Lotus Notes, Webaroo on a Stick

It’s been a while since I wrote about software for USB drives/flash drives/thumb drives/key drive, whatever you want to call them. Updating my apparently still popular directory of such software, now more than 18 months old, I came across a few recent bits of news I thought worth passing on:

• IBM now has a version of its Lotus Notes that will run off a USB drive called Lotus Notes on a Stick. This kind of surprised me, given how terrified big companies are of staff wielding USB drives. Still, could be useful for road warriors. What also interesting, as Andrew Charlesworth of vnunet points out, is that the software allows users to update blogs and publish RSS feeds.
• Webaroo, the packaged-for-offline-Internet software, will now run on drives running the U3 installation software. Webaroo whittles down the Internet to a modest size based on your interests and then downloads it into a packet you can save to your computer and view offline. U3 is a standard installed on USB drives to allow them to run programs.
• The visually impaired now have their own USB drive: The Serotek FreedomBox bundles the usual browser, email and other applications but wrapped around the company’s text-to-speech and speech-to-text command interface. I can imagine this would be useful for those people using public computers in libraries or nursing homes, or simply wanting to travel around and use computers that may not have accessibility software installed.