How would you like to charge your BlackBerry, PSP, cell phones or laptops wirelessly?  Well in the fall of 2009 this technology will become a reality.  I give you the Powermat System.  (www.powermatusa.com)
This magnetic induction mat along with the receivers will be in every household in the near future.  Just think, no more spaghetti of wires for each device, no more looking for the right power adapter for each device, you just clip on the receiver and lay the device on the mat and you are all done.  With certain models you can charge up too 6 devices simultaneously.  You won’t believe this but this unit charges your device at the same rate that it would if you had it plugged into the power adapter it came with!

The website states that this is only the beginning.  The technology is totally scaleable and someday will be integrated into your desks, coffee tables and even in the walls of your home.  This will give you invisible connectivity points for wire-free living.  Not only that but in the future the next generation will be able to sync to iTunes or transmit video all while charging!

Powermats are already available in many configurations depending on your needs.  The receivers are also built right into cases for the most popular device and there are also power disks that will work with a multitude of gizmos.

Take it from me, this product is going to revolutionize all handheld devices in the future.  There will be no more need for power adapters since this technology will be built into every new product that comes out.

The company’s website is telling us that the first of the products will be out in the fall of 2009.  AlphaKOR has requested to be the first reseller in Windsor and will be carrying this product as soon as it lands!

Chris Brenner

Its finally time to upgrade that old Microsoft Small Business Server 2003 to the new Microsoft Small Business Server 2008.  Microsoft has announced the product is slated for shipping the second half of 2008.  The new “SBS” takes strong solutions and incorporates them into a fully integrated product for your small business needs.  SBS is designed to give you an all in one solution to help protect business data, increase productivity and present a professional image for clients.  This affordable solution integrated it’s robust server 2008 technology with MS Exchange 2007 for e-mail and calendar functionality.  They have also added new and approved features like MS ForeFront Security for Exchange Server and Windows Live OneCare for the server.  Microsoft ForeFront Security gives you built in anti-virus and anti-SPAM while MS Windows Live OneCare helps to protect, maintain and manage your server.  Other products included are Windows SharePoint that helps you share internal documents as well as coordinating calendars, managing issues and participating in discussions all when on the road.  For more information please feel free to e-mail chris@alphakor.com

Chris Brenner

Sun-Times - “Drobo and DroboShare”

This column was originally published in The Chicago Sun-Times on February 14, 2008.

Cartoon characters have it so much easier than we do. Laws of cartoon physics say that if you run out of space on your hard drive, you can just jam a funnel into the top, dump in a few more drive mechanisms from a big metal bucket, and then you’re right back in business.And so, ladies and gentlemen, I present the Drobo storage system. This $499 USB storage device is made by Data Robotics, Inc. (Drobo.com), but I’m pretty sure that DRI is actually a wholly-owned subsidiary of the ACME Corporation.

You pop the front off of the box to reveal four empty drive bays. Each one can hold a SATA-standard hard drive mechanism (which are as cheap and plentiful as greed and avarice). Just buy some and slide them right in. Installing drives in the Drobo is no more complicated than inserting a frozen waffle into a toaster. No screws, no mounting brackets…just push it into the slot until the bay’s retaining clip clicks into it.

You can mix and match capacities, leave some of the drive bays empty…it doesn’t matter. Dump the storage in and close the door. Drobo figures everything out all out on its own. Plug it into your computer and it appears as a standard, single USB storage device ready for formatting.

“Big deal!” you’re sneering, because you didn’t have a decent breakfast and my mention of waffles has made you cranky. “It’s a RAID storage array. What’s different about that?”

What’s different about it is that Drobo isn’t a RAID. Adding capacity to a RAID is a huge production.

I remind you that Drobo is a cartoon device. You need more capacity? Fine. Buy another drive mechanism and slide it into a vacant slot. Presto: your computer now sees the exact same drive with the exact same contents…only it’s larger.

Please note the things you did not need to do:

You didn’t need to reformat anything. Drobo saw a new, unformatted mechanism and automatically prepared it and added it to the pool of available storage.

You didn’t need to back up all of your data first. With a RAID, adding another mechanism means erasing the volume and starting all over again is often a much bigger production, depending on which RAID you bought and how you set it up. With the Drobo, there’s really no need to think in advance or understand how any of this works.

You didn’t even need to unmount the volume. The Drobo and its contents were “live” throughout the whole procedure. If you start a backup of your notebook’s internal hard drive and you suddenly notice that (holy crud!) you’re going to run out of free space on the Drobo, you don’t need to click “Cancel.” You can actually dash to the store, come home with a new mechanism, and slide it in.

Whoops…all four drive bays are already filled. No problem: just yank out that tiny 160 gig mechanism there on the bottom and replace it with the 500 gig one you’ve just bought.

Yes, while the Drobo is up and running.

Yes, while the backup is in progress. Drobo uses cartoon physics, remember?

Incredible, but true. Drobo stores your data redundantly, across all of its mechanisms; in a sense, it acts both as an external hard disk and its own backup. If you have more than one mechanism in there and one of them fails, absolutely nothing happens. The green light next to that drive bay turns red (to encourage you to replace the faulty mechanism before the fire spreads to the rest of the office), but your computer will be blissfully ignorant.

This redundancy does create one drawback: if you load up the Drobo with (for example) two 250 gig mechanisms plus a 500 and a 750, you don’t wind up with 1750 gigs of storage. As a rule of thumb, the capacity of the largest mechanism becomes overhead, so this example volume would be closer to about a thousand gigabytes.

But it’s a terabyte of damned-near bulletproof storage that can be expanded on the fly with zero effort. I insist that it’s more of a quirk than a drawback. To remove all confusion, an optional desktop utility as well as a long bar of blue LEDs on the device itself make it clear how much free space is available.

Drobo’s been out for a few months now, but DroboShare is a brand-new accessory that boosts it from Mega- to Giga-awesome range. It’s a flat base that sits under the Drobo and turns it into an network storage device. If you have the aforementioned desktop utility installed, your Drobo will just magically become available to every Mac or PC in the whole house or office.

But it’s a standard Samba fileserver. The software isn’t required…it just automatically locates and mounts the Drobo for you.

Drobo does to conventional hard drives what the iPod did to portable CD players. It’s a revolution that was desperately needed and it’s such a vast improvement over the old way of doing things that thirty minutes after your first flight, you can’t imagine traveling by foot ever again.