Conferenza

Demo08: Afternoon, Day 1

Lunch was held in the demo pavilion - a nice change from the previous sunblasted outdoor meals. (Re-error! The theme of the conference is not “realign,” it’s “reinvent.” “Realign” is just one of the twists popping up onscreen, playing off of “reinvent.”)

With that behind us, let’s dip back into the pitchstream.

. LiquidTalk connects mobile employees. CEO Dave Peak says they’re automating the process of finding, creating, and pushing content to cellphones. Their application manages a company’s digital files, and lets users sync that content with a Blackberry, iPhone, or iPod. Any content in the library can be sent to a mobile phone – as a phone call.

. Zodiac Interactive. Emmy award-winning creator of tools for TV. Its new Zodigo provides “mobile search for the TV Web,” according to CEO Matt Johnston, providing mobile content on demand through your TV. Users select content “in a fantastic merchandising experience,” enter a phone number, and Zodigo will call the user’s phone. The user can receive, say, a coupon, and have it scanned at the point of sale.

. Voyant’s Voyant @ Home is an online financial planning service. It offers a range of what-if planning tools, showing what happens to future financial plans based on changing events. Its Voyant Community allows users to chat online, share questions and answers. The software seemed to have a good level of sophistication, but the interface looks like a lot of early DOS programs, so the company could take the design up a level or two.

. Review2Buy. Send a text message to REVIEW (738439), give a product name and your zip code, and you should get back a note providing pricing, reviews, and options to buy it locally. You can even compare two products. If it works appropriately when you’re in a store, it should help to resolve a buyer’s hesitation that you have enough information to buy locally, rather than wait to buy online.

. Acesis Point-of-Care provides a flexible patient care application designed to help physicians do better diagnoses. By checking “present” symptoms, a doctor or nurse can get very specific recommendations on potential lines of investigation. Because few diseases are so linear, what’s missing seemed to be any community functions that allow physicians to annotate insights.

. “Blist is the easiest database on the market,” according to CEO Kevin Merritt. It starts out as a spreadsheet, but you can store virtually anything in each cell – lists, images, videos, etc.

. Ecrio’s MoBeam is a small keychain device that generates a light beam that looks like a barcode to a laser reader. Like a virtual coupon, the idea is to allow people to get offers from vendors – on their PCs, or locally by Bluetooth – and bring them to the point of sale. It’s a good idea – but it’s not clear why someone wouldn’t just want to get a barcode image on their cellphone, a device they’re already carrying around.

. Green Plug solves the “Martha Stewart” problem: too many power supplies. (Stewart famously stood up at last year’s Demo conference, pleading to Sony CEO Howard Stringer to help her stop carrying around so many connectors.) Green Plug provides a chip that goes into a manufacturer’s power supply, which recognizes an attached device – “You’re an iPod, you need 5 volts” – and provides just that amount of power. When the device doesn’t need it any more, it shuts down. (Technically, it uses an AC/DC front end, with internal DC-to-DC converters, and both analog and digital elements.) Green Plug provides the software free to the device manufacturers, so their devices can talk to the supply. If they get enough OEMs, they could have a significant impact on reducing the amount of wasted power chewed up by PCs.

. Celsias’ Climate Change Projects is “the first online destination where project leaders and project sponsors come together for climate-change projects.” Example: creating a local group of professionals who work in sustainability. They intend to make money by marketing green products on the site. It looks like a great effort – but it’s not clear why it’s a Demo-type company.

. Citrix is the granddaddy of PC virtualization. Two years ago, I traveled with Citrix’ marketing guru, Traver Kennedy, who showed me a completely virtual life – he used a remote server to manage all of his applications and files, logging on using mobile broadband to access his stuff. But it wasn’t perfect: Provisioning applications, for example, was still an IT chore. Here at Demo, Citrix execs say their XenDesktop provides a total virtual desktop “directly from the data center.” The admin chooses the desktop type, assigns a name, and chooses the amount of storage allocated for the user. Applications are then “virtually provisioned” into the virtual desktop, even when opening local files. It won’t work for everyone – it’s still not possible to be connected everywhere – but it’s an excellent solution for the right enterprise.

