Comments for Top 10 Picks From DEMO 2007

Top 10 Picks From DEMO 2007

2007-02-02T21:47:41Z

Written by Alex Iskold and edited by Richard MacManus

DEMO 2007 has just wrapped up from Palm Desert CA. The companies that demonstrated their products covered a wide spectrum: Web apps, social networking, hardware, media, wireless, security, enterprise software and other technologies. It was an action-packed two days of presentations, so in this post we pick out our 10 favorites (listed in alphabetical order). Note that each logo is linked to their home page and the name is linked to the DEMO page.

Jam across the globe with eJamming.
The eJamming web site and desktop software allows musicians to play in sync over the internet. The intricacies of channeling music, let alone synchronizing it, over the web are well known. eJamming's secret sauce allows musicians across the globe to connect and seamlessly play together as if they were in the same rehearsal room. eJamming seems to be a great addition to our virtually connected lives. If we can work from home, why not jam from home as well?

Discover and enjoy the world of cinema with Jaman.
Less than 1% of the movies made in the world are available to the US public. Jaman is about to change that by delivering these movies straight to Windows and Mac Desktops with innovative, better-than-DVD quality software. On top of getting us these unique movies, Jaman software creates instant social networks by placing an interactive control bar to the right of the movie window. The controls allow you to turn on commentary from the other users, and rate or review the movie. Interacting with other users while watching a movie could be distracting, but Jaman seems to nail down the problem with the great user interface.

]]> Design your dream home with MyDesignIn.
Social networking has gone vertical in recent times and this app is an interesting twist. MyDesignIn allows users to collect home design ideas and artifacts online using browser buttons. The users then can apply collected information and images to the blueprints of their house and get design advice from their friends and family. The site needs to grow and evolve more, but the concept seems interesting and getting help with home design is useful.

Create and share photo timelines with Our Story.
Just when we thought there is nothing left to do in the online photo and media sharing market, Our Story proves us wrong. They take the simple idea that media exists in time, and come up with an end-to-end photo organizer, storage and sharing experience. The photos are organized around events and timelines, and they can be shared and contributed to by multiple users via site or email. They've got printing of albums built in too. Flickr has certainly brought us the social photo revolution, but it is up to the companies like Our Story to iterate and refine the vision around one of the most basic usages of photo - recording the events of our lives.

Protect your blog IP with Sentinel.
We live during exciting times, when self-expression on-line and particularly blogging is on the rise. Protecting the copyright of our blogs is as important as protecting the copyright in print. Sentinel monitors the web and pin-points blog plagiarism. This service gives content creators the ability to see who is doing what with their content.

Syndicate all your media with SplashCast.
Splashcast allows users to remix photos, video and audio to create personalized channels. These channels are then available to play in any SplashCast player installed on a web site, blog or social network profile. Since you can choose what channels to play on your own SplashCast player, in essence, you can create your own web TV station.

Experience embedded 3D with Total Immersion.
Total Immersion’s software enables the real-time integration of interactive 3D graphics into live video flows. In is quite impressive and certainly is the most fun DEMO video that I watched. The effects of embedding colorful 3D graphics into real-time video are quite stunning, and Total Immersion appears to completely master this field. Applications range from media/entertainment to toys. My description does not do this technology justice, you have to see it!

Annotate the Web with TrailFire.
TrailFire is an annotation technology that allows any user to attach notes to web pages. By naming the notes with the same name, this software allows users to create trails. Each trail represents an individual or collective navigation path, centered around a topic. TrailFire is implemented as a combination of browser extension and web site. All existing trails are available on trailfire.com and can be browsed by topic and searched. There have been a few implementations of social "sticky notes", but this one is taking the concept to a whole new level.

Rule and pirate WiFi like a pro with Whisher.
When was the last time 128-bit encryption stopped piracy? Certainly not when it comes to WiFi. Spanish company Whisher helps you to navigate the entire WiFi network, without worrying about what network you are connected to. They do this by allowing you to connect to the computers of users that already connected to the secure networks. Sounds weird? Absolutely! But are we loving this? No doubt.

Find people and companies with ZoomInfo.
ZoomInfo offers a vertical semantic search engine, focused on companies and people. It is an impressive technology that turns the web into a database of corporate and personal information; and organizes it in an intelligent way. Whether you'd like to research companies in a competitive space, or you'd like to learn more about the career of a particular person, ZoomInfo offers you great resources and tools.

Summary

So those were our top 10 picks from DEMO 07. What were your favorites from the show?

