Iomega launched a new offensive Monday in its quest to dominate the high-capacity computer disk market, and Novell announced a new computer networking product for small business.
Both announcements were made at the opening of the 19th annual COMDEX computer trade show.The presence of Utah companies among the more than 2,100 COMDEX exhibitors is relatively small with only 20 software and hardware firms represented. But Iomega and Novell both have a significant presence at the trade show.
Novell is not only a major exhibitor but built a massive computer network providing e-mail and Inter-net access to show visitors. Novell expecting to process more than 5 million pieces of electronic mail and other computer transactions during the week-long show.
Iomega is the market leader in high-capacity computer storage, and other mass storage exhibitors compare their products to Iomega's. But its flagship 100 megabyte Zip disks and drives have less capacity than disks and drives offered by most of its competitors.
That distinction will remain for a new version of the Zip drive announced Monday that is compatible with Apple's new iMac and IBM-compatible PCs running Windows 98 and equipped with USB ports. But Iomega's other announcement is a beefed-up 250 megabyte Zip drive and disks. The new drive will read and write data to the 100 million Zip disks shipped in the 100 megabyte format, but existing Zip drives will not be able to use the new 250 mega-byte disks.
The new 250 megabyte Zip drive is expected to be available in several weeks at an estimated retail price of $199 with disks expected to sell for $16.65 when purchased in a six-pack.
Novell announced it is shipping NetWare for Small Business 4.2, a computer networking option for small businesses with up to 50 computers.
Novell recently launched NetWare 5.0, but a re-engineered earlier version of NetWare was chosen for the small business product because of its stability and broad use, and because it may be easier for smaller firms to manage, said John Slitz, senior vice president of marketing.
Novell will be bundling Intuit's QuickBooks Pro 6.0, a small business accounting package, with the small business networking package.
Novell also announced it is offering free Y2K fixes for NetWare 4.10 that can be downloaded from the company's Web site. The company also shipped a free "Information Ferrett tool" to 40,000 customers this week that checks Novell products at the server level for Y2K readiness.
Salt Lake-based Cirque Corp. used the COMDEX venue to introduce new touchpad devices. The Cruise Cat incorporates programmable hot buttons and a programmable touch gesture feature that "learns" patterns drawn on the touchpad with the fingertip that can also be used to issue commands to the computer.
Orem-based PowerQuest announced at COMDEX the upcoming release of Lost & Found, a data recovery application. Lost & Found recovers data from damaged or corrupted media in the event of a disk crash, logical system failure or intentional or accidental data loss.
Unlike other data repair and recovery software solutions, Lost & Found does not need to be installed prior to the recovery of lost or corrupted files.