Dateline: Las Vegas, NV It was time for the annual pilgrimage to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Recently I was able to attend that and see the cornucopia of products available. Many of these can help small offices and home offices to get ahead and prosper. Here are some of the most note-worthy developments that you'll be able to use in both your business and personal lives.

Word Processing (kinda') on Your Palm

One of the exhibitors at the Palm Pavillion (had to use Pavillon as it was an alliteration and bigger than a booth) was Documents to Go 3.0. This product gives you the ability to download documents from your desktop or laptop and use them on your Palm device. The program allows Word, Excel and other files to be transferred to your Palm for editing and refinement.

This product is a much-needed tool to work with documents on your Palm. With Documents To Go you can use bold, italics, underline, justifications, indentations, auto bullets and numbering. This can be a great feature for those documents you've so painstakingly created and need to modify while on the road.

The program also allows you to import Excel documents. You can modify the numbers but not the formulas.

The program is nice but doesn't give the full functionality that many want. You can't create Word documents on your Palm easily. You have to import an existing document from your desktop then accept the Save As function to change it. This is annoying.

The spreadsheet part is nice but since you can't change formulas you're handicapped to only what exists. Forget creating something new.

This is a good first step but has a way to go.

(Documents To Go, DataViz, 800-733-0030, www.dataviz.com)

Back Up For Palm

A handy device that I wished existed does. It is Memory Safe from Northstar Mobile. The device gives the ability to backup your entire Palm on a small chip that weighs about one ounce and is about the size of a chewable wafer.

Plug it into your Palm, tap on the right icons and you've backed up all that important data. The $89.00 cost is good insurance that you'll be safe whatever happens.

(Memory Safe, www.Northstarmobile.com, 949.360.7770 )

TiVo

Take control of your television viewing. The popular TiVo is a personal TV service that lets you control live TV by pausing, rewinding, and instant rewinding any program, anytime. You can program it to record certain programs with certain words in the title. Unlike traditional VCR recording, you can have it record for a variety of channels at a variety of times.

I've long felt that TV has a lot of junk on it but also a lot of good educational material that can help you get an edge.

The unit sells for $199 to $699 depending on the features. The latest release will record up to 60 hours of programming. This can be great to capture the most important programs when you want, where you want. You pay a monthly fee of $9.95 per month or $199 one time fee for life. The service dials a toll-free number daily to get up to date information on your favorite programs and when they'll be available.

It seems that this would be only for consumer use. However, for a serious business person who wants to get ahead of the competition, you can program the unit to record those events that are most important to you in business and your industry.

When you consider how much your time is worth, it makes sense to carefully select the best viewing for you both in business and in personal enjoyment.

(TiVo, www.tivo.com, available at consumer electronics stores)

What's Coming? - Credit Card Sized Cameras

Technology makes things smaller and easier. One of the new innovations shown but not on the market yet is the SMaL camera (note to editors, SMaL is not a typo), that is the size of a PC card that will fit into your laptop computer. It records pictures in 640X480 resolution which is OK for websites and consumer applications.

The unit is expected to sell for about $129.00 retail and provide a wide variety of applications where small sized cameras are critical.

(www.SMaLcamera.com, 617-806-1970, expected in Fall, 2001)

The future looks bright. With objects getting smaller and smaller while gaining more functionality it is a good time to be in the market for digital electronics.

Terry Brock is an internationally recognized professional speaker, consultant and author in the fields of business productivity, technology and marketing. He is a syndicated columnist for Biz Journals across America and can be reached at 407-363-0505 or by e-mail at terry@terrybrock.com.