The cutting-edge products that won Best of Comdex honors last week provide
solutions to corporate IT problems--including some problems that PCs created in
the first place.
This year's Comdex/Fall marked the first time PC Week has conducted the Best
of Comdex awards program, which honors products that stand out from the Comdex crowd for their
innovation and applicability to the enterprise. PC Week Labs technical analysts teamed with PC
Week Corporate Partners to single out products in each of 12 categories, in addition to a Best
of Show category.
Our Best of Show honoree, FaceIt PC from Visionics Corp., uses biometric
face recognition technology to allow PCs to recognize faces. (See PC Week Labs' review of FaceIt.)
What makes it a corporate solution is the included set of utility software, with capabilities that range
from file encryption to a personalized greeting of visitors to an unattended office.
Based on decades of research into the brain's face-recognition behaviors,
FaceIt PC also won honors as Best New Technology of the show. In the coming year, FaceIt PC and
derivative products will create new and productive ways of adding value to corporate IT assets.
The Best All-Around Application comes from Dan Bricklin, who jump-started
the PC software industry as co-creator of VisiCalc. Bricklin will make a comparable impact with
his newest creation, Trellix Corp.'s Trellix 1.0, a word processor for hypertext that lets users
see and edit document structure as easily as content.
The product has broad appeal. The Web, and hypertext in general, are
changing the shape of the basic corporate document. Simplifying the task of creating nonlinear
documents will be important for most corporations. (For more on Trellix, see Eamonn Sullivan's
Intersights column.)
The other PC Week Best of Comdex winners were the following:
- Best Desktop System: IBM's IntelliStation M Pro, for redefining the standard in
manageability and high performance corporate professional workstations.
- Best Portable or Handheld: Mitsubishi Electronics America Inc.'s Pedion, for
creating a new design in a capable notebook that's as thin as most laptops' displays.
- Best Server: NCR Corp.'s WorldMark 4380, for integrating best current practices in
an eight-way server that maximizes performance and eases administrative workload.
- Best Peripheral: Digital Persona Inc.'s U.are.U, for making fingerprint recognition
technology meet corporate needs for a fully distributed security solution.
- Best Toy of Show: CyberStuff Corp.'s Cyberstik, for enlivening
interactive games with three-dimensional interaction.
- Best Development Tool: Blue Sky Software Corp.'s WinHelp
Office 5.0, for easing the task of writing well-structured, fully
integrated online help.
- Best Connectivity Solution: Mango Corp.'s Medley97, for
fully distributed fault-tolerant storage without a dedicated server.
- Best Utility Software: Dragon Systems Inc.'s Dragon NaturallySpeaking
Deluxe, for bringing machine recognition of natural speech to
mainstream desktop applications.
- Best Internet Software: Kiva Software Corp.'s Kiva Enterprise
Server 2.0, for providing the scalability and manageability needed
by multitier applications.
- Best Digital Media: Play Inc.'s Trinity 1.0, for combining
broadcast-quality TV studio capabilities in a single box priced
for in-house training and communications.
Look for expanded coverage of PC Week's Best of Comdex awards Dec. 1 issue
and online at www.pcweek.com/bestofcomdex/
