The version will be available to teachers and students for $49, compared with the standard price of $199, and its release will be accompanied by a marketing campaign focused on college students, a key target market for the new application. OneNote, one of two new applications included in Office System, Microsoft's newly renamed line of workplace productivity applications, is being positioned as an adjunct to Word's word processing program. OneNote is designed for taking notes and organizing them with information from other sources, such as Web pages. The program automatically saves notes as they're input and offers several options for organizing and browsing notes, which can later be incorporated into final Word documents. Microsoft introduced a discounted academic version of Office last year. The program quickly became the most popular consumer version of Office, thanks in part to lax enforcement of licensing terms that restrict use to students and educators. OneNote will debut along with other Office System packages on Oct. 21. The product was initially seen mainly as a tool to be used with the fledgling Tablet PC format Microsoft introduced last year, but the software giant has since positioned it as a general application for anyone who needs to collect and organize notes from a variety of sources. College students, who have to incorporate lecture notes and library research, are a natural audience for OneNote, said Bobby Moore, Microsoft's product manager for OneNote. "It's going to allow them to organize information in such a way that it'll be much easier to use it," Moore said. "One of the interesting things that's happening now in colleges is this idea of open-note exams. We found in our testing that the ability to search their notes in OneNote gave students a real advantage in those kinds of exams." In addition to the discounted academic edition of the software, Microsoft will distribute on college campuses 500,000 CDs of a trial version of OneNote, and the company will set up Tablet PC kiosks in 300 campus bookstores that have tablets running OneNote.

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies is delivering a tiny 4GB hard drive to electronic device manufacturers for testing. The 4GB Microdrive, a miniaturized version of a hard drive used in PCs, can be used by a wide range of devices to store data files for computers or image files for digital cameras, among other uses, the company said. The San Jose, Calif., hard-drive maker is offering samples now and plans to ship the 1-inch drive in volume in November. Derived from technology gained when Hitachi purchased IBM's hard drive business and formed a new joint venture, the Microdrive gives Hitachi Global Storage Technologies an avenue to compete with several miniature storage formats used in computers, handhelds, digital cameras and other electronics devices. The Microdrive will take on flash memory products such as Compact Flash cards or Sony's Memory Stick and will also bolster Hitachi Global Storage Technologies' position against forthcoming storage devices, such as Iomega's 1.5GB Digital Capture Technology removable hard drive. The Hitachi unit says that the benefits of the new Microdrive over flash and other storage methods are a speedy data transfer rate and a relatively low price. The company expects the 4GB Microdrive to sell for $499. Lexar Media sells 2GB and 4GB flash memory cards that cost as much as $799 and $1,599, respectively, according to its online store. Hitachi Global Storage Technologies will also offer a 2GB version of the Microdrive starting later this year. Like past versions, the new Microdrives will fit into a standard, Compact Flash Type II slot, allowing them to be used by devices that can accept memory cards and other add-ons that use the format. The company will continue to sell a 1GB Microdrive as well. Companies that are evaluating the 4GB drive--some of which already use the 1GB model--include Blaupunkt, Eastman Kodak, Minolta, Nikon, Olympus, Pentax, Sigma and Sony. bang bus free bangbus