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Over the past two days at the DEMO conference in Palm Springs, California, 52 companies have stood on stage and presented their company in a short presentation. There are just a couple of rules - the presentation must be live, finished in under six minutes and absolutely (thank you!) no PowerPoint.

At the end of each conference, six "DEMOgods" are chosen by DEMO's producers and one more company is chosen by popular vote to walk away from the conference with a cool million bucks. Here are the six DEMOgods and one crowd favorite of 2011.

While the majority of companies launching at DEMO are entirely Web-based, there are some exceptions. This morning, we saw a handful companies hit the stage with gadgets in-hand (or in tow) that offer interesting perspectives on the future.

What does the future look like? If DEMO is any indication, it's filled with mind-reading headbands, and augmented reality dressing rooms, and kiosks that eat your old devices and spit out cash in return.

You learned long ago not to leave your computer unprotected against the elements of the Internet. You would never think of accessing the Internet without anti-virus software (hush, you Mac folks), so why would you leave one of your most important online presences - your Facebook Page - unprotected?

Today at DEMO, WebSense launched Defensio 2.0 for Facebook, a Facebook app that can help keep your company's Facebook Page safe and clear from malicious links, spam and profanity.

Over the next two days at the DEMO conference in Palm Springs, California, more than 50 companies will take the stage and introduce their product in six minutes flat. It's a format that has become an industry standard, with conferences like TechCrunch 50, TechCrunch Disrupt and LAUNCH following in its footsteps.

A continual criticism of DEMO over the years, however, has been that the price of entry is simply too high. At nearly $20,000, the cost of getting on stage at one of the world's pre-eminent tech conferences can be prohibitive to say the least, so we decided to take a look at how funding broke down for the $1,000,000 in presentations we're seeing over the 48-hours.

DEMO, the conference where companies get six minutes on stage to present their product, kicked off this morning with VentureBeat's Matt Marshall talking social. "It's all about social," said Marshall, explaining that social media companies like Facebook have grown at an unprecedented pace. It took half a century for IBM to hit $1 billion, whereas it only took Facebook a handful of years, he said.

With that in mind, let's take a look at three companies that presented this morning at DEMO and hope to latch on to the ever-expanding social web.