| |
DEMO continues to be my favorite conference -- the semi-annual event took place this past week in San Diego, California. It was an uneventful trip from Palo Alto, where I had visited Mediazone, and on to San Francisco for a flight with Southwest (possibly the best airline in operation in the states) to San Diego to join the DEMO opening reception.
There were some key trends that were reinforced at DEMO again this year. Many companies in some way talked about mobile. Most companies either provide a web service or use web services as their platform. The term "cloud" is seeping into the vocabulary. Most companies were media related in some way or provided or used social networking. None of these things are new, by any means, but DEMO confirmed their strategic importance and demonstrated 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. I visited the ones in which I had the most interest. Chris Shipley kicked off the conference with insightful comments about the industry. (See the Demo blog for more on her thoughts). She talked about how the web has evolved from banking and buying things to a social web with a lot of user generated content to a web that will create real market value. Only a small percent of Internet users actually take advantage of the potential of the social web. This next phase will bring down the barriers: syndication, distribution, constant connectivity, on demand and lead to the distributed web. There will be new devices, new protocols beyond the desktop and mobile. Collaboration will become purposeful, not just "social". All this will be accompanied with advances in usability, security, and authentication.
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 72 companies showing off -- each getting six minutes on stage to tell their story. Chris screens the companies and introduces them to the audience. After the main tent sessions the attendees get to visit with the companies in the "Demo Hall". There isn't time to visit all of them so I try to
be selective -- I visited 25 of the companies this time. Some of the ones I found interesting follow. They are in no particular order.
If you asked me which of the 72 launches I found most interesting I would have to say Telnic, Ltd., the "dot tel" company. Having yourname.tel will allow you to store, update and publish all your contact information and web links directly on the Internet. This is not a web service -- the data is actually stored in the infrastructure of the Internet. The heart of the Internet is the DNS -- the Domain Name System. Among other tasks, the DNS translates humanly-meaningful domain names (like amazon.com) to the numerical address (like 72.21.210.11). The names and numbers are stored in special purpose computers that are scattered around the world. With dot tel, companies or individuals will be able to have their contact information stored there too. It will be the one official place to have directories for people and companies. You will be able to choose how much information you want public (maybe just your name and your web site or blog address) and which data you want to be private.The private information will be encrypted and can be selectively shared with people or organizations that you authorize. People will be able to reach you on their mobile with the touch of a button through the dot tel directory. No web site or hosting is involved. I think this will be a big deal.
Plastic Logic, Ltd. showed an e-book that can display full-sized documents. It is like an 8.5 x 11 Kindle and will replace a briefcase full of documents. It was sort of a computer but not really a computer. I am a bit skeptical on this one.
A number of companies showed how the web is gradually replacing television as we know it. Use your favorite search engine and take a look at
Awind Inc.,
RealNetworks, Inc.,
beeTV,
RemoTV, Inc.,
Invision TV, LLC, and
ffwd.com, Inc. Or just revisit the DEMO Conference Agenda for links to what Chris and team thought about them.
A handful of companies showed products that make creating, sharing, and consuming digital bits more enjoyable. See
UGA Digital, Inc.,
Trinity Convergence, Inc.,
Blue Lava Technologies, Inc.,
Kadoo Inc.,
MixMatchMusic, Ltd.,
Photrade, LLC,
MeDeploy, and
The Echo Nest Corp. Photrade is yet another company in the digital photography space. They will allow you to share and protect photos you take, purchase photos that others have taken, and make money from your photos. With the plummeting of high quality digital cameras and the availability of software that can make an amateur photo look professional there is a growing market here.
Mobile will become a bigger and bigger part of our lives.
Maverick Mobile Solutions, Pvt. Ltd. has a solution that protects your phone in case you lose it. It sets off various bells and whistles. Not a bad idea as we put more and more personal data on our phones.
G.ho.st lets you put your PC on your mobile phone. You have to see it to believe it.
WebDiet claims to make losing weight and getting healthy easy by using your mobile phone to enter everything you eat and get an analysis that optimizes your diet. If you want to chat and share more with your friends take a look at Xumii.
There were more than a half-dozen companies showing off new ideas for protecting and managing digital assets. As we move more and more of our pictures, conversations, movies, notes, documents, etc. to the digital world, the security of them becomes more and more important. One of the companies I found quite interesting in this area is Usable Security Systems, Inc. UsableLogin is their product and what they are trying to do is make passwords as we know them obsolete and give us secure access to any web site. All you have to do is recognize a picture you have chosen and remember one simple codeword to log in securely. Some of us have more than 100 login/password pairs. I think Usable may have a problem getting some banking sites to cooperate but even if just 80% of the sites you visit could be handled with a single password that would be a very good thing. The Founder & CEO, Rachna Dhamija, did her PhD in security at Berkely and she gave a very good demo. See it here.
As a security aside, if you use Gmail, I highly recommend selecting the https option in the settings. This doesn't guarantee security but it does insure that the data going back and forth between your computer and Google is encrypted.
There were many more great demos. Browse your way through the DEMO Conference Agenda and see what catches your eye.
The flight back to New York on American Airlines offered an unexpected surprise. GoGoInflight offered broadband Internet service. The price was $12.95 and the performance was excellent. I ran a speedtest and found the results to be better than what I get from Comcast Cable at home. The WiFi connection works with both laptops and any mobile phone that has WiFi (like the iPhone).
