Who needs an actual whiteboard? Give me a light-colored wall, a mini projector, and the Luidia eBeam Edge and I can teach anywhere, anytime, in person or online.

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I’ve had an eBeam Edge sitting in a box in my office for a while now, waiting for me to unpack it and give the interactive whiteboard tool a test drive. This past weekend, I finally broke it out and I’m glad I did. At first blush, it reminded me of a small version of the early Mimio bars that attached with suction cups to any whiteboard and allowed capture of drawn content. Although Mimio devices have come a long ways, at the time (almost 5 years ago), our experience with them was pretty negative. Fortunately, the eBeam is vastly more sophisticated than the old Mimios and, more importantly, is supported by great software.

The eBeam Edge is about the size of one of the candy bars that are so coveted on Halloween and only obtainable in the wealthier sections of town. At around a quarter of an inch thick, the radio receiver magnetically attaches to a small bar that is mounted on any wall or whiteboard with 3M Command Strips. Every eBeam Edge system comes four of these magnetic mounts, meaning that the eBeam itself can move with a teacher from room to room or among teachers easily during the day. Just pop the device off the wall, grab the USB cable, and go (wireless BlueTooth versions are also available).

For me, the Edge will live in my laptop bag, along with extra Command strips and a micro portable projector. Since the interactive whiteboard components interface so easily with virtual classroom applications (and, in fact, Luidia offers their own free synchronous whiteboarding solution to customers), a complete e-teaching setup can fit in one main pocket of my small messenger bag.

There are a few things other than size that set the eBeam apart from other interactive whiteboard solutions. The most important is speed and accuracy. A quick calibration routine (tap 9 spots with the stylus in order) accessed from a virtual button the software places on the projected desktop, and you can have an interactive whiteboard up to 100″ diagonally on virtually any surface. From there, you can write on the native projected whiteboard or any other application that accepts mouse/tablet input using the stylus in near real time. Annotating a PowerPoint slide, for example, with written text, equations, underlines, arrows, and highlighting with none of the lag that often accompanies interfaces of this type.

The second is the software itself. While SMART and Promethean are the undisputed masters of prepared content for their interactive whiteboards, Luidia has focused on an incredibly intuitive interface for everything from drawing and annotation to mouse control with their stylus. The teacher in the image above (OK, she’s probably not a real teacher, but it’s a good marketing photo of the software in action) has the stylus resting on the palette that controls virtually all of the stylus capabilities. With simple taps, the palette shifts from straight mouse control to highlighting (including color selection) to drawing (including color and line size selection) to calibration. Many other functions are included in the icon-based palette as well, but it never feels cluttered. The palette also features adjustable transparency, so the instructor can make it more or less obvious based on need.

eBeam hardware comes with Workspace software (essentially an overlay of interactive features on any desktop application, including tablet-style input to touch-aware applications), Capture software (for building presentations and capturing either still shots of the projection or recording movies of the content loading on the whiteboard), and Scrapbook (for creating archives, organizing and sharing screen shots, building e-learning courseware, etc.). These launch automatically (or prompt the user to launch them) based on user actions and work across Windows, Mac, and Linux (there are currently some limitations on OS X and Linux, in particular a lack of Lion support). The software also supports interactive Flash content, including prebuilt widgets from Luidia (virtually any other Flash modules can be loaded into the Scrapbook.

The hardware isn’t cheap, but is competitive with Mimio; prices for systems hover around $1000 and schools/teachers will need to have a projector and computer in place. However, because an in-room PC is commonplace and projectors are increasingly ubiquitous, the Edge allows for easy use of existing whiteboard and projection resources without investing in expensive, full-blown interactive whiteboards.

For schools looking at more permanent installations, Luidia offers similar technology in fixed “digital-ready” whiteboards, short-throw mounted projectors, and multi-projector “InfoWall” setups.

Interestingly, Luidia also recently announced a partnership with Polycom to add their interactive whiteboard technologies to video conferencing installations. They also just announced a new partnership with NEC to layer not only their interactive capabilities on NEC mounted projectors but also to provide real-time whiteboard sharing and collaboration for distance and hybrid education using their synchronous technologies. This sort of industry traction certainly suggests some long-term viability, but more significantly, demonstrates the flexibility and utility of the core technology.

