Iomega’s Rev drives compete with portable hard drives from Seagate and Western Digital; EMC hopes to buy the company and turbocharge the brand. Image: Iomega

What happened to Iomega (IOM)?

It was a gravity-defying technology stock during its best run a decade ago. At its peak in 1996, the company’s nearly $6 billion valuation meant many investors were betting it would be the future of digital storage.

Iomega seemed to be at the right place at the right time; broadband connections and music downloads were not yet common, and few tech companies recognized that storage would be a growth market. Meanwhile Iomega’s proprietary Zip disks and Zip drives provided the capacity of a computer hard drive and the portability of a floppy disk, making it a snap to move chunky files like digital images or huge spreadsheets from one PC to another.

Lenovo’s critically acclaimed ThinkPad X300 laptop does without a hard drive. Image: Lenovo

While munching on a reuben at Birk’s, a steakhouse in Silicon Valley, Seagate (STX) CEO Bill Watkins is explaining why he’s not too worried about a these trendy new laptops that have everything but a hard drive.

On the surface, this would seem to be a big problem. Seagate, after all, is the world’s largest hard drive maker with expected sales of more than $3 billion this quarter – so Watkins likes to see his wares go into more gadgets, not fewer. It’s easy to see why he tends not to favor devices like Lenovo’s sleek ThinkPad X300, which is winning raves for its light weight and silent operation, and its 64-gigabyte flash storage drive.

New Home Server aims to bring big-business technology to the home — but it will be a tough sell

HP’s MediaSmart Server runs Microsoft’s new Windows Home Server operating system. Image from Microsoft.

Yes, it has come to this. Now that consumers have multi-PC homes, wireless networks, and thousands of digital files floating around, they need a computer whose sole purpose is to keep an eye on the other computers.

At least, that’s Microsoft’s (MSFT) pitch for a new class of machines built to run its new Windows Home Server operating system. Home Server products became available for pre-order this week from retailers including Best Buy (BBY), Circuit City (CC) and Amazon (AMZN), but it remains to be seen whether mainstream computer shoppers will buy the idea.

The concept is geeky, but the need for a home server is real, as anyone who has lost files to a hard drive meltdown will attest. The promise of the home server is that it will deftly perform many useful tasks that most computer users find too troublesome to do on our own.

For example, it will automatically back up every file on all the Windows computers in your home (so long as they’re running Windows XP or higher). The home server will also allow you to use a web browser to access files that are on your home computers while you’re on the road, and even remotely share them with friends and family. All the while it also watches out for the other PCs in its network, making sure they have the latest security software updates.

Founder and CEO Michael Dell. Image: Dell

Michael Dell’s old game plan was ruthless and effective: Crush competitors by building products at a lower cost, and using the Internet to pass the savings on to value-conscious customers. That strategy made his namesake company a darling of the first Internet boom and the largest computer maker in the world.

But times have changed. In recent years archrival Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) has stolen Dell’s (DELL) global PC crown by using HP’s larger size to cut costs and its retail relationships to grow sales. And while Dell has struggled, companies like Apple (AAPL) are using design savvy to simplify computing experience through devices like the iPod and iPhone.

Servers like this one, which put information onto the Internet, let off a lot of heat – and it takes energy to cool them. Photo: HP

The Internet is hot. Not just hot as in popularity. Hot as in heat.

It’s so hot, in fact, that data centers – those expensive warehouses full of computers that serve up information – are racking up huge power bills. According to Hewlett-Packard’s (HPQ) calculations, a large data center with 70,000 square feet of space might guzzle $10.4 million worth of power in a year. Data centers require so much energy that over a three-year period, the computers inside could easily cost a company as much to plug in and cool as they did to purchase in the first place.

To deal with the power problem, and make some money in the process, HP weeks ago began selling a homegrown technology called Dynamic Smart Cooling. Today, the company is releasing numbers it hopes will convince customers that the technology works.

Flash-based models such as the new iPod touch are increasingly upstaging Apple’s hard drive-based players. Photo: Jon Fortt

In the iPod’s world, storage isn’t the selling point it used to be.

That’s one clear lesson from the sales rankings at the Apple Store, which posts a regularly updated list of the most popular iPod models. Though the iPod classic, which uses a hard drive to store music and video, offers a whopping 80 gigabytes of storage for $249, it is being outsold by the iPod touch. This, despite the fact that the touch has a tenth of the storage space and costs $50 more.

Why is the touch beating the classic? For one, the iPod touch has the benefit of good looks – it’s almost identical to the iPhone, this year’s must-have gadget. The touch also has a large display, built-in WiFi and web browsing. (The iPod touch is isn’t Apple’s best-selling model; number-one is the slim iPod nano, which starts at $149. It doesn’t use a hard drive either.)

When does a Chinese company’s strategic technology investment become a national security risk?

Lawmakers were starting to ask that question Friday after 3Com, a struggling manufacturer of networking equipment, announced plans to sell itself to private equity firm Bain Capital Partners, and Chinese networking giant Huawei Technologies in a $2.2 billion cash deal.

Even if you’re not a heavy user of its Photoshop software, or even an investor in its stock, it might be a good idea to watch this afternoon’s earnings announcement from Adobe Systems (ADBE).

That’s because Adobe, the Silicon Valley-based software maker that also sells Flash, Photoshop, Acrobat, and other popular programs, will give investors the earliest possible peek at how healthy the technology industry was this summer. The next-earliest major tech company to report earnings is Oracle (ORCL), which releases its results on Thursday – but aside from that, no big players will weigh in until Intel (INTC) and Yahoo (YHOO) share their numbers on October 16.

Tuesday is the day.

Apple (AAPL) has summoned the tech press to CEO Steve Jobs’s fortress of solitude, the company’s headquarters in Cupertino, for an unspecified product announcement. Those of us who have been covering Apple for a while know the drill – generally speaking, Jobs has three stages for product splashes: Macworld, the Worldwide Developer Conference, and home base.

Good news for laptop makers and consumers heading into the second half of this year: Competition in the hard drive market continues to keep prices low. Bad news for the hard drive makers (and their shareholders): That same competition continues to keep margins low as well.