. StackSafe. “Have you ever had the frustration of not being able to buy something online?” asked CEO Loren Burnett. Unplanned downtime “has been a headache for years.” The company’s TestCenter is designed to let IT operations teams make “copies” of their IT environments, then test changes to prevent unplanned downtime – which the company says is a multi-billion dollar annual problem.

. SceneCaster. The company’s SceneWeaver is the next generation of its SceneCaster Web-based 3D modeling tool, which was launched at last year’s DemoFall. SceneWeaver allows any object to have Web links added to it, such as a YouTube video. They can also display 3D video on devices (such as an iPod) that don’t have their own 3D chips. Claims CEO Paul Lypaczewski: “We’re going to do for 3D what YouTube has done for video.”

. LiveScribe’s Pulse Smartpen includes a speaker, two microphones, and 1 to 2 gigabytes of memory. That’s a lot of power for a pen. But it’s designed to capture your life as you write it. Special pads of paper have “microdots” on the pages, and have images on the bottom that tell the pen various commands. That information can then be copied to a PC and manipulated, even playing back recorded audio that’s linked to images drawn on the paper. It can even translate written words into another language, spoken by the pen itself. The Pulse was shown at last year’s D: All Things Digital conference, and the software seems to have been substantially improved since then.

. Seesmic is “all about the conversation,” according to CEO Loic Le Meur, who is also the founder of one of Europe’s top Internet conferences, Le Web 3.0. The company lets users post video automatically to a variety of platforms, and to comment on videos online. The company’s API lets others create tools to leverage the video content loaded on Seesmic. (I have to admit it’s a little strange seeing marketing icon Cathy Brooks onstage, an old friend who recruited me years ago to TechTV, and who’s usually behind the scenes. It’s a big statement about Seesmic that she would join the company.)

. MOLI.com resolves one of the limitations of today’s social networks: Maintaining profiles for different groups. Facebook and MySpace are “flat” identity spaces, where just one identity fits all: You can’t show friends one part of you, and business contacts another. It’s a nice interface, with integrated commerce. But the basic question, of course, is if the world needs yet another social networking site…

. iVideotunes offers iVideosongs, allowing musicians to play along with high-def videos of original artists. To illustrate how much their recordings are like the originals, Hall & Oates’ John Oates came onstage to play “She’s Gone,” showing some of the unique chord changes he’d incorporated into the song. A good crowd-pleaser for the end of the day.

Demo08: Sipping from the Pitchstream, Morning of Day 1

Demo08 kicked off with high-energy music and a low-energy dance number from producer Chris Shipley and her stage crew. (Thankfully, Shipley made reference to “So you think you can dance,” so we don’t have to.)

A reported 600 attendees have packed the ballroom at Palm Desert’s Desert Springs Hotel. This year’s theme is “realign” – as in, realigning expectations, services, product categories, and relationships (or at least that's my takeaway). I'll realign expectations - I said I wasn't going to live blog, but here's a stream of consciousness on the pitches, and I'll offer more filtering tomorrow.

. Timetrade Systems. TimeDriver is positioned as a sales tool, allowing the customer to schedule themselves against the salesperson’s Google or Outlook calendar. Not the strongest product to open with.

. Iterasi. “We’re the other side of search – the saving and sharing of Web pages,” said CEO Pete Grillo. Iterasi bookmarks Web pages exactly as they look – even if it took several steps to load all of the information on the page. Not sure how often this is necessary – nor why Mozilla Foundation wouldn’t just add it as a feature for Firefox. Iterasi also works like the Internet Archive’s “Wayback Machine,” “notarizing” pages, saving earlier versions and allowing for scheduled downloads of updated versions.