This is starting to read a bit like Luidia marketing schtick, but only because I was incredibly impressed with the usability and quality of the eBeam Edge. If I were looking at whiteboard solutions in a school at this point, I’d skip expensive, heavy interactive whiteboards and just leave big blank walls, ready for eBeams that can be purchased, deployed, and used as budgets allow for far less money and far greater whiteboard real estate than any smartboard manufacturer can currently match. The Edge has officially made my list of dead-finger tech (the hardware and software that you’d need to pry from my cold, dead hands if you wanted me to give it up).

After reporting sales of 13.2 million smartphones during the third quarter, HTC is now the fourth largest smartphone vendor after having outpaced Research In Motion, according to market research company Canalys.

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A diverse product offering, expanded distribution network and growing global brand recognition resulted in HTC’s highest-ever quarterly revenue at $4.5 billion for the period ending Sept. 30. That is a 79 percent improvement year-on-year, the company said in a statement on Monday.

At 13.2 million smartphones, shipments increased by 93 percent year-on-year. For example, in China HTC sold nine times as many phones during the third quarter this year compared to the same period last year. That has helped turn HTC into the fourth largest smartphone vendor, passing RIM by a margin of 1.4 million units in the process, according to Canalys. “It has seen a lot of success in the Asia-Pacific region, and it is doing very, very well in the U.S. market,” said Pete Cunningham, analyst at Canalys.

The company is also closer than ever to Apple and Nokia, which sold 17.07 million and 16.8 million smartphones, respectively. “It is going to be very competitive. Nokia is probably the vendor that is the most vulnerable from HTC in the short term. Nokia’s Symbian volumes will tail off, and its success depends on how fast it can ramp up Windows Phone sales,” said Cunningham.

Good products combined with a lot of support from operators have helped HTC increase its shipments volume, according to Cunningham. When an operator wants an Android-based phone, HTC and Samsung, which is the biggest smartphone vendor, are the first port of calls, he said.

To further expand volume, HTC is opening a factory in the beginning of next year, which will help increase the company’s total manufacturing capacity to about 40 million phones per year.

Two areas in which the company is currently investing are LTE (Long Term Evolution) technology and entry-level smartphones. An LTE device upgrade cycle will come in 2012 in the U.S. and some advanced markets in Asia, and HTC hopes to take advantage of that. At the same time, it aims to continue to attract first-time smartphone buyers, it said.

“In the long term, we will have a very healthy market in terms of competition and that drives innovation, which is great for end users,” said Cunningham.

Windows 8 news continues to trickle from the Building Windows 8 blog at a steady clip: today, Gabe Aul detailed changes to the Windows 8 boot process that promise to drastically reduce startup times.

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The team wanted to come up with a startup method that would deliver the benefits of a cold boot (a “fresh session” at startup, no power usage when off) while reducing the amount of time that it takes to load the operating system from disk to RAM.

To accomplish this, Microsoft has combined aspects of a traditional Windows shutdown with system hibernation, which saves the contents of your RAM to disk and then restores it to RAM at next boot. While a Windows shutdown currently closes all user programs (the “user session”) and then all system services and processes (the “kernel session”) completely before powering off, Windows 8 closes the user session and saves the rest of your RAM’s content to disk. The kernel session can then be restored to RAM quickly at next boot – this is more speedy than traditional hibernation both because there’s less data to restore to RAM from the disk (just the kernel session, as opposed to the kernel session and the user session), and because restoring hibernation files is a fully multithreaded process in Windows 8.

Microsoft notes that drivers are still initialized during this startup process, which means that driver and system updates should no longer require a “full” reboot of the system (something Microsoft has been promising since the Longhorn days). However, for those of you more comfortable with a traditional “full” shutdown, there are command line options to toggle the new feature on and off (“powercfg /hibernate off” which has the unfortunate side-effect of completely disabling hibernation), and also to initiate one-time full shutdowns (“shutdown /s /full”).