Other patrickWeb stories about conferences
Conferences, Internet Technology, Mobile, Travels, WiFi, iPhone September 15, 2008 06:20 PM
Someday I will ride the entire 308 miles of 
The 4:45 AM departure from home last Sunday was not a barrel of fun but the flight to San Francisco was uneventful and was followed by a visit with 
This was my first trip to Greenland and Iceland. I have been fortunate to visit many countries around the world but have never been to these two unique places. Thanks to 
The 
Thoughts about the conference to follow shortly, but since 
The security line after checking in at 
The 
In a nutshell, 
The trip is over and things are back to normal, but South Africa has left a lasting impression on me. All the stories and pictures are in the index below. For anyone who wants to print the stories, they are all combined into a single 
The 
It was a smooth flight from 
If there is a "must see" in South Africa it would be Victoria Falls. My bottom line would be that if you go there to make it a day trip and be sure to fly directly to the Victoria Falls airport. The way we made the trip turned out to very complicated. Just like 
We met 
The 
There is much to write about Africa and Internet technology, but I can not resist sharing about our luggage. We waited in line along with many others to provide information about the size and color of the missing bags. The agent entered the information and gave us a printout that was clearly from a decades-old system. We were told to give a call after twenty-four hours. I called after 26 hours and was told there was no update and that it could take up to five days. The reasoning was that there may not be room in the next few flights for "extra" baggage -- the classic case of taking care of the new customers rather than upset them by helping customers who have already been disappointed. After continuing to get "there is no new information" I thought to myself that tracking luggage would be a great application for the web. I wondered if the airline had thought about it.
The trip back from Africa took twenty-nine hours. If you include the half day in Cape Town's 
There are quite a few stories here in the blog about "
There is much that could be said about the hundreds of miles of driving to see family and then a houseful of family and good times before during and after Christmas. I won't bore readers of the blog about that but there is one thing I would like to share about one special gift I received. It is called Open It! 
It was an educational week at the 
More about the 
There is more to say about the 
The trip to New York for a board meeting last week went smoothly. Traffic was light -- even within the city -- and I got to the hotel lobby in much better than normal time. The one thing that went less well than it could have the check in process at the 
Nothing could be better than going to the 
The flight from Frankfurt, Germany arrived in 
Visiting China is an eye opener culturally and economically. It is a rapidly developing country and it appears that special interest groups do not get in the way of progress. Perhaps it was the same way when America was building the 
Thanks to Theron Rogers in Georgia for pointing out a "minor* error in my last posting. 
Most everything in China is on a massive scale and that is certainly true of 
The next flight in China took us to 
The 
The flight to 
The flight northwest from Hong Kong to 
This week was the beginning of my fourth trip to 
It was a joy to attend the 14,438th concert of 
If you have ever been to 
Our journey through the 
The cruise started in Amsterdam, Holland and sailed to Copenhagen, Denmark for the first stop. The main attraction there was 
I have learned a lot during the last two weeks while visiting six countries. One of the most interesting days began with a flight from Pulkovo Airport in St. Petersburg to Sheremetyevo Airport in Moscow. The Russian airports could use some upgrading of services, shopping facilities, and direction signs in English, but they are said to be quite safe. Boarding the 
Standing in the center of 
There are some pictures from the 
After finding four official National Geodetic Survey 
Thanks for all the nice feedback on the stories about the Business Leadership Forum in Rome. There are two final links that may be of interest. Chris Barger at IBM has posted the audio for the podcast about the demos, Internet technology, and healthcare. You can play it from 
The 
The final afternoon of the 
Following Nakamura-san at the 
The shuttle buses departing from the 
There wasn't time during the two and a half hour drive from Denver to 
I have been very fortunate to be able to travel
around the country and the world, especially during the last fifteen years while sharing and learning a lot about the 
The snow on Wednesday was melting fast, the temperature was in the fifties, and the 
Just back from sunny 
The sky was blue in Connecticut today too but the temperature was only in the high twenties. The 
The 
At some point most of the world will be cashless -- all transactions will be digital in some form. In addition to debit and credit cards we will soon be able to use our mobile phone to authenticate and authorize payments -- even to 
Thanks to Wayne Jonas Bealer from Reading, Pennsylvania for forwarding 
There are quite a few web sites and 
There are now 
A personal review of the new 
The time is now. I would rather be writing the final story about 
Sometime roughly six million years ago an island called Kauai was formed in the Pacific Ocean. Kauai is 5,012 miles from home and it takes a long time to get there -- although not as long as 
That's it. The story is told -- and now it will be back to other more important topics like 
The 
Two new books arrived this week that may be of interest.
The 
The flight from Toronto to Fort Lauderdale, Florida was on 
The long trek to Cario, Egypt began on the afternoon of September 5th with a ride to 
Stepping onto the 
Supernova 2004
I have been looking forward to my first visit to 
Over the years I have been very fortunate to be able to travel to many countries around the world to talk about "
The 
The 
After visiting the two conferences and then calling home with 
Japanese people are continually showing their respect for others. 
There are 123 million people in Japan and ten percent of them live in one city -- Tokyo. It is a magnificent place. Tokyo has many sections like all major cities of the world. My stay for the first two days of the trip was in 
The 
We just turned north after rounding Cape Horn, near the bottom of the Earth. Less than four hundred years ago, people still thought the world was flat and that ships would "fall off" the globe if they went too far. Once that belief was shattered, mariners headed out onto the oceans, many seeking passage around the South American continent. Magellan navigated a passage through a complicated series of channels at what was then thought to be the most southern part of the continent, but in 1615 two brothers from Holland discovered Cape Horn, truly the southern most land mass of the continent. We were fortunate that the weather allowed us to see the full expanse of the region. Often the famous rough seas prevent this. The next stop will be the Falkland Islands and then on to Bueons Aires.
According to the 
Most
of us remember vividly where we were on September 11, 2001. In my case, I was
in Danbury, Connecticut in the board room at 
