John McCain and Barack Obama are often seen sending emails between campaign rallies as they barnstorm the country. But whichever man is elected president will face a predicament: unholster his Blackberry or risk political suicide. As George W. Bush told a small group of friends just days before being sworn in, “Since I do not want my private conversations looked at by those out to embarrass, the only course of action is not to correspond in cyberspace.” In the last eight years, President Bush has not sent a single message. And future presidents are all but certain to follow in his footsteps.

Although liberal critics often claim that Bush prefers living in a bubble, the president seemed to regret giving up email. He used it as governor of Texas, and he told reporters last week that he eagerly looked forward to signing on again once his second term comes to a close. Recalling the good old days when he had a computer, he remarked, “I stayed in touch with all kinds of people around the country, firing off emails at all times of the day to stay in touch with my pals… [T]here’s no better way to communicate.”

The potential benefits of using email in executing the duties of commander in chief are as self-evident as the risks. Because the number of people who have physical access to the president is inevitably quite small, email would empower him to seek counsel from a greater number of people both inside the White House and outside Washington.

Online Media Technologies, developer of video and audio software, has released a new DVD-burning and authoring software, AVS DVD Authoring 1.3. This new software allows users to organize video files of most various formats into professionally-looking DVD-projects and burn DVD disc. AVS DVD Authoring 1.3 is specifically designed to simplify home DVD-creation to the maximum and work with video for computer beginners more comfortable.

AVS DVD Authoring 1.3 takes video files of all popular video formats today (AVI, MPG, MPEG, WMV, VOB, MOV, QT or FLV) and creates DVD with personalized menus. You can either choose from a list of ready DVD menus or create your own DVD project applying multiple video effects, adding titles and music background. It is also possible to merge several video files into one DVD project and burn home DVD for watching on TV or PC. In preview mode you can play the created DVD project to check its quality and make sure that everything is correct. Before burning DVD disc, AVS DVD Authoring 1.3 makes it possible to choose between PAL or NTSC TV systems, select a necessary type of DVD media (Single or Double-Layer) and set quality parameters for a DVD-project.

The message out of Computex this week is loud and clear: The Netbooks are coming. Intel is touting its Atom processor. Acer is on the board with its Aspire one. Microsoft is adapting Windows to the Netbook market. Nvidia says Netbooks will be graphics intensive. The big question: Are buyers as enthusiastic as the vendors?

To celebrate the start of the UEFA Euro 2008 football tournament with their friends in Europe and as a way of showing commiseration to England, Scotland, Northern Ireland, Ireland and Wales for not qualifying this year, Proporta is offering all their customers a 15% discount on all Proporta branded hardware for two days only. To receive your discount simply enter the promotion code EURO2008 when you order (you’ll be prompted at the cart page).

As more and more people exclusively use PCs to maintain their most valuable documents, including family photos and video, extensive music collections, even crucial work files, the risks posed by accidental data deletion can represent a true personal catastrophe. What’s worse, many people who lose files aren’t aware that readily available, easy-to-use software exists that can instantly restore precious documents and irreplaceable digital photos they feared were gone forever.

To prevent this frustrating, yet reversible data loss from imperiling users’ important files, iolo technologies announced the release of a new, even easier-to-use version of its Search and Recover software, which allows even non-expert users to quickly recover accidentally deleted files even years after the data was lost.

Safeguarding your data is no longer an option but is a necessity. Government legislation has issued directives for organizations to report publicly if any security breach that has caused to compromise personal information. Despite this requirement, most enterprises, large corporate can only account for 60% of their computing possessions and even more shocking, 73% of companies do not have specific security policies documented for their laptop or desktop computers.

Disk Doctors File Shredder recently launched by Disk Doctors Labs is a desktop tool that can be used to securely erase important files and wipe all its traces from any windows based operating environment.

Syware, developer of mobile database development tools for business and personal productivity, announced the release of Visual CE 11, a major new release of its mobile database development tool. The new release significantly extends the capabilities of Visual CE and its drag-and-drop desktop development environment, which enables both business professionals and developers to easily create Windows Mobile based applications with little or no programming.

CyberMatrix has released version 1 of Timesheets CE, an easy to use timesheet entry application for PocketPC and Windows Mobile-based PDAs. Timesheets CE is ideal for engineering offices and other project driven businesses wishing to replace their cumbersome paper-based timesheet entry. The timesheet entry screen looks like a standard timesheet entry form. Timesheet data can be edited using the included data manager. Reports summarize the entered timesheet data.

Timesheets CE interfaces with the popular CyberMatrix Timesheets software for Windows. When away from their PC, employees can easily enter time on their Pocket PC device. When back at their PC they can import the Pocket PC collected data into Timesheets for Windows.

Timesheets CE runs on most Windows Mobile and Windows Embedded compatible devices. Timesheets CE requires SQLite and additional run-time software that can be downloaded free of charge from the CyberMatrix web site.

NormSoft announced the availability of its audio player Pocket Tunes Deluxe for Windows Mobile 5 and 6 devices. Pocket Tunes is an easy-to-use and feature-rich music player for listening to digital music and Internet radio stations. The Pocket Tunes software can be purchased and added to many phones and PDAs to expand their multimedia capabilities. With the addition of Windows Mobile, Pocket Tunes now supports Palm’s entire family of handhelds and smartphones in addition to many Windows Mobile handhelds and smartphones from other manufacturers.

SanDisk has introduced a line of flash memory-based solid-state drives (SSDs) that are designed for an emerging new category of portable consumer electronics–called Ultra Low-Cost PCs (ULCPC) or “netbooks”–that allow users to have an enhanced experience while easily surfing the Internet using wireless communication. The SanDisk pSSD (Parallel ATA solid state drive) eliminates the need for a hard disk drive and can store both the operating system and application data for these new devices.