Demo07: Some Favorites

To highlight some of Demo07's highlights, I'll first defer to my former Conferenza business partner, Shel Israel, who routinely makes great calls about likely Demo Gods, based on his exhaustive polling of attendees, and despite – or perhaps because – he regularly coaches solid winners.

Shel liked video-linker Blinkx for its demo, remote music platform eJamming, international movie site Jaman, online video search Magnify.net, Total Immersion’s virtual reality D’Fusion, slick multimedia content aggregator Vuvox, and mini-printer ZINK, Read more about Shel’s picks here.

I also liked all but Blinkx for their products (and agree Blinkx’ delivery was spot on), though I didn’t find Magnify quite as compelling. And though they’re likable and spunky, I can’t say I think eJamming has much of a prayer of profitability.

Some others to like:

• Aggregate Knowledge, for its great business model, and paying customers.
• Though its interface can be a little cleaner, Zoho is a very interesting hosted Web application that I’ll likely use.
• Mission Research’s SalesWorks could also be very valuable for a small business, though the jury's still out on its “hybrid” model of both local and hosted software.
• Though Demo07 had few offerings for the enterprise (the pendulum has swung waaaay far from the corporate market), if Serendipity Technologies can do what it says, it could be a very well-liked solution to providing access to critical (and hard to reach) corporate data: This is a big problem, and a big potential market.

An early plane forced me to miss the Demo God awards. At this writing, they still don't seem to have been posted. We'll see tomorrow whether the crowd and the panel agree on the standouts.

As far as trends at Demo07 go, two major threads stand out:
1) Lots of companies seem to want you to be able to mix multimedia elements together and publish them. I don’t know if that means lots of people actually want to use these tools, but there’s a clear supply-side belief the market is there.
2) If so many companies are trying to let you store, access, and share information over cellular networks, the existing carriers have abrogated their relationships with their customers by creating closed platforms that aren’t innovating fast enough.

The second trend seems important enough for me to spend some more time on, so that’s the subject of a subsequent post.

gB