September 26, 2007 | Comments: (0)
DEMOfall asks startup company to leave show
A scheduled presenter, mEgo at the semi-annual DEMOfall conference was summarily thrown out after it was learned that the company broke the rules by unveiling its product two weeks early at the TechCrunch40 conference.
And, because they violated their contract, the $18,000 entry fee was not returned, according to a DEMO spokesperson.
Well, don't do the crime if you can't do the time, as they say.
Presenters at the show sign an iron-clad agreement to embargo their product until the show. As a reporter, I know I am warned, within an inch of my life, that I had better not break the embargo.
mEgo received many warnings, according to the DEMO spokesperson, but chose not to pay heed.
While this may not qualify as a controversy, some do say mEgo still should have been allowed to present or have their money returned. I am not in that camp.
Here's a video interview of mEgo at TechCrunch40 when they actually launched their product.
Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on September 26, 2007 01:11 PM
September 26, 2007 | Comments: (0)
No, not another Microsoft killer
What would DEMO '07, or any high tech show for that matter, be without loud music and a light show for the daily opening of the conference? DEMOfall could do no less.
But once the noise and flashing lights stop, the hope is always that it will be followed by something more original. Wednesday morning's demos lived up to my high standards.
The first group of presenters offered tools for organizing and running meetings, in effect making them more efficient.
Unfortunately, the enablers are not responsible for the content and so no one has figured out how to make those meetings more interesting, at least not at this year's DEMO.
First up was Tungle, a company with a lightweight plug-in for calendaring.
As skeptical as I am over yet another calendar applet, this one is pretty interesting. It is compatible with Exchange and Outlook now and will be compatible with Google Calendar and Lotus Notes later in the year.
Tungle puts your contacts, preloaded with your Outlook contacts, in an am IM-like list that indicates if the other users have the Tungle plug-in or not.
When you select a name to invite to a meeting, if the user doesn't have Tungle, he or she will receive a pop-up asking if they will accept the invite and if they would like to download the plug-in.
Tungle users can see availability of other users deploying a peer-to-peer network topology and can also create what CEO Marc Gingras called a Tungle Space.
Tungle Space allows the originator of the meeting to go to his or her calendar and highlight a time space for meeting availability. When you send a message to someone else, they see the available time space and can fill in the time they would prefer for the meeting. The time space is updated until everyone invited to the meeting can find a mutually agreeable time.
Mark Dzwonczyk, president and COO of Vello, a phone conferencing solution, was next up, and this solution is definitely worth a second look.
For me, the aha moment came when I realized that Vello calls the user when the phone conference is about to start rather than the user having to find the conference call-in number and place the call himself.
A Vello user simply adds the names of all the people expected to participate, creates a group name, and clicks to call.
In a demo at the show, Dzwonczyk called 68 audience members whose phone numbers he had gathered the evening before. With one click, all the cell phones in the audience started ringing.
So much for complying with executive director Chris Shipley's request to be courteous and "please turn off your cell phone."
Vello users can drag and drop the names of people into groups from Outlook and other contact applications.
What makes it all worthwhile is that conference calls will surely start on time because all participants are called at the same time.
If a user's cell phone service drops them from the call by mistake, any participant can simply call 888 MyVello to be reconnected.
Next up was a company called Tubes Network. This company offers a solution for sharing any kind of content, such as documents, photos, and video.
The desktop icon/visual is neat. It uses the idea of a pneumatic tube as used by banks at drive-up windows to send stuff to the teller. A bit old-fashioned, but for me, the image works.
So users simply place any kind of content inside the tube, click "send ," and the tube is delivered to everyone in the designated group, according to CEO John van Siclen.
Users are not accessing anyone else's hard drive, the content lives on a hosted server run by Tubes.
Tubes can also be made public allowing users to share pics and videos with the world.
The next company, InstaCall, will probably have the Microsoft lawyers working overtime.
Its founder, Sabeer Bhatia, claims InstaCall is "deconstructing Microsoft Office one application at a time."
