Palm Desert, California: Here at DEMO 08, we have two days of product launches by 77 companies unveiling new web tools and services, hardware, software and the latest in consumer electronics.

Products like the Roomba vacuum cleaner and Pleo the robot dinosaur were introduced at DEMO and the room here is packed with media and venture capitalists watching six-minute demos of the next big ideas.

Some highlights from the opening session:

Iterasi unveiled its "Notarize" web toolbar. This is bookmarking on steroids. Iterasi captures a complete web page when you click on its button. That means not just the link, but an image of the page and a full html version that will render just as you first saw it. This has become more difficult as sites have become increasingly complex with the use of Ajax, but search results pages and annotated maps can be saved as you created them. The page can also be tagged and filed to make it more findable.

LeapFrog, the educational toy company which has sold 30m of its LeapPad platforms worldwide and more than 70m LeapPad books, introduced its new Tag device.  The pen-like peripheral is aimed at helping four to eight-year-olds to read. Pressing on any word or object in Tag-enabled books makes the pen speak the word. It can also be connected to a PC to download words for new books and to upload information on the child’s reading, showing a parent how their child is progressing.

One of the irritations of current mobile phone browsers is that they lack the software capabilities to play video. Skyfire launched a browser for mobile phones at DEMO that can handle Flash, Ajax, Java and Quicktime elements in web pages. The bad news is that is still in private beta and only works on Windows Mobile devices currently. The presenters said users could also listen to last.fm music, and later showed me how other kinds of non-Flash-based internet radio like the BBC could be heard.

The storage company Fabrik showed off Joggle, which it described as "aggregation through virtualisation". Joggle, built on the Adobe Air platform, finds your content whether it is online or offline and presents it in a single view. Fabrik showed a window of thumbnail pictures that were stored on a combination of Flickr, a USB thumb drive and a MyDocuments folder. Content such as photos and music can be dragged into a slideshow creation tool that can then be served as a widget on a users’ blog or MySpace page.

SpeakLike showed an instant-messaging translation service. An English speaker typed in English in his chat window, but his words appeared translated into Spanish in the window of his Spanish friend. The reply in Spanish was translated back into English. SpeakLike also demo’d an English to Chinese conversation. The company uses a mixture of machine translation and human interpreters, which raises questions about how the business will scale and make money.

Finally, Notchup showed off a job recruitment service for people not looking for jobs. The idea is that people happy in their jobs but interested in listening to good offers are the most sought-after recruits. Companies can pay tens of thousands of dollars to headhunters to reach these people, but Notchup cuts out the middleman. Workers enter their CVs and use a calculator for their skills to set a price of say $500 that they expect to be paid to be interviewed. Companies contact them directly although the worker’s anonymity is initially preserved. Notchup says 50,000 people and 400 corporate clients have signed up in the past eight days.

Intel, which has been engaged in a battle royal with Advanced Micro Devices over whose chips go in high-end servers, is beginning to encounter a similar level of competition from a smaller rival at the other end of the scale.

VIA, based in Taiwan, is often forgotten as a player in the dominant "x86" market for PC microprocessors. It has never had more than 5 per cent market-share and is normally in the 1 to 2 per cent range, with Intel taking around 80 per cent and AMD the rest.

However, it seems to be a match for Intel in the niche segment largely ignored by AMD for low-powered computing.

Samsung has tried both VIA and Intel microprocessors in its Q1 ultra-mobile PC.  VIA is preferred in the 02 by  Silicon Valley’s OQO, which pioneered the category. A VIA processor is also powering the Everex CloudBook, which created a stir at the Consumer Electronics Show this month.

Intel is pushing a new category called Mobile Internet Devices or Mids and is expected to become more competitive when it introduces its low-power Silverthorne chip. More details of its capabilities are expected next month.

This week, VIA announced its next-generation Isaiah architecture, which it believes will keep it ahead of Intel, even after Silverthorne appears in the second quarter.

While Intel has switched from increasing speeds to decreasing power demands in its chip designs, VIA is going the other way.

Its strength has always been the extended battery life it permits through the low wattage of its microprocessors. With Isaiah, it says the power demands will be the same, but the Isaiah chip will perform two to four times better than its predecessor.

"Our chips are the best in the market for performance per watt, but the level of performance we can achieve with Isaiah means we can be more competitive in other segments," says Glenn Henry, president of Centaur Technology, a VIA subsidiary that designed the chip.

The performance boost could even make VIA a competitor for the microprocessor slot in full-sized PCs, he says, a move that would certainly get the attention of both Intel and AMD.

The second part of Google’s Android plan is about to unfold (OK, the Google version doesn’t look exactly like the character on the left, but you get the point.)

