Making the Big Pitch

In every type of industry, in organizations of every size, people are selling something to somebody all of the time. That goes not only for the dedicated sellers, the pros who spend all of their time pitching products to customers, but for the rest of us too. When we're not pitching our ideas to team leaders or our recommendations to company strategists, we're pitching ourselves - for a raise, for a plum assignment, for a dream job.

While each of us must harness our own intelligence and creativity to deliver a message, the right high-tech tools can help us enhance that message. The latest crop of laptops, projectors, digital and video cameras, and presentation-software packages deliver great flexibility for building up to the big pitch. They enable you to sharpen a point, amplify a message, customize a presentation. Best of all, they can help you break free from those canned presentations that everyone else is using. And who knows? They just might help you become a bigger rainmaker than El Nino.

Two Laptops for the One-to-One Pitch

Alone on the road, peripatetic pitchers need all the technology they can get. Trouble is, lugging around a full-blown multimedia laptop might result in heavy chiropractor bills - until now. The 12-pound technoburdens of yesteryear are on the way out. Today, slim is in. The PowerTools generating a lot of geek lust these days include a pair of svelte yet fully configured notebooks.

Digital HiNote Ultra 2000 ($5,399) The Ultra 2000's brightest feature is its 14.1-inch screen, one of the new generation of big active-matrix models. It's sharper than most laptop screens, with a maximum resolution of 1,024 by 768 pixels and a viewing angle that makes it ideal for one-to-one, desktop presentations.

To give you enough computing power to crunch spreadsheets and to manage presentation graphics, the HiNote is powered by a 233-MHz Pentium chip and features 32 MB of RAM along with a 4-GB hard drive. It also contains a bay for either a 3.5-inch floppy drive or a 20X CD-ROM drive (you can swap between them). There's a built-in 56-Kbps modem for those who want to keep up with email and report back to the office online. The Ultra 2000 packs all of this into a 1.25-inch-thick case, and it weighs about 6.5 pounds.

To get the most out of presentations, add on the Ultra Multimedia Dock for $899. It features a Universal Serial Bus connector, an extra bay (so you don't have to swap out the floppy drive to handle the CD-ROM), two additional PC Card slots, and a three-speaker system that delivers high-quality sound. It also includes video output, so you can run a presentation simultaneously on your computer screen and on a conventional TV. All this is crammed into a 0.75-inch-thick slice of plastic that snaps easily onto the bottom of the Ultra 2000. It weighs just 1.5 pounds, and the rechargeable battery lasts an average of more than three hours.

Coordinates: Digital Equipment Corp., 800-722-9332; http://www.windows.digital.com

Mitsubishi Pedion (about $6,000) The Pedion is positively the most anorexic full-featured laptop on the market. Measuring less than one-inch thick and weighing just 3.1 pounds, it boasts a large keyboard and a 12.1-inch, thin-film-transistor screen. At 800 by 600 pixels, the screen isn't as sharp as that of the HiNote, but it works well enough for close-encounter pitches. The machine also has a magnesium case, making it more durable than most laptops.

With a 233-MHz Pentium processor and 64 MB of RAM, the Pedion can handle any kind of software, video clip, or graphics program that you throw at it. You might also want to bring along Mitsubishi's Media Pack docking station. Similar to Digital's Multimedia Dock, it contains a 20X CD-ROM drive, a 3.5-inch floppy drive, and speakers. When you strap it onto the Pedion's underside, the whole package measures about 1.5 inches thick and weighs less than five pounds. Better yet, the media pack comes free with the machine.

Coordinates: Mitsubishi Electronics Inc., 888-445-5250; http://www.mitsubishi-mobile.com

Two Tools for the One-to-Many Pitch

The best way to convey the big picture is to use a big picture. Unfortunately, people who must tote a laptop from customer to customer rarely know ahead of time whether they'll be meeting in a small auditorium with gads of AV equipment or in a small boardroom with just an electrical outlet. The standard solution to this dilemma is a portable LCD projector. Connected to a laptop computer or a VCR, an LCD projector can throw an oversized picture on a wall, but the image is typically washed out.