According to Microsoft, these improvements should benefit users with SSDs and HDDs alike, and will be especially noticeable when paired with systems supporting UEFI, the BIOS replacement that is slowly being adopted by most major PC manufacturers and motherboard makers. For full details, as always, you can check out the very detailed post on the Building Windows 8 blog.

Microsoft has signed a cross-license patent agreement with Samsung Electronics that grants Microsoft royalties from Samsung’s Android-based smartphones and tablets, Microsoft said in a statement on Wednesday.

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Microsoft didn’t disclose details on how much money Samsung will have to pay Microsoft for every Android-based device it sells. Last year, HTC, which together with Samsung dominate the market for Android-based smartphones, also signed a licensing deal with Microsoft.

In the past three months, Microsoft has signed Android deals with Acer, General Dynamics Itronix, Onkyo, Velocity Micro, ViewSonic and Wistron, Microsoft’s general council Brad Smith and deputy general council Horacio Gutierrez wrote in a blog post.

That leaves Motorola Mobility, with which Microsoft is currently in litigation, as the only major Android smartphone manufacturer in the U.S. without a license, they said.

It seems unlikely that Microsoft and Motorola Mobility will agree on a licensing deal without litigation. Motorola Mobility is in the process of being acquired by Google. “Our acquisition of Motorola will increase competition by strengthening Google’s patent portfolio, which will enable us to better protect Android from anti-competitive threats from Microsoft, Apple and other companies,” Google CEO Larry Page said about the $12.5 billion acquisition.

Smith and Gutierrez had this message for Google in their blog post: “We recognize that some businesses and commentators — Google chief among them — have complained about the potential impact of patents on Android and software innovation. To them, we say this: look at today’s announcement. If industry leaders such as Samsung and HTC can enter into these agreements, doesn’t this provide a clear path forward?”

Samsung signing a deal with Microsoft makes more sense. The company is already busy battling with Apple in courts around the world. Samsung did not reply to questions about the deal.

Also, earlier this week, Samsung announced the Omnia W, its first smartphone based on Windows 7.5, also known as Mango. In addition to the licensing deal, the companies also agreed to cooperate in the development and marketing of Windows Phone, Microsoft said on Wednesday.

Samsung and HTC are close partners to Microsoft, so signing licensing deals make their lives easier, according to Francisco Jeronimo, research manager at IDC.

But, on Tuesday, Samsung joined Intel to help develop Tizen, a new OS that merges MeeGo and Limo. So the company is keeping its options open when it comes to OSes.

Microsoft appears to be preparing to launch a new website called “Next” where it will share information about new technologies it and others are developing.

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“It’s Microsoft’s home for stories and conversations about what’s new and on the horizon,” according to the “about” page.

For now, the main page says that the site is “coming soon.” The only blog post says: “Congrats if you found this site already…you weren’t supposed to! We’ll be back soon.”

It was written by Steve Clayton, who has worked at Microsoft for 13 years and, according to his profile, recently moved to the company’s Redmond, Washington, headquarters “to work on storytelling.”

The site will offer stories about people at Microsoft and the technologies they are developing, according to the “about” page. “It’s not all about Microsoft though — we’ll look at where technology is going, how it will impact our lives and what the important trends are. Innovations and innovators of all types are fair game here and we’ll shine a light on them as well as on Microsoft,” it says.

Microsoft will welcome feedback about the kinds of topics it should cover on the site, it said. “The site is ultimately for you, to show you who we are, what we’re about and where we’re headed,” it says.

The main page also includes a list of items posted on Twitter from Microsoft’s Twitter account. The URL links the site to Microsoft’s TechNet blogs, which often cover technical topics related to the company’s products.

Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the site or when it will go live.

For the launch of its first full-fledged online office suite, Office 365, Microsoft is paying particular attention to how the new service could help small and medium-size businesses.

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“While we launched Office 365 for all customers, we wanted to focus today on the small and mid-sized opportunities,” said Kirk Koenigsbauer, Microsoft corporate vice president within the Microsoft Office Division product management group, in an interview with the IDG News Service.

During his presentation in New York, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer dropped the names of large companies already using Microsoft cloud services, including DuPont, Hyatt, Starbucks and Volvo. However, the company’s overall marketing emphasis was centered on making Office 365 as appealing as possible to small and medium-size businesses (SMBs), which spend US$800 billion annually on IT products, according to Gartner estimates.