The FCC has confirmed that the boys from Mountain View are on the list of eligible bidders for its much-anticipated wireless auction, which starts next week. If Android (Google’s mobile phone software) is to have life he will need airwaves to ride on, and Verizon’s grand promise last year to open its network to all-comers still feels far too vague. Google must now show whether it is ready to put its money where its mouth is.

Not many surprises jump out of the FCC’s list of 214 qualified bidders, not least because many are shell companies whose real backers are not immediately obvious. Qualcomm is there, as is Chevron (perhaps looking to create a network for remote oilfield monitoring.) Otherwise AT&T and Verizon lead the cast of wireless and cable companies that have jumped the FCC’s pre-auction hurdles.

One name that failed to make the list: Frontline Wireless, a company backed by former FCC chairman Reed Hundt and venture capitalist John Doerr. This is a big loss of face for both men. Frontline used its considerable lobbying power to persuade the FCC to set aside part of the spectrum aside for a joint commercial/ emergency service network. Frontier itself planned to bid for this, but last week conceded that it had failed to raise the money to bid and was shutting up shop. Let’s hope the rest of this widely-anticipated auction fares better.

The $100 laptop may still not be a reality, but a One Laptop Per Child spin-off is already talking about a $50 version appearing in the next three years.

Mary Lou Jepsen, chief technology officer for OLPC, left the not-for-profit project that has been putting cheap laptops into the hands of schoolchildren in developing countries on December 31.

She has now founded her own company, Pixel Qi, which aims to produce a lower-cost laptop and develop for other devices her innovation of a sunlight-readable low-power screen.

In an interview with Groklaw, she says:

“The big laptop makers have woken up, and there will be a dozen $200-$300 laptops in the market in late 2008. I think that price is way too much…I’m starting a company to go lower – I think we need a $50-$75 laptop in the next 2-3 years.”

While Pixel Qi aims to commercialise the advances achieved in OLPC’s XO laptop, it also says it will help the project by providing products at cost.

However, it could also find itself in direct competition with OLPC.

When we spoke to Nicholas Negroponte, OLPC’s founder, last week he told us he had just attended a meeting to kick off OLPC America, based out of New York and Washington.

“It’s to look at America on a statewide basis, maybe not through schools, but [by selling] directly to kids,” he said.

OLPC has had significant success selling its XO laptop - current cost around $185 – in the US in a “Give One Get One” campaign, which for $400 also donates one free to a developing-world child.

More general availability in the US could put it up against the cheaper laptop that Pixel Qi describes as “ a new machine, beyond the XO.”

It seems like Yahoo chief Jerry Yang fell into the usual trap of keynoters at CES of trying to sound relevant by demonstrating products in January, but then admitting they will be delivered who knows when?

And for a company that seems forever trapped in the process of trying to make something synergistic from its disparate parts and acquisitions (think Flickr, Upcoming and Del.icio.us), that can’t be good.

Mr Yang said it was time to get Yahoo yodelling again, but the only substance in his speech was the announcement of Yahoo! Go 3.0 for mobile devices and a demo of what Yahoo Mail could look like in the future.

Yahoo Go did look a big improvement on the 2.0 version and the carousel of services it offers, always limited by the size of the mobile screen.

It includes a redesign, a new mobile home page and mobile widgets that third parties are expected to provide now Yahoo is opening up its platform. But the service is only in its early beta phase and is limited to just a few devices.

The Yahoo Mail revamp looked impressive with its ability to rank the importance of address-book contacts and reveal their activities in a style similar to Facebook’s newsfeed and Plaxo’s Pulse.

Jerry Yang showed how an email or instant messaging discussion about where to eat for dinner could be dragged onto a Yahoo Maps icon to reveal favoured locations or turned into an Evite invitation.

However, as Mr Yang and fellow co-founder David Filo confessed, this was still very much in the concept phase.

“We are not that far away, some of the building blocks are there today,” said Mr Filo, in a statement that summed up Yahoo’s continuing quest for its holy grail of joined-up social networking and Web 2.0 services.

Touch-typing took on a new meaning for me this year as I struggled to hit the right letters with my fingers on the touch-sensitive iPhone.

What was more satisfying was the multi-touch capabilities the iPhone introduced – expanding the size of a photo by the spreading of fingers, stroking through a music collection in Cover Flow mode.

Touch has been a major trend of 2007, from the iPod touch and iPhone and their imitators to Microsoft’s coffee-table Surface PC.

Balda, a German company, was a major beneficiary of the iPhone’s popularity, with its glass screen, whose software can detect several fingers at once, being adopted by Apple.

Synaptics, a Silicon Valley company, has also got in on the act – its touch technology is now in more than 25 phones.

