Vitrium Systems

The rain continues to come down here in Taipei, Taiwan, and so do the vast number of E-book readers, slates and tablet coming to market.  It is the 30^th meeting of Computex Taipei, and wow, I am excited about the future.  Consider that there is a paradigm shift occurring here in Taipei away from the PC (or personal computing) to mobile computing!

On May 25^th I attended the SIIA NetGain Conference and Technology Innovation Tour in San Francisco, California, to Adobe Systems, Google and Apple.  I was at Apple Corporate Headquarters standing in the Apple Store examining the new iPad.  Slick doesn’t begin to describe what Steve Jobs has done in transforming already 2 million folks away from their PC’s to mobile computing!  So, where is the Microsoft supported version of this really cool device?  Well, look no further I found a ton of them here in Taipei at Computex!

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This is my third time attending Computex Taipei in ten years.  This year marks the 30^th year that this party has been going on and the magnitude of this conference continues to grow.  To facilitate the madness, this year’s show is being held in four separate venues across the city. Candidly, there is too much to see, try 5,000 booths with supermodels and promotional giveaways abound. What recession, tech is sizzling!

There are lots of new chips being announced, it is hard to keep up with all their names and the collision of the CPU and the GPU on a single piece of silicon.  Day two was really iPad killer day at the show, also netbook killer day as tablets are back!

Intel introduced the next generation of Atom Chips for netbooks, tablets and smartphones which will ship by the end of the year. Qualcomm is out and shipping their third generation Snapdragon chips. AMD demonstrated two of their Fusion accelerated processing units. The Ontario and the Llano will ship in the first half of 2011.

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There are a few PDF converter programs available online, both to download and to use as a website application. I used a lengthy word document with lots of graphics to test the speed of these free PDF converters. This is the test document I used.

PDF Converter

www.freepdfconvert.com

A free online PDF creator program that can be used with both OS and Windows operating systems. Simply upload the document you want converted to PDF and wait while your file is converted. Then download the PDF from their website to your desktop in a zipped file. It took under a minute for the word file I uploaded to be converted.

Zamzar

www.zamzar.com

Zamzar is a free online PDF converter program, no software downloads required! Simply upload the file you want to convert (or a URL), select which format you want it converted to (like PDF), enter your email address to have the converted file sent to, and click convert. It will work with any operating system. After uploading my test word document, it only took 5 minutes for the PDF file to be sent to my email.

Take a look at Michael Arrington’s review of it at Tech Crunch.

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By David Finlayson, Edmonton Journal

An Edmonton structural engineer and a Vancouver financial consultant launching a document-software company may seem like an odd combination.

Find out how Vitrium Systems was launched, here.