That market is fragmented in terms of what Microsoft products are being used, Koenigsbauer elaborated. Some may be using older versions of Exchange or Microsoft Office, or may just may be using a mish-mash of different products. Worse, many organizations have small, if not non-existent, IT departments.

“Cloud services are a great value propositions for SMBs,” Koenigsbauer said. “They have very small IT staffs. They don’t have the infrastructure. They don’t have the capital to buy new racks of servers.”

More than 70 percent of the users of the Office 365 beta versions were small and medium-size businesses, Ballmer said. He ticked off a list of potential types of users for the new service, including real estate agents, accountants, lawyers, cleaning services and auto dealerships.

Office 365 can be exciting “particularly for companies that have little or no IT support and very little time and financial resources to dedicate to technology,” he said. “Office 365 … is a big step forward. These businesses really will be able to let their employees share information in new ways.”

At the press event, Microsoft gathered representatives from a number of small and mid-sized organizations that have tried Office 365 in its beta form. Chiefly, these businesses seemed most interested in using Office 365 as a way to avoid maintaining in-house Microsoft Exchange servers.

One company considering its use is the Hendrick Automotive Group, which operates 75 car dealerships throughout the U.S.

“For us, one of the reasons we’re looking at Office 365 is that we have a very small IT department. By moving services to the cloud we will be able to realign those resources to those applications that are unique to our industry,” said Robert Taylor, who is the director of information technology for Hendrick. “We’ll be able to deliver applications faster to our users.”

Currently, the company runs a centralized pool of Exchange servers. Its IT services department supports around 4,000 users with a staff of only 13. The company also uses Microsoft SharePoint as an aid to help train employees, and get personnel from new dealerships up to speed.

Another company testing the technology is Perkins Eastman, an architecture firm. Based in New York, the firm has 600 employees across 13 offices worldwide, which are supported by an IT staff of 14. “We’re constantly looking for ways to be more efficient,” said Hamilton Esi, who is director of practice applications for the firm. “Office 365 was a natural transition for us, because of its value proposition.”

The company has been testing the service since December, first with 15 e-mail accounts, then with 50 mailboxes. “Down the road, I see the entire organization moving over to the cloud,” Esi said.

Chief to the appeal of Office 365 for Esi is the ability to quickly spin up new accounts for new offices. The company is rapidly expanding, and plans to open two offices this year. With Office 365, the company can centrally provision email accounts without the need to set up separate servers in new locations. Employees can get their email accounts even before the office is fitted with a new Internet connection. “We now have the ability to set up the office in record time,” Esi said.

One area in which Microsoft will still have to prove its mettle is with the service’s up-time. The company’s precursor to Office 365, BPOS (Business Productivity Online Suite), had experienced a number of outages.

Koenigsbauer has noted that Office 365 apps inherently are different from BPOS ones in that they were designed to work in multi-tenant environments, which should minimize troubles. Ballmer promised that the SLA (Service Level Agreements) for Office 365 will be “the best in the industry.”

Office 365 may ultimately prove to be more reliable, agreed Scott Gode, vice president of product management and marketing for Azaleos. Azaleos offers a service to manage federated Active Directory instances, which will be essential for blending internal office use and Office 365 deployments under a single-sign-on.

The mistakes Microsoft made with BPOS come with the territory of ramping up a new service, he explained. However, Office 365 is a higher profile service for the company, and so Microsoft has probably devoted more resources to keeping it running. Engineers have also probably learned from running BPOS.

“We’ve been affected by the [downtime], but we don’t expect it to be totally without hitches,” said Chris Robert, senior manager for information security for Scripps Network Interactive, which runs a number of cable channels such as the HGTV.

When Scripps was spun out from its parent company, Scripps Co., management decided to switch over to BPOS for all employee e-mail needs. The company has been using the service for several years now. “Overall, we’re pretty happy with the [BPOS] service. It is quite a bit more stable,” than a typical in-house implementation, Robert said, noting that in-house email servers can go offline as well. “People have forgotten. It’s not like we’ve never had downtime,” he said.