“In devices which give you the maximum visual information and where there’s no room for keyboards, the touch screen becomes your user interface,” Francis Lee, Synaptics chief executive, told me.

Synaptics is better known for its touch pads that replace a mouse in notebook PCs. I rarely click anything on my notebook these days, using “tap zones” on the touch pads to replace a mouse left- or right-click and stroking the pad to scroll through pages or zoom in or out.

Global revenues for touch-screen technologies will nearly double from 2006 to 2012, rising from $2.4bn to $4.4bn, according to the iSuppli research firm.

It lists eight leading technologies – resistive, surface capacitive, projected capacitive, infrared, surface acoustic wave, optical, bending wave and active digitizer – and eight emerging ones - photo sensor in pixel, polymer waveguide, distributed light, strain gauge, multi-touch, dual-force touch, laser-point activated touch and 3D touch.

Resistive products are currently the cheapest and most common types of touch screen and revenues should increase at a compound annual growth rate of 3.1 per cent to 2012, says iSuppli. In contrast, multi-touch revenues, helped by the iPhone and expected adoption by handheld game consoles and map browsing systems, are expected to grow at a rate of 31 per cent.

Ribbit’s claims to be Silicon Valley’s first phone company may be a bit of a stretch, but the start-up’s software could help a thousand internet phone companies bloom from virtual handset makers to vertical service providers.

Early examples include the chalkboard soft-phone, pictured left, developed by London design agency, Square Circle, and the Ribbit for Salesforce application that makes voice an object and provides speech-to-text transcriptions within a customer relationship management (CRM) system.

Ribbit should be a godsend to developers. It’s a platform that acts as a “SmartSwitch”, handling all the complexities of mobile, fixed and internet telephony and allowing developers to master just a few commands in Flash to introduce voice to any web page or web application.

It promises a complete matrix of connections, from mobile phones ringing up desktop widgets to an instant-messaging window calling a fixed-line phone.

Ribbit, which gets its official launch today, offers more possibilities and greater personalisation than the telephony buttons that services such as Skype and Jajah can add to web pages.

It says it can justify its Silicon Valley phone company tag with the processes, business model and innovations it is introducing.

Ribbit’s platform approach means it will offer services such as billing, customer support and quality-of-service assurance, just like a regular phone company, but it will leave it to a growing developer community to come up with applications for its technology.

The company plans a revenue-share arrangement with developers, but it is also proving it can make money from its own reference applications – the Salesforce app is worth $29 per month per user.

The Mountain View-based company is VC-funded by Alsop-Louie Partners, Allegis Capital and KPG Ventures and has recruited 600 developers since the developer community was launched in August.

New applications are being launched every week. “The bulk have been enterprise applications, but we think it will open up for consumer ones, when we provide a [reference] application,” says Crick Waters, vice president of business development.

Coolest consumer app to date is the virtual iPhone, powered by Adobe’s AIR technology, which sits on your desktop and acts just like the real thing, minus the roaming charges.

Count me a cynic, but I’m still having trouble accepting that Verizon Wireless has really changed its spots (this was the surprise news last week that it will "open up" its network to any device or internet application, within reason.) The latest development: CEO Lowell McAdam, having got the taste for this new religion, now says he’s even going to build mobile devices using Google’s Android technology (see this interview with Business Week.)

Common sense suggests that Verizon Wireless is not simply going to throw it’s business model out with the bathwater. For now, that model involves luring customers to company stores with cheap subsidised handsets, selling them large volumes of airtime at flat rates, and packaging this with company-backed entertainment services like V Cast. Why, then, would it let "open" handsets and any old application (think Skype) onto its network?

The key here is the terms. When I spoke to McAdam about this last week, he said he was going to apply a pay-by-the-packet charge to allow these non-Verizon devices to connect. This comes at just the moment the wireless industry is moving en masse to flat-rate pricing, having realised (as the fixed-line internet guys did years ago) that this is the only way to get consumers to stop worrying about costs and start surfing in earnest.

In the Business Week piece mentioned above, where McAdam gets warm and fuzzy about Android, it’s also noteworthy that he doesn’t say that these devices will be open to any application. That’s Google’s hope, but living in the real world, it has accepted that some companies may want to use its software to build "locked-down" handsets. On top of these considerations, Verizon Wireless has also said it needs to vet outside hardware for security and network stability reasons.

OK, so maybe this is starting to sound a little cynical. Let’s assume that McAdam should be taken more at his word and Verizon Wireless will not go out of its way to thwart the openness it has so publicly espoused, and may actually even do some things to promote it. Even then, it still isn’t facing a mass change in customer behaviour. Given the choice of a cheap flat-rate phone or an expensive new gadget that will rack up bigger bills the more they use it, which do you think most Verizon customers will choose?

