PHOTO: Sergio Moraes/Reuters/Landov

What if you could surf while you surf? Well, nobody really wants to do that, but apparently consumer reality and marketing promotions need not have anything in common. Intel Corp.'s marketing team commissioned a surfboard with an integrated tablet laptop and a solar charger, to show off the company's Centrino wireless technology, which gives the surfboard an Internet connection via a wireless hot spot on the beach. It was developed for a sports festival in 2004 but is still in use a year later, as demonstrated here by Neco Padaratz, at Joaquina Beach, in Florianópolis, Brazil. Frivolous as the idea is, there was a bit of engineering involved in the board's construction, according to Jools Matthew of Gulfstream Surfboards, in North Devon, England. The challenge, he says, was to make the laptop watertight and to ensure that its weight didn't alter the board's balance.