Verizon Wireless today beat Apple and its carrier rivals to the iPhone 4S pre-order punch, kicking off sales just after midnight PT.

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Sprint followed about 20 minutes later.

But while Verizon’s site appeared to be working normally — and responded promptly to orders that were aborted at the last minute — Sprint’s was initially sluggish and displayed a “site is temporarily unavailable” message when one of the iPhone 4S models was chosen.

By 12:35 a.m., however, Sprint’s site accepted an order.

Apple’s online store reopened around 12:30 a.m. Pacific after its usual pre-launch maintenance, and appeared to be operating normally at first, although Computerworld was not able to place an order as a new customer with any of the three carriers. In fact, after selecting Sprint, a message appeared saying that the iPhone 4S could only be pre-ordered by existing Sprint customers, and told others that they would have to purchase their phones at an Apple retail store.

But within 30 minutes, Apple’s pre-sales site started acting erratically, at times returning a generic “Not Found” error message and at other times refusing to allow a carrier choice. At 1:15 a.m. those problems appeared to have been largely resolved, but Apple’s site was at times lethargic, likely because of the traffic load.

AT&T did not begin taking pre-orders at its website until nearly 1:00 a.m. Pacific.

Today’s pre-order launch had been set Tuesday when Apple CEO Tim Cook led a launch event that unveiled the long-rumored smartphone.

Much of the commentary about the iPhone 4S, particularly on Twitter, was negative that day, with many expressing disappointment that the smartphone didn’t offer a larger-sized screen or support the faster LTE networks that AT&T and Verizon are deploying.

It’s impossible to know whether the negative reaction will mean fewer sales, but most analysts have predicted that it will have little impact and remained confident that Apple will sell a record number of iPhones during the fourth quarter.

Last year Apple sold 16.2 million iPhones in the fourth quarter.

Apple is selling the iPhone 4S at three prices — $199, $299 and $399 — rather than the two prices of earlier versions. Also today, Apple and carriers kicked off sales of the $99 8GB iPhone 4.

The company has departed from past practice in another way: It kept alive 2009’s iPhone 3GS, which it and carriers will offer to customers free when they commit to a two-year service contract.

iPhones ordered online today are to be delivered by Oct. 14, said Apple, the same day in-store sales will begin. Apple has said its retail stores will open their doors next Friday at 8 a.m. local time, an hour earlier than usual for most of the outlets.

Also today, Apple told customers they could order an unlocked iPhone 4S — one not tied to a specific carrier or connected to a contract — in November for prices ranging from $649 (for a 16GB model) to $849 (for a 64GB phone).

Microsoft will make no more Zune music players, building its future music strategy on applications incorporated in its Windows Phone and Xbox platforms, the company has confirmed.

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Rumors circulated in March that Microsoft planned to stop making dedicated music players, but the company ducked the issue then, saying this year’s new Zune devices would be mobile phones running Zune software. It went on to release a trickle of applications for the Zune platform later in the year.

The company has now updated a help page at Zune.net to announce: “We will no longer be producing Zune players.” Instead, the page said: “Going forward, Windows Phone will be the focus of our mobile music and video strategy.”

However, this will make no difference to current Zune users, the company said on the support page: “Your device will continue to work with Zune services just as it does today. And we will continue to honor the warranties of all devices for both current owners and those who buy our very last devices.”

Microsoft launched the first Zune players and Zune Marketplace music store on Nov. 14, 2006, as a challenge to Apple’s iPod player and iTunes music store.

However, Apple moved the goalposts a couple of months later with its Jan. 9, 2007, announcement of the iPhone, a widescreen iPod that could also make phone calls and surf the Web.

It took Microsoft three years to follow suit. When it announced Windows Phone in February 2010, one of the features of the new mobile OS was a Zune music player app. It’s also possible to access Zune music and video via Xbox Live, Microsoft’s online service for its Xbox 360 game console.

Sales of the Zune have consistently trailed far behind those of the iPod. While not a definitive ranking, the list of best-selling MP3 players at Amazon.com is telling: Nine of the 10 best sellers are iPods (Sandisk has a $40 Sansa model in eighth place) and the first Zune device now appears at number 24, preceded by 16 iPod variants.