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…