Stories by Yardena Arar

With a high-performance camera and separate audio module, the Logitech CC3000e conquers rooms too large for most off-the-shelf videoconferencing products

Google is so ubiquitous in our everyday digital lives that it's easy to overlook the many tools it offers that have a business slant.

Accounting is the language of business, and good accounting software can save you hundreds of hours at the business equivalent of Berlitz.

If you think doing business on the web begins and ends with online banking and e-commerce, you haven't been paying attention.

The Acer Aspire One 522 (model BZ897) delivers a good, classic netbook for a very reasonable price ($330 as of March 18, 2011). Petite and slim with a handsome 10.1-inch widescreen LED-backlit display, a 250GB hard drive, an integrated 1.3-megapixel webcam, and a multitouch touchpad, this portable does a solid job with multimedia and boasts pretty good battery life: nearly 7 hours in our tests using the provided 6-cell battery.

TaxActDeluxe has been the budget tax-software option for some time now, but can it handle business taxes? The answer is yes -- but only if you don't need a heap of guidance and you can make do with limited data-import features.

Home is where the network is: That's the mantra of networking vendors at the Consumer Electronics Show 2011 in Las Vegas this week.

From Jules Verne to Stanley Kubrick and beyond, writers and artists have imagined what the future would be like. Their visions range from the comically bizarre to the uncannily accurate to the wildly optimistic (where are those jet packs they promised us?!). Here's a quick collection of our favorite examples.

Home networking giant Netgear plans to introduce a 500 megabit-per-second line of HomePlug AV powerline products this fall. Netgear announced a slew of products, including next-generation powerline and advanced multimedia-optimized Wi-Fi products this week at CeBIT, the giant tech trade show in Hannover, Germany.

From its aspirational brand name (the ER in Cool-ER stands for e-book reader) to its hip tinted metallic case, the $US249 Cool-ER clearly strives to distinguish itself from the black-and-gray competition - and to a large extent it succeeds. Skinny (0.43 inch thick), lightweight (6.3 ounces), and available in eight cheery colors, this e-book reader resembles an overgrown iPod - not a bad role model for industrial design.

The Astak EZ Reader PocketPro is about the same size as the Sony Reader Pocket Edition. Both have 5-inch, 8-grayscale E Ink screens and cost $US199, putting at the small (and inexpensive) end of the e-book reader continuum. But some significant differences - pro and con - distinguish the two; and for all its extra features, the Astak's limited and rather strange font size options are a serious drawback.

The Sony Reader Pocket Edition (PRS-300) is about as inexpensive as e-book readers corrently get: $US199 for a slim gadget with a 5-inch, 8-grayscale E Ink screen.