wall. There, on Tuesday afternoon, companies from the Power.org consortium demoed some leading-edge tech.

One standout at the booth was Applied Micro’s new Media Server, a home data center of sorts. The open-source, network-attached storage tower, compatible with two or four multi-terabyte hard drives, can be used as a central hub for information passing through a household of networked computers. In this way, the device and an emerging market of others like it serve as a counterweight to the “cloud” paradigm, in which networked computers cull Internet-based (rather than drive-loaded) apps.

“People have this need that is not recognized by cloud computing,” said Haluk Aytac, senior solutions manager at the Sunnyvale-based firm. “They want to own their own data.”

Another perk of NAS: seamless backup. Applied Micro’s tower was rigged to four monitors, showing a scene from the latest season of ABC’s “Dancing with the Stars.” Boot down or crash one of the four drives and Donny Osmond and Kym Johnson don’t falter one step in their multi-screen tango.

Other notables:

• XGI’s H.264 Blu Ray-decoding video card. Virginia Quance, a rep from the Texas company, mused on some interesting possible implements: for example, hi-def multitouch screens on printers for manipulating (perhaps Photoshopping?) documents before inking them on paper.
• Freescale’s Android-based netbooks. The chipmaker is banking that a simple operating system like Android, developed by Google for smartphones, will play well on bigger screens (Steve Jobs seems to agree, thus the iPad’s iPhone user interface.)

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 4th, 2010 at 4:56 pm and is filed under News.