January 31, 2008
Demo continues to be my favorite conference -- the semi-annual event took place this past week in Palm Desert, California. There were many new people in attendance but also some friends from many Demos past -- Amy Wohl, Shel Israel, John Landry, and Steve Larsen. While there were many attendees in their mid-twenties, the five of us joked how we had logged 200+ years in technology.
Whenever possible I try to start an out of town visit with a hunt for a benchmark or geocache. The nearest benchmark was along a railroad bed across the Interstate several miles away so I decided to look for three geocaches. The first two turned out to be more than challenging and after miles of walking and searching with ten feet of each I had to give up. At least the weather was great and I got some exercise. During a break before dinner the next day I went back out and looked for "Between Rock & a Hard Place". After reaching the latitude/longitude and looking for ten minutes or so I thought I would be zero for three but then as I thought about the comments made in the log at geocaching.com, it suddenly came to me and I found it. It was one of the most cleverly hidden caches I have seen in years.
The Demo conference allows entrepreneurs to show off new gadgets, software, hardware and business ideas and enables the press, analysts, investors, and technology enthusiasts to assess what they see. The product introductions that take place reveal key technology trends over the coming 12 to 18 months. This year there were 77 companies showing off -- each getting six minutes on stage to tell their story.
There were some key trends that emerged from Demo this year. Many companies in some way talked about mobile. Most companies either provide a web service or use web services as their platform. Most companies were media related in some way provided or used social networking. None of these things are new, by any means, but Demo confirmed their strategic importance and significant implementations. I don't think any of them have cracked the code so to speak but there were many that had exciting visions and demos. visited the ones in which I had most interest. Chris Shipley kicked off the conference with insightful comments about the industry. See the Demo blog for more on her thoughts. Chris screens the companies and introduces them to the stage. After the main tent sessions the attendees got to visit with the companies in the "Demo Hall". There isn't time to visit all of them so I tried to
be selective. Some of the ones I found interesting follow. They are in no particular order. (Read more)
TimeTrade Systems, Inc. is a very clever tool for market development work. It allows you to establish what time slots you have to offer for appointments. The system then sends emails to your target market and the recipients of the invitation can select a time slot that works for them and the appointments are made automatically.
iLeonardo has a collaborative search offering that I really liked. You can create a notebook on a topic of interest and then see what research other iLeonardo users have done.
Iterasi, Inc. allows you to save web pages exactly as you saw them. For example when you get a confirmation of an Amazon order, or if a web site has a page counter, you can take a snapshot of the page and save them in a folder. There have been many similar products over the years but not this well thought out.
Citiport, Inc. showed a way to plan travel in a major city. Today you can search for a hotel in a city, for example, and you get a large number of offers to sell you a room but nothing about the actual hotel web site you are looking for. Citiport makes it very effective and personal to plan your day in a city.
Skyfire showed a mobile browser that they claim can do anything a desktop browser can do. Opera Software has been doing this for years but this new startup adds some competition. The mobile web is going to emerge big time in the months ahead.
SpeakLike, LLC offers a multilingual instant messaging service. They demonstrated a three way chat in English, Spanish, and Chinese. Each of the three chatted in only their own language. The translation seemed to get the idioms and slang right.
NotchUp, Inc. is a new way to match job seekers with jobs.
Education.com is aspiring to be the one stop place for parents who care about education. One example is to find which school is near a home you may be considering.
Toktumi, Inc. uses your PC in combination with the Internet to enable you to operate a small business as though you had a big business style PBX.
Avistar Communications Corp. provides an Internet based video service. It allows users to video chat with multiple people while watching a TV channel at the same time. It dynamically allocates the bandwidth to insure that each participant gets good quality video.
Ribbit Corp. is an Internet based phone company. They integrate various social networks with your mobile and your land based phone service via the web.
LegiTime Technologies, Inc. has some very good tools to use SMS text messaging on mobile phones in a comprehensive way. Group reminders on a regular basis.
Vidyo™, Inc. has the best videoconferencing approach I have seen. They support multiple types of participants, including HD, in a single conference. The quality of the demo was extraordinary.
Demo included a very interesting panel about Africa. The panelists were steeped in Africa and offered a strong case for why Africa represents a vast and untapped market. I will be there later this month to gain my own perspective. Check out the panelists via your favorite search engine: Erik Hersman , Editor, AfriGadget.com and Principle, Zungu. Juliana Rotich , Contributing Author, AfriGadget; Environment Editor, Global Voices Online, and Mike Stopforth , CEO, Cerebra and CMO, Afrigator.
