Technologizer » DEMO

Live From DEMO09

Harry McCracken — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 17:16:01 +0000

I’m at the DEMOFall conference in San Francisco Diego, the second massive launchpad for new companies and products (after last week’s TechCrunch50) in as many weeks. So far, the product-demo gremlins seem to be having more than their usual amount of fun with the companies onstage: Problems with Internet access and other glitches have bedeviled multiple demonstrators.

My favorite demos so far:

HP kicked off the conference with SkyRoom, a $149 piece of software for conducting high-definition video conferences among up to four people. It’s aimed to simplify business collaboration, and will come bundled for free with some HP computers.
Micello tries to be “Google Maps for the inside of buildings,” with an iPhone app that can show you where things are on the premises of locations such as shopping malls and other public places. (I could have used something along these lines yesterday–I was at the San Francisco airport and really, really wanted to find a Wells Fargo ATM.)
Fuze Box (which used to be CallWave) launched Fuze Meeting, another HD conferencing service. This one has iPhone and BlackBerry apps.
Digsby, a multi-client IM app that’s been around for awhile, has a new version with Twitter functionality that aims to be conversation-centric and pleasing to mainstream folks rather than Twitter geeks. (It’s got a single-column view, unlike power tools such as Seesmic and TweetDeck.)
Waze is a sort of phone-based social network for commuters that (somewhat like the late and lamented Dash Express) aggregates info from users to identify traffic problems in real time. The company launched an Android app awhile ago, and is using DEMO to announce that it’s now available on Android, iPhone, Symbian, and Windows Mobile.

More thoughts to come as we see more demos and I get the chance to troll the aisle of the pavilion…

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The T-List: Special DEMOfall Edition

Harry McCracken — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 14:48:23 +0000

I had a swell time at DEMOfall, which, despite stiff competition, turned out just fine. And here are a few more debutantes that I found interesting for one reason or another.

Goodbye, TV Guide?
If there was a striking trend at DEMO it may have been the launch of three services designed to help TV fans find stuff to watch. Invision.TV sports a dense, grid-like browser of Internet video clips and shows and lets you watch content without leaving this view; FFWD takes a distinctly different approach, with a big window that only shows one video at a time and a FFWD button for surfing to the next one. And the oddly named BeeTV, which optimistically claims it’ll be your “new best friend” aims to bring sophisticated personal recommendations to set-top boxes, based on their viewing habits. I wasn’t completely sold that any of these services have solved the problem of too much video and too little time to find it, but all are worth a look.

Read more at: Read Write Web, Cnet, NewTeeVee

Koollage Looks Cool
I kind of like Koollage, a service that lets you create “pods”–which you or I would call widgets–that can be viewed in a browser or on an iPhone. Pods can contain RSS feeds, video, photos, and other content, and you can share ‘em with people you know or the whole world. I’m actually less interested in creating pods than I am by their potential as an alternative, space efficient way to browse through a blog on an iPhone. Side note: Koollage’s DEMO demo involved creating pods shaped like a frog. That part I still don’t understand.

Read more at: Mashable

Finance Gets More Personal
I’m a fan of Mint, a slick personal finance service that debuted a year ago at TechCrunch40. DEMO included two interesting new competitors. Rudder focuses on short-term money management–basically, telling you how much cash you have once all your bills have been paid–and attempts to help you do much of that management via e-mail alerts rather than in the browser. Like Mint, it’s free–it analyzes your spending and offers you up coupons and other deals. Green Sherpa, meanwhile, is aimed particularly at women–who do most of the money management in this country–and stresses cash-flow management and planning for purchases. It’s free of the marketing angle of Mint and Rudder, since it’s a paid service.

Read more at: The Standard, VentureBeat

Hey Cosmo! You’re Annoying!
My friend Ed Albro of PC World named HeyCosmo as his personal Worst of DEMO, and while I’d have to think a bit before going that far, it certainly looks like the most annoying service that launched at the show. It’s a weird automated phone survey system that lets you robocall multiple friends at once to help plan outings or call dozens of restaurants simultaneously and demand that they press buttons on their phone to answer your questions. The first feature would bug the heck out of most of my friends; the second one attempts to solve the same problem as OpenTable in a far more complicated manner. At this point in the development of the human race, I think most people have at least one thing in common: They don’t like to be called by machines.

Read more at: PC World

I Like ILovePhotos
Anyone who launches a photo management and sharing application and service designed especially for Macs has set themselves up with a considerable challenge, considering that it means going head-to-head with iPhoto. But I still liked ILovePhotos, which emphasizes working with photos of people. It auto-detects faces in your photos, making it easier to tag your friends and family, then auto-creates slideshows that can be played on any iTunes-compatible device, like an iPod or an Apple TV. ILovePhotos looks relatively skimpy on features, and I don’t think most people would want to use it as their only photo organizer/sharing service. But it does look fast and fun. The Mac version is supposed to be available shortly; a Windows edition is in the works.

Read more at: VentureBeat

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Plastic Logic’s Reader: Electronic Paper That’s the Size of a Piece of Paper

Harry McCracken — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 16:16:49 +0000

The first morning of demos here at DEMO has begun, and the second product unveiling of the day looks potentially cool: A company called Plastic Logic previewed an e-book reader that uses electronic paper technology similar to that of the Amazon Kindle and Sony Reader–but in a larger, thinner form factor with a full touchscreen.

Plastic Logic says that unlike the Kindle and Sony, its product is aimed at folks reading business documents and magazines (the demo involved a copy of The Economist). The reader includes markup and annotation features that leverage the touchscreen, and the 8.5″-by-11″ screen size obviously makes sense both in terms of providing more real estate and mimicking the typical size of business documents printed on plain old paper.

I have and enjoy using a Kindle, but I’m still something of an electronic paper skeptic: The displays are monochrome, with gray text on a gray background, and there’s not enough grayscale to do decent photos. (I remain baffled by hype for electronic paper that touts it as looking like real paper or being wonderfully legible.) And while the Plastic Logic reader has some advantages over a notebook–it’s a third the weight of a MacBook Air and the electronic paper technology lets it run for days on one battery charge–I’m curious whether the business types that the company wants to cater to will buy and carry both a notebook and an electronic reader.

So far, I’ve only seen the Plastic reader from my seat in DEMO’s demo hall; I’m looking forward to seeing it up close. The company didn’t mention a price or a shipping date–actually, even the product name is TBD.

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An Absurdly Busy Week for Technology

Harry McCracken — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 15:58:23 +0000

I’m in San Diego for the DEMOFall conference, where more than seventy new products and services–mostly from startups–will debut over the next two days. You’d think that would be enough new stuff for one week in September, but DEMO is going head to head with TechCrunch 50 back in San Francisco, with 52 other debutantes, all of a Web 2.0 nature.

Did I mention that Apple is holding an event tomorrow in San Francisco at which it will unveil new iPods and possibly other items?

I’ll be blogging highlights from all three tech events here at Techologizer, and will cover even more news–albeit briefly–in my Twitter feed. Should be a fun, exhausting, and extremely newsy three days–join me, won’t you?

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