InstaCall is actually a live document sharing solution that can create a Flash-based application that looks just like any Microsoft Office app.
It starts with the idea of sharing and managing docs by installing a tool bar in Word, Excel, or PowerPoint. Users click on the file which makes it a shared document.
When a user receives a copy of the document any changes made are immediately synchronized on the server. When the originator opens the the document they will see the updated version.
From the tool bar discussion and chats can be added around the document.
Here's the kicker: If the recipient does not use Office -- which may become more prevalent as, ThinkFree, ZOHO and Google Apps and others start to encroach on the sacrosanct turf owned by Microsoft -- InstaCall will convert the application in to an XML document built using Adobe Flash.
Bhatia claims the Flash version will have "complete feature compatibility with Office 2007." Pretty amazing if true.
And so it goes.
Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on September 26, 2007 11:03 AM
September 25, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Enabling technologies have their day, too, at Demo
Tuesday's afternoon sessions at Demo in San Diego offered up an instructive look behind the scenes at the enabling technologies that will drive high tech's future capabilities.
Jasper Wireless looks at the intersection of global economies and the proliferation of intelligent machines and offers an international platform for
connecting and managing networks, systems and cellular devices worldwide.
"One hundred and ten million machines now have the power to talk to one another," said Daniel Collins, CTO at Jasper.
What devices or machines talk about over cellular is not up to Jasper, rather its technology focuses on making the connections and delivering the content.
A centralized management console will allow managers to view a single dashboard no matter where in the world the devices or machines are located. Using the console a manager could deactivate a connected machine from thousands of miles away.
Jasper is a cellular provider with coverage in 35 countries.
Bringing it back home to the desktop Propel Software offers up a refreshingly easy to understand and practical technology.
The company's Personal Bandwidth Management [PBM] technology, dubbed Propel PBM, brings QoS [Quality of Service] to the desktop.
The problem it solves is focused on the rising tide of connected applications, such as Web 2.0 apps, SaaS, video, and gaming over the network. All of these applications are vying for the same limited bandwidth on the desktop.
David Murray, president and co-founder, demonstrated the technology by using a VoIP connection while simultaneously uploading a very large file. Without Propel PBM the VoIP connection was extremely poor and only by disabling the upload was the VoIP connection improved.
Murray ran the same demonstration after invoking Propel PBM and both the upload and the VoIP connection worked seamlessly.
Fusion-io is another enabling technology that will improve the performance i/o of storage systems, according to co-founders Rick White, CEO and David Flynn, CTO.
The product is ioMemory and it is basically a new storage architecture that puts 640GB of storage on a PC card using silicon instead of rotating disk technology.
The card can handle 100,000 seeks per second and in the demonstration moved the equivalent of 8 DVDs in 40 seconds, all eight were done simultaneously.
"ioMemory is 1000 times faster than a hard drive," said White.
White carried on to the stage a cardboard mock up of 100 hard drives in a box about six foot tall and compared it to the ioMemory card he held in his hand.
"It is a SAN in the palm of your hand," White said.
Remaining on the desktop, Qumranet Solid ICE product offers a fully integrated desktop virtualization product.
In the demonstration Solid ICE was used to manage three separate operating systems on a single desktop. New users can self provision a virtual desktop even to the extent of assigning memory and CPU power to each environment.
LogMein, read that Log Me In, already has 25 million users on the desktop. The company announced at Demo a mobile version of its technology for smart phones.
The product, Rescue plus Mobile, is delivered as a SaaS solution.
Michael Simon, CEO demonstrated how the technology can remote control a smart phone and troubleshoot typical cell phone application issues, such as inability to get onto corporate email.
The remote control system gives help desk providers a virtual image of the smart phone which allows them to use the cursor as the user might use the stylus to navigate the device.
Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on September 25, 2007 03:57 PM
September 25, 2007 | Comments: (0)
DEMO startups say it's all about community -- Ugh!
Okay, like everybody else I have a limited amount of patience. Well, unfortunately for Advanta and Spigit I'm all out.