Comment from Ali on 2007-02-02

2007-02-02T22:09:09Z

of all of these I have only heard of trailfire, splashcast and ourstory before. The rest are all new to me.

Will definitely give them a look especially Total Immersion and Jaman.

Comment from Dan on 2007-02-02

2007-02-02T23:18:10Z

We had an exclusive coverage of Whisher at DEMO and we must say we love the thing. We loved it before it was launched, even though we knew close to nothing about it.

Comment from Bob Walsh on 2007-02-02

2007-02-03T01:18:21Z

Thanks Alex and Richard - you guys had the best coverage of DEMO07 of all.

Comment from Zoli Erdos on 2007-02-02

2007-02-03T01:27:53Z

Sentinel appears to be DEMOware only. I'm not the only one who could not get it work - check all the commenters on Scoble's blog, or posts on Technorati: the common experience is that you can sign up, then nothing happens even a day after. Everyone sees the same progress bar (fixed, not moving) and none of the buttons do anything.

Comment from Josh Jaffe on 2007-02-02

2007-02-03T04:46:36Z

Blinkx was the best of the 'established' startups and Boorah was my favorite brand new startup. Jaman and PairUp were my bottom two.

Zoli, the Sentinel guys told me the free version takes two weeks to check for plagiarism. They offer a paid version that is faster.

Comment from Marshall Kirkpatrick on 2007-02-03

2007-02-03T09:21:48Z

SplashCast - push updates from media channels to all subscribed players arround the web. Come on Alex - mixed media is the easy way to summarize us. Who else is making RSS delivery of media items an easy task for anyone? You know the value of building an ongoing relationship with your users who would otherwise be one-off evangelists! Would I work for an uninovative media sharing service? I don't think so.

Comment from Stephane Rodriguez on 2007-02-03

2007-02-03T09:50:06Z

I strongly disagree that Trailfire "taking the sticky notes concept to a whole new level."

1) It's not new. Many years ago, there was a company called ThinkOffice that did exactly that. They tanked. Not sure why but perhaps content owners did not appreciate that people out there trash their brand.

2) One of "so-called vectors" of Trailfire is an insertion in Google search results. Hmmm. Repeat after me : S P A M

3) Trailfire tries to build traffic for their own website, where they have a catalog of existing trails. But they apparently have a lot of clutter, obviously this won't scale, and put all the trails like that lack an editorial which means advertisers have ZERO incentive to buy ad spaces next to these.

4) On top of that, the implementation is far from respect : many screen blinks when trails display. Anyone can comment on a trail apparently (S P A M, abuse, self-promotion, you name it). And, that takes the cake, the visual arrow on the side of a trail often points to nothing (it is in fact dependent on many of the actual client screen), thus it confuses more than anything else.

In short, DOA.

Correct me if I am wrong.

Comment from Joel on 2007-02-03

2007-02-03T23:46:06Z

For what it's worth, I also went through the Demo companies and I was impressed by a few companies that weren't on Richard's list. Briefly, I liked:

VuVox - Media editing and creation software. Very crowded space, but it looks outright incredible. It's worth going to look at the Demo video just to see how it looks.

Zink - Printing without ink by using special paper. How cool is that?

Seagate - Not exactly a startup company, but they're coming out with a 40G wireless harddrive that will let you play video/music on a mobile device via bluetooth

6th Sense Analytics - Software that automatically tracks when a developer is working on what he or she is working on. Not sure if it'll actually work like they say it will, but if does it'll be one of the most valuable tools available to an IT manager.

Comment from Graeme Thickins on 2007-02-04

2007-02-04T11:52:27Z

I like your choices. A few you didn't mention that I liked, some of which I mentioned in my coverage, were:

‚Ä¢ PairUp, a business social networking service for road warriors, was interesting. Scoble and I liked it -- though he, with his crazy travel schedule, had suggestions for all kinds of new features to add! But you have to hand it to a one-man, virtual business: the guy won a DEMOgod award. (I wonder when was the last time that happened?)
‚Ä¢ SalesWorks customer management software from Mission Research. This is not stuff for you early-adopters, but for the huge mainstream small business market out there. I think it's worth watching.
‚Ä¢ Magnify.net is about simple creation of video channels and automatically discovering new videos for them. What got me, though, is they get how audience participation translates to targeted ad revenue.

Just a few that come to mind. There were more -- it was a great DEMO.

cheers,
Graeme

Comment from nb on 2007-02-06

2007-02-06T23:35:11Z

I love Splashcast and Jaman