Demo Stays on Impressive Track

The first demo sessions at the exhibitor pavilion went well.  As Shipley accurately observed, "you could just hear the buzz coming out of the (pavilion) tent." On second thought it was more like a roar. The first afternoon session was generally received as well as this morning's. Some attendee favorites:

• Riya, a company I've been consulting since last August, was without dispute, the best received company of the day. It is a photo search engine that uses face and text recognition to look inside your photos. Co-founder and CEO, Munjal Shah showed how his company's proprietary face and text recognition technology looks inside people's photo collections to find people in the collection, automating the tedium of tagging each photo. The free service goes into public beta in a few weeks. PC World's Harry McCracken blogged about them.
• vSee, was also among our personal favorites. It's cute name has nothing to do with the venture community, but is spot on as a name for the easiest peer-to-peer video communications system that I've seen. CTO Milton Chen held a three way conversation with colleague in to remote locations. You can even scan around your colleagues to look at a white board or visual display. Chen said that Intel CTO Paul Otellini s among his existing customers.  The quality is pretty damned good. Chen said that his vision was to make vSee the iPod of video conferencing.  This makes us hopeful that the pricing will make vSee the video conference system for the rest of us.

As is often the case, a solid majority of companies are worthy of mention. Others I liked include:

• Kaboodle, of Santa Clara is one of several companies, like Riya, that addressed some aspect f search, a category first assumed dead before Google came along, and then assumed was taken, after Google came along. Kaboodle let's you create a page to extra product information from multiple web sources, then compare before you buy. You can also invite other Kaboodle members to share the product information. This Web 2.0 company has a good deal of potential.  I think they are going to be a bit challenged to tell their story with enough simplicity for people to "get it" quickly enough.

• Krugle, headed by sequentially entrepreneur Stave Larsen s another company I'm consulting. It is essentially an open source search engine that any developer can use to find all the code in the world which they are authorized to see. In fact, the company actually showed all the world's source code on a single scrollable page. Krugle is also a primary place for anyone t search for information on technology terms, such as Conferenza reporters often befuddled by terms hurled from the dais.
• Polyvision introduced Thunder, an enterprise-level collaboration system. The essence of it is a large flat device that would go into a large conference room, where a workgroup would interact with workgroup at multiple other sites. Instead of Video conferencing for collaboration, the Thunder device spits out flip chart output from each location to all the others  The flip pages are arranged in all participating rooms in the same order. On the surface, we liked this one, but we can't tell you how effective it would be until we get to use it in a real time situation. The world may be getting flatter, but multisite collaboration remains a daunting problems with a long history of awkwardly rendered solutions.
• Plum.com is among the companies with buzz at Demo, but after seeing the six minute demo by husband and wife co-founders Margaret Olsen and Hans Peter Brondmo we weren't quite clear on just what it does or for whom.  The essence of it, as we understand it is that you start at Google and aggregate stuff that interests you to a plum site page where you customize an aggregation that interests you and you share with friends. When you find stuff you like on Google you can aggregate all these things onto a Plum page. The demo was hurt by the couple's need to show their charm and humor, which is authentic, but we end up not quite clear on the concept.
• RawSugar of Palo Alto is yet another company taking slices into the search pool. Contending that most Internet content is located on small sites, RawSugar uses tags to customize your search in ways that it says are more useful. For example, if you are bike-riding enthusiast, you can use their tags to determine bike riding enthusiasts by location, size of group or levels of strain, etc.
• Santa Monica-based TagWorld already claims to have 700,000 users to its social network.  What was new is their introduction of TagWorld Social Commerce, which essentially is the fastest, easiest way I have seen to build a virtual store on your social network.  Paypal is integrated in it for transactions. Can bid on other TagWorld user goods.  Not an auction, just a marketplace .  Once buyer and seller agree on a price it takes a single click to complete the transaction since the service already has your address and other relevant information..

Comments

[margaret olson]

Thanks for the mention of plum! On stage at DEMO were my co-founder Hans Peter Brondmo and his wife Julie Hanna Farris. I was in the audience biting my nails.