I guess you could say I just don’t get it.
Advanta has something called IdeaBlob, a community site for posting business ideas.
Okay, number one, who is this community? Sounds like something out of that great British TV series the Prisoner.
Advanta claims you will attract mentors who can help you with your idea.
The New York skeptic in me says it will attract people who will steal your idea if it is really good and or if there are actually mentors offering advice on your business idea I would imagine they will want a piece of the action before they deliver any meaningful advice.
In the demonstration the CEO suggested that you will get the advice you need. Rather I think you will get hundreds of useless comments and from these you will pick out the advice that you agree with anyway.
Okay, next up, Spigit, is another one of those sites that offers up "the wisdom of the crowd" as Paul Pluschkell, CEO put it.
Well, as a reader of history, I'm not sure the crowd is always wise.
I leave it to the reader to fill in the blanks here and come up with their own examples of the wisdom of the crowd being a very scary idea.
Nevertheless this idea of the wisdom of many persists on the Internet in these collaboration sites and it appears to be growing. Ugh.
Okay, maybe I'm out of patience because I don’t get it and I don’t believe it. Whatever.
Pluschkell says by using his analytics and evaluation engine the site captures comments and quantifies them bubbling up to the top what its engine considers the best ideas.
If I hear of one more company that bubbles the best ideas up to the top I'll scream.
This is a social collaboration platform according to the CEO which "gives structure to the process of collaboration."
Users actually get something akin to merit badges, like in the Boy Scouts, and if you earn enough badges you can launch a virtual IPO.
As skeptical as I am I am duty bound to tell you that SAP is one of the early adopters.
Okay, SAP could use a few good original ideas. Microsoft take note.
Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on September 25, 2007 10:38 AM
September 25, 2007 | Comments: (0)
DEMOfall launches with video innovators
The lights go down, the noise comes up, and Demo 07 is underway.
If the first few demonstrators are any indication, full video without stuttering, breakup, or out-of-sync sound and picture accessed over the Internet is on the way.
Now the TV moguls will have even more to worry about.
First up was Charles Oppenheimer, CEO of Digital Fountain, who demonstrated a new content delivery network using the company's Splash technology.
Oppenheimer never quite got around to explaining how it works but if the demo was a true indication of what it can do, it was pretty impressive.
Showing a surfing video with one percent data loss made the video hard to watch. Oppenheimer cranked up the video loss to 20 percent and at that point the video was unwatchable until Splash was turned on.
We in the audience were able to watch a full motion video that ran without a glitch.
Digital Fountain will launch and license the Splash technology in January.
MotionDSP did them even one better by improving a grainy, awful cell phone video into a very watchable, high quality video.
What the technology, FixMyVideo, did was quite close to what was always unbelievable when seen on television shows like CSI where a dark, impossible-to-see photo is made into something akin to an award winning picture of the bad guy.
FixMyVideo works by aggregating multiple frames to enhance each frame of the video. So, the technology takes a license plate number that may be hard to read in any one particular frame and searches for additional frames that add additional data to the original frame until the license plate number is indeed highly readable.
Among its investors, according to the CEO Sean Varah, is In-Q-Tel, the "independent investment arm of the CIA."
Independent of whom, I would like to know?
Finally, ClipBlast! introduced what it calls a Video Web Search Widget. Maybe ClipBlast! isn't another YouTube but the fact that they've been crawling the Web since 2004 and creating a master index of every video on the Web means they will either rival Google for video search capabilities or get bought.
Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on September 25, 2007 09:39 AM
September 24, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Coming up: DEMOfall 07 live blogging
InfoWorld Editor-at-Large Ephraim Schwartz is on his way to San Diego for DEMOfall, where he will blog live (sorta) from the show.
Check back here tomorrow... and see Ephraim's show opener, DEMOfall '07: Web 2.0 takes stage.
We'll also have videos hot off the show floor, all in our special show report, which will be live tomorrow at 3 a.m.
Posted by Mike Barton on September 24, 2007 12:06 PM
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