Targus
150W Auto Power Mobile Inverter: $69
www.targus.com

Working from well-lit and air-conditioned offices, your small business customers enjoy the convenience of high-speed Internet access, printers, copiers, and even coffee makers. The road is much less forgiving, though, stripping away valuable electrical sockets and room for big appliances.

But just because cigarette lighters are more prolific than outlets for customers traveling to sales calls or conferences, tech-addicted road warriors shouldn't have restricted access to their mobile implements. Targus' Auto Power Mobile Inverter is able to turn the 12V DC output that nearly all cars feed through a cigarette lighter into 120V of AV current with up to 150W of power. The inverter includes surge protection and an automatic shut-off feature designed to prevent damage and preserve battery life—all for under $70. If you're looking for the perfect upsell to go along with your VBI whitebooks, this is it. There are three different power specs contained within the VBI initiative: 65W, 75W, and 90W. Naturally, they all duck well within the inverter's 150W ceiling. But because Targus actually enables the device with two AC outputs, customers will want to keep an eye on the combination of devices they connect.

Adaptec
eSATA/USB 2.0 Hard Drive Enclosure Kit: $79
www.adaptec.com

MOST EXTERNAL INTERFACES sacrifice performance in the name of portability. USB and FireWire, for example, are incredibly versatile. However, neither is as fast as the hard drives spinning inside your workstation. Adaptec's eSATA/USB 2.0 Hard Drive Enclosure gives your customer the power to tote an external 3.5” hard drive in an eSATA based box that rivals the speed of any internal PC drive. You aren't constrained by capacity or compatibility—Adaptec claims it supports any drive from any manufacturer. And in the event that your customers don't have access to a 3 Gbps eSATA port on the road, they can also connect through standard USB, yielding respectable performance, as well.

NVIDIA
Quadro Plex 1000: $17,500 and up
www.nvidia.com

A common complaint in the server/workstation world is that multi-GPU technology has yet to reach the professional space in full force. Forget that. For clients in the video business for whom every minute is worth serious money, the Quadro Plex is now the visual computing solution (VCS) of choice. These are fully configured, compact, parallel-capable (via Quadro Plex Interconnect cables) workstation boxes that come set up by default for individual use as a sort of SFF pedestal. However, pull off a couple of bezel pieces, take two Quadro Plexes on their side, screw them together with a special plate, and what you get is a 19” wide, 3U block ready to rack mount. That is frickin' brilliant, and, according to NVIDIA, it represents a 20X leap in visual compute density in a rack configuration. Each box puts out under 40 dB, so small clusters may not be silent, but they'll be quieter by the foot than any other high-caliber VCS solution.

Due to hit shelves in September, NVIDIA is expected to have SKUs in both Intel and AMD designs, although the marketing emphasis is on the video subsystem, of course. The three debut models run down like so: The Model I will sport two Quadro FX 5500 cards running in SLI mode with four dual-link DVI outputs and a maximum of 32X FSAA per channel at 1920 x 1200. The Model II pairs two Quadro FX 4500 X2s for a total of four GPUs, eight dual-link DVI ports, and 64X FSAA. (That's some serious Half-Life 2 action, y'all.) The Model III is much like the Model I, only the III supports various HD SDI (Serial Digital Interface, common for TV broadcasting) configurations at the expense of frame synchronization capabilities.

How extensible is it, you ask? NVIDIA says to expect aggregated bandwidth of up to 80 billion pixels per second and a total display resolution of up to 148 megapixels. Obviously, there's plenty more detail where this came from, so if you're in the workstation market, make sure to get all over the Quadro Plex.

Plextor
Wireless Projector Adapter: $289
www.plextor.com

The road warriors and corporate presenters in your clientele should take note. Most of us have been in situations where it's a pain to have the notebook and presenter close enough to the projector to make a VGA cable connection. The projector might be near the back of the hall and the speaker at the front or, even worse, the projector might be mounted to the ceiling. Handheld presentation wands will only get you so far; sometimes, you just want the full control of having your hands on the notebook.

Enter the Plextor Wireless Projector Adapter, which is essentially a LAN/WLAN video bridge box. Armed with a 10/100 Ethernet port on top of 802.11a/b/g support, the device will handle resolutions of up to 1024 x 768 and up to 15 frames per second. WEP encryption is built in, and all management is done over the network via a browser. Perhaps best of all, there's no more having to share one VGA cable among multiple presenters and their respective notebooks. All presenters simply log into the box and hand off presentation control as they wish. When a professional presentation can make or break big deals for your clients, this is the product that might just save their bacon.