Nothing ventured, nothing gained

DEMO 2006: If I were attending this year’s DEMO conference, this is a review of my first day might look like:

• Moobella: It’s an entire ice-cream factory on the go. If you’ve always wondered what a twinkie ice-cream would taste like, Moobella answers that question. My (tasty) suggestion: Apply some sort of collaborative filtering technique on flavors.
• Blurb: Blurb let’s you convert your digital content into a paperback. If you’re a blogger, a digital scrapbooker, or that guy with a ton of grandma’s old recipes, and you want to produce a book from your writings, then you should check out Blurb.
• Bones in Motion: Think of software that tracks your location through your cell phone. The flagship product appears to be a piece of software that tracks your outdoor fitness achievements via the cell phone/GPS. The idea itself doesn’t sound terrible exciting (since I eat Krispe Kreme and Twinkies for breakfast), but the underlying technology fascinates me. Developing an application that runs on multiple cell phone platforms AND provides location- based services via GPS–now that’s cool!
• MP3Car: Commoditized Car PC parts.
• Digismart: You know that scene in Star Wars where R2D2 projects a 3D animation of Princess Leia? It looks like these guys are stepping in that direction. Digismart let’s you project your image from handheld devices on to a wall about three feet away.
• Accomplice: I hope the world is ready for yet another To-Do list application.
• Grassroots Software: I couldn’t really find out too much about this product, but I guess if non-linear presentation software AND taking on Microsoft head first is your thing.
• Network Streaming: Ok, let me sum these guys up. 1) Download Joel Spolsky’s Aardvark specification 2) Implement said specification (smart summer interns optional) 3) Prof^H^H^H^H DEMO 2006.
• Peppercon: KVM-over-IP? In 2006?
• TinyPictures: Tiny niche. I hope they do something 100x more awesome than TextAmerica and Flickr.
• Ugobe: “We develop and market revolutionary robotic technology that transforms inanimate objects into lifelike creatures exhibiting stunning, organic movement and dynamic behaviors.” It’s Furby 2.0.
• Zingee: Share files. Great idea, but I’m biased since I did something like this back in college. One small problem, the Windows client relies on the NET 1.1 Framework. Well two problems really: 1) Where are the Mac and Linux clients? 2) Users have to download the .NET Framework 1.1. If you really want wide adoption, may I suggest using MFC or WTL. Maybe even consider wxWidgets for those cross platform needs.
• Garageband: It looks like some sort of socialized rating system for music. I wonder what they’re doing differently than Pandora or Yahoo! Launch.
• Multiverse: A small step towards the commoditization of the World of Warcraft, Second Life, and all those other incredibly addicting MMORPGs.
• GuardID: A secure USB keychain for computer passwords. Appears to work only on Microsoft Windows.
• biggerBoat: “The Internet’s most comprehensive, entertainment industry-specific search engine delivering cross-category, cross-format, and cross-retailer search results to online entertainment consumers. We currently provide music and movie results to our partners, with television, video games, and books coming soon.”Sounds like something Amazon’s obidos engine can handle.
• Gravee: A community powered search engine. Not a bad idea. When they do achieve some sort of critical mass, I wonder if results could potentially be skewable by the community. Results are taggable (finally, an adult-themed tag-cloud) and there’s even a specialized blog search.
• Polyvision: An electronic virtual whiteboard. I want to replace the whiteboards, currently covering the walls of my company, with this technology. There is definitely a need for more tools that let virtual teams work together.
• VSee: If you think video conferencing software sucks, then chances are you’re not using Apple’s iChat, which is just as well since the VSee demo appears to be Windows-only.
• Kaboodle: Hmmm, social shopping? I personally take recommendations from friends and specialty review sites. With the guerilla marketing tactics I’ve been reading about lately, it’s even more important to me that recommendations can have some degree of trust associated with it. I’m not sure how Kaboodle handles this.
• Plum: Collect, Share, and Discover content. Cool! Sounds a little like Google Base.
• RawSugar: Sharing knowledge is good. The site goes down randomly, so I couldn’t figure it out
• Riya: I remember hearing about this idea a few months ago. It’s basically one of the first facial recognition web applications. I wish they would team up with Facebook or Orkut or Picasa to do something cool.
• Tagworld: If MySpace is ghetto by design, then maybe Tagworld is the opposite.
• Miaplaza: Social recommendations? You’re kidding, right?
• Krugle: Search engine for publiclly available source code. 1) I wonder if I can search for examples of specific design patterns 2) Screenshots primarily list Java, can I search for a hash map implementation in Scheme? 3) If krugle searches mailing lists, how does it tell if the code is a “good” or a “bad” example? 4) Can I annotate and mark up code?
• Jitterbit: Looks like a really amazing web services management tool. From what I can tell, you can control (through their downloadable client) a ton of web service APIs from Amazon, eBay, Google, Eventful, etc. The tool lets you make XML (SOAP/REST) requests to the various web services and displays the results immediately. From the screenshot, it looks like you can schedule calls, perform XSL transformations, and mashup results from different services. I hope results are persistable to a database. Written in Java (NetBeans RCP?), so it’ll run on everything.
• IPSwap: Think Craigslist or eBay for intellectual property. Definitely by developers, for developers.
• Loglogic: Looks like a Log analyzing engine for all sorts of logs. HTTP, SSH, Samba, FTP, Proxy, SMTP, etc. Works on Unix and Windows environments
• Persystent Technologies: Virii, worms, registry malfunctions, deleting key files are no longer the problem when you can restore the system to a previous state with very little intervention from IT or NetworkStreaming.
• Avokia: It looks like a high availability solution for “The Enterprise(TM)”. They appear to take the “We scale everything horizontally” approach.
• Extricom: According to the press release, it looks like they released a wireless LAN product that boosts channel capacity three-fold. In other words, more internets for everyone.
• iGuitar: A simple USB adapter that connects your guitar to your PC or Mac, allowing you to capture music on your companyer. Very cool.

So that wraps up my first fake day at DEMO 2006. For real and actual coverage, check out TJ’s Day 1 coverage here and here, as well as Jeff’s Day 1 coverage.