Nothing ventured, nothing gained

It’s been a pretty crazy day (not being) at DEMO 2006. (Not actually) Going to this event has taught me a lot about what makes a great demo. Here is the remaining review of the companies and their services or products:

• mypeople: Looks like an unlimited coast-to-coast cell phone service plus a personal concierge service for cell phones. Reminder calls, wakeup calls, sport scores, etc.
• Eqo communications: Here’s the use case: Someone calls you on Skype (PC). EQO’ installed software routes the call to your handset, all this without high-speed wireless or being on a 3G network.
• Zink kat: Chili, according to their webpage, really doesn’t look like anything. It looks like a box, and I think music is involved. According to TJ and Jeff’s page, it looks voice activated, and it plays more music than you can chuck a stick at.
• Transparensee: It looks like another discovery/recommendation engine. Understanding relationships between items is complicated. Take restaurants for instance. It’s easy to recommend restaurants based on genres, or cars based on specifications, but what about dating? Hair color–brunette, eyes–brown, height–5’ 6”, ok, and what about chemistry? How do you recommend chemistry?
• Nexidia: Audio mining; speech analytics; NLP. Freaking Cool!
• Kosmix: I’ve also been hearing a bit of buzz about Kosmix’s subject- oriented search engine. For now, the three subjects are health, travel, and politics. I hope to see more subjects like real estate, or automobile repair, or even a legal search (sort of like Westlaw).
• Truveo: Video search. It’s like YouTube or Google Video without the community, the videos, or the remotely accurate search engine.
• Panoratio Database Image: A technology spun off by Siemens. Put confusingly, it’s a tool that can reduce the size of the result set without losing any details. I’d like to hear what sort of mathamagical compression algorithms they are using since it sounds too impressive.
• Zimini: Ok, so I have an idea: I’m going to write this program that people will download. They can then submit their personal information (providing us as much as they want, of course) and in return we’ll give them coupons. Right!
• Sproutit: It seems like an email management service for small businesses. It reminds me of Basecamp or Salesforce.com. I have to admit, I didn’t know there was a demand for outsourced email management.
• Eeminder: No, not reminding, eeminding. They push “reminders” to your cell phone. I can’t even pretend to be excited about technology like this.
• Iotum: Looks like a highly configurable rules engine that can route incoming office calls to IM, email, your calendar, your companie’s bluetooth enabled toaster, etc, etc. I guess this is perfect for the kind of person that get’s a ton of calls. To do all this, the software taps into your company’s IP-PBX. Sounds neat.
• Open Connect: Old and busted: “Mainframes and green screen” New hotness: “Web-based UIs and web services”. soaComprehends takes your mainframe interactions and builds a custom web-application that optimizes your user mainframe interactions. If you know what all of that means, I feel truly sad for you.
• Sharpcast: Transparently share photos between your PC and your phone. I guess this would rock if your phone has a lot of memory and a nice screen.
• LocaModa: I text message a phone number, and the message appears on a medium. (See live example).
• BroadRampCDS: “BroadRamp CDS™ Content Delivery System is the world’s first multimedia content delivery system that delivers a broad spectrum of media by converting existing content into online interactive multimedia.” Let me translate: “Broad spectrum” = AVI, MPEG, DIVX, XVID. “Online interactive multimedia” = “Flash, whatever the latest version is”.
• Vizrea: Looks like another cell phone photo management service. Looks like they are exclusively running on Nokia phones.
• Smilebox: An online scrapbook service. I hope it’s simple enough to use. My gut feeling tells me that it sounds like the sort of software that should run on the desktop, as opposed to on the web.
• Newsgator: I like where Newsgator is going: feed ubiquity. They released a Hosted Solution service.
• VividSky: “Have you ever found yourself sitting at a sporting event with your attention away from the action only to hear the roar of the crowd?” No, not really. I suppose if you were to put wireless access points in football stadiums, accessing unlimited game content was the next logical thing to do. I’d like to see a real fan do this. Let me put my beer down, shove my popcorn under my left armpit, lick my fingers clean, whip out the latest Treo 700w, and "access" that content.. Meanwhile, the play is being shown over and over again on 10 of the 50 ginormous overhead projectors, and my buddy is screaming at me for spilling the beer. Right.
• Simplefeed: I wish the website cut down on the ROI talk, and focused on getting me signed up. From the “About” page, it looks like an RSS manager (like Feedburner), except that there doesn’t seem to be any possible way to signup.
• Azos AI: Looks like two products which convert your phone into SUPER CRISIS PHONE during an emergency.
• StrikeForce: “WebSecure’s breakthrough technology proactively stops keylogging programs by encrypting keystrokes at the keyboard level and rerouting them directly to your browser.” Cute. My beef: it works only under Internet Explorer; it’s a bandaid covering the real problem–that you have a keylogger; and if someone really wanted your keystrokes, they could tap into the browser and read every FORM input field on the webpage. Quite a false sense of security
• MI5: A rack mountable unit capable of detecting spyware traffic, spyware in webpages, spyware in “phone home” applications, spyware infections, and pretty much any sort of malware in your enterprise. It sounds incredibly comprehensive. I’d like to see it in action.
• Astav: Fraud protection. Can’t really tell from the website. Apparently it’s a password-replacement technology. Not sure how it’s integrated with existing systems.
• PayWi: Not to be confused with Pei Wei, Pay Wi let’s you pay bills, transfer money, purchase stuff online with your cell phone. Doesn’t the rest of the world do this already?
• Pay By Touch: No need for credit cards or checkbooks, or cash, now you can pay with your thumbprint.
• Shimon Systems: No need for passwords, now you can login to wireless network with your thumbprint.
• Cesura: Uptime management services. You get a page or a text message if your system is down.
• Fortify Software: Fortify Application Defense appears to be a J2EE application protection tool that guards code by injecting extra boundary checks at the bytecode level. The demo looks like it manipulates the bytecode of your deployed WAR file. Just a couple of things <puts on Java hat>: that application was pretty terribly written to begin with. 1) Strings should be sanitized and escaped before being placed in an SQL statement (or just use a PreparedStatement) 2) Never let your servlet container display stack traces. Always redirect the user to a friendly 404 page.
• IronPort: From TJ: “[T]heir newest product today scans all inbound web traffic and gives all of them a reputation ranking. Only traffic with a certain ranking goes through. So basically it is a spam filter not just for your inbox but for your whole network working with 1GigBit/s.” Cool!

Well that’s all folks. For a real account of what happened at this year’s DEMO 2006, please visit TJ or Jeff.