But if greater "openness" does bring a new wave of innovation in handsets, and if Verizon Wireless’s customers do eventually see value in these things, then it will be well-positioned to ride the wave of changing consumer demands. What’s more, it would have achieved this without having to go the route of rival AT&T, which surrendered an arm and leg to Steve Jobs (in the form of a revenue-sharing agreement) to win the iPhone contract. So full marks to McAdam for positioning Verizon Wireless for what comes next - only, don’t imagine he is about to give up the old way of doing things without a fight.

Amazon’s new e-book reader has kindled a blaze of blogging reaction to the $399 device.

Reviews of Kindle have been mixed, to say the least. A selection:

PaidContent says that, despite Amazon’s claims “the screen isn’t like reading actual paper. It’s not as bright and there is glare if the light is too direct…this is very much a first-generation product. It’s not going to revolutionize the industry overnight.”

Michael Gartenberg, Jupiter Research analyst, praises its ubiquity, pricing and search function.

“The ability to access content from anywhere is important and the fact that there’s no PC involved makes the process a lot easier…the notion of $9.99 best-sellers appeals to me…the ability to find what I’m looking for is super important.”

Jupiter’s research (below) suggests only 23 per cent of online consumers are interested in reading fiction or non-fiction books on mobile devices.

Engadget says: “While the reader itself could be mistaken for a Handspring device from the 90s, the service itself certainly makes for a compelling proposition.”

In a poll on its rival Gizmodo’s blog, 51 per cent preferred Sony’s Reader compared to 15 per cent favouring Kindle, while 15.5 per cent voted “If it’s not made by Apple, who cares?”

Jeremy Toeman on his LIVEdigitally blog says Kindle “will fail, and fail terribly.”

“It’s pretty hard to argue that an electronic reader will vastly improve the book discovery, purchase, and consumption experience (unlike how much an MP3 player was able to do that exact thing). …How many people are really in a position where they need a mobile library of 200 books with them to choose from?”

Seth Godin is also highly skeptical:

“The beauty of real books is that they don’t require a reader, which means that millions of people are eligible members of the market. Even if you only have .0001% market share, you can still get your book read. The challenge that my hero Jeff Bezos has is that if he’s really really lucky, he’ll sell a million of these things in a year. And that means that at $10 a book, you need to have significant market share to make an impact. The Sony Reader has been out for months and it has sold, perhaps, a few thousand units.”

David Rothman of Publishers Weekly says Kindle is “like a prop from an old sci-fi horror flick… Maybe, as with the old VW Beetle, we’ll all learn to love the ugliness.”

Gadget freak Robert Scoble has already ordered his Kindle for overnight delivery but admits:

“Getting geeks like me excited by a new “shiny toy” is pretty easy. Getting a large market excited? That’s a LOT harder.”

By Michael Steen, FT Netherlands Correspondent

You’re sitting in a traffic jam, late for a meeting, watching the estimated time of arrival on your satnav’s display creep later and later as it takes account of the fact that, right now, you’re not going anywhere. Do you cancel, try another route, or wait it out?

TomTom, the Dutch maker of navigation devices, is claiming to put an end to this kind of dilemma with a new service it launched today in the Netherlands, dubbed High Definition Traffic. It tracks the paths of about 4 million Vodafone mobile phone users to expand the amount of traffic information available.

Traffic information on satnav devices is not exactly new, but they tend to depend on patchy data compiled by sparse roadside cameras and traffic detectors.

Vodafone can track the whereabouts of each phone to within 500 metres and monitor its movement, says Luciën Groenhuijzen, managing director for TomTom Mobility Solutions. He is quick to point out that the data is not linked to the phone users.

The tracking element allows TomTom to strip out pedestrians and people travelling on trains that run alongside motorways. Each user is tracked for one hour before being re-assigned with a new random number.

"We introduced that [the one hour limit] so that we can’t follow someone, even if we don’t know who they are, for a whole day," Mr Groenhuijzen says.

TomTom blends the data collected from Vodafone with existing sources and sends updates to one of its new, €399 units every three minutes. (TomTom includes a year’s traffic information in the price after which it will charge €9.95 a month.)

So does it work? A test of the gadget at the height of Monday morning rush hour in the congested Randstad area around Amsterdam seemed to suggest it does.

Driving from the coast towards Amsterdam, the navigation device shows an accident has closed a lane on the motorway and a parallel main road is also clogged up. The gadget sends our car under the motorway, along a canal and through a village that looks onto fields near Schiphol airport. One feels a little smug.

What happens if everyone buys the gadget? Don’t you lose your edge? Mr Groenhuijzen claims not. The system is so fast at updating, he says, that the TomToms stuck to people’s windscreens would not send them all haring down a B-road into the same village to create a new traffic jam.