. LiquidPlanner. “We allow you to capture and manage uncertainty,” said CEO Charles Seybold. LiquidPlanner allows project members to define tasks with a range of delivery dates – essentially baking in their uncertainty about delivery dates. This is a far more realistic way to manage projects, allowing members to define more realistic ranges for their tasks. However, the product currently lacks goal-seeking around solutions: For example, in their demo, they had to manually identify and move a low-priority – and slipping – project to a later time to remove risk, but it would have been great to have the product suggest where risk existed, and where it could be mitigated.

. Citiport is attempting to be a destination site for city-focused travel, with content created mostly by travelers and locals. But this is a crowded space, with everyone from Wikitravel to TripAdvisor already amassing large amounts of information. The community features are good, but they don't seem to lead to the kind of quality on, say, TripAdvisor or Zagat's.

. Leapfrog. Ozzie & Matt. The Tag pen has an infrared camera to detect special ink in Leapfrog books, and automatically reads the text, makes noises for certain pictures, etc. The pen stores the child’s reading activity, lets parents view their “learning path” online, seeing what the child “should” be learning next. (We can discuss whether that's something a parent "should" want to do or not.) But I learned something from the demo: “When you add ‘e’ to the end of a word, it makes the vowel stand up and say its name!”

. Skyfire. “The full PC Web on your phone.” Showed an impressive view of ESPN’s Super Bowl site, with full images and video. Also showed a Facebook slide show on their browser, then on Mobile Internet Explorer – which couldn’t even log into the page “…because of a page error.” Very impressive demo. They claim they can deliver any page – even running JavaScript or Flash. It’s not clear how it’s possible to easily zoom in and out, but I’m looking forward to playing with it on several phones. Closing tag line: “We’re Skyfire, and we welcome your phones to 2008.”

. Fabrik is a young Web storage and solutions company that already has $250 million annualized revenue, according to CEO Mike Cordano. Their Joggle allows customers to manage all of their rich media files, whether they’re on a local drive, or on Web hosted services like Flickr. Also allows users to share their music, images and video through blogs, Web pages and social networking sites. It remains to be seen if images sitting on your hard drive can be viewed by others, or if a copy is uploaded, but it's a nice interface.

. Speaklike. CEO Sandy Cohen says his company “changes the way people communicate and work across languages,” translating real-time chat. His demo showed simultaneous English, Spanish, and Mandarin translations, and he claimed that the quality of translation increases as it “learns” from particular “speakers.”

. STEP Labs makes technology that improves the quality of audio, cancelling ambient noise under extreme conditions. The demo showed a real-time video link from a car out in the parking lot. With Santana blaring “Evil Ways” from the radio, a passenger talking on a phone, and the driver talking into the company’s STEPware Auto noise-cancelling microphone: the transmission was a little muddy, but no ambient noise came through. The playback of an onstage demo – after loud music and audience noise-generation – didn’t go quite as well, but under reasonably challenging conditions, the technology looks like it could significantly improve the quality of speakerphone calls, if nothing else.

. Notchup.com. “The best people are people who already have jobs,” said CEO Jim Ambras. Since I started professional life as a career counselor, I can strongly disagree with that. But it’s an interesting premise: You’re happily working at your current job, but you probably don’t mind hearing from recruiters – if they’ll pay you. Notchup lets you set a base price, and block out specific domains so your employer can’t find you. (Riiiight.) The service does block the candidate’s name, and it potentially saves up to 30% of the candidate’s first year’s salary, the typical recruiter’s fee – and the market they’re attempting to disintermediate. Ambras reported that they signed up 50,000 members in the past 8 days – on a password-protected beta site.

. Education.com, “the WebMD of education,” according to the company. Its new SchoolFinder is a service designed to help parents find public, private and charter schools. But their demo spent five minutes on the general Education.com site, and one minute on SchoolFinder.

. 800Genie. Makes it easy to retrieve email and other information through voice recognition on your phone. I like “teleblogging,” but I'm still not sure what it is.

. Toktumi offers a very easy-to-use Web-based PBX system. For $12.95 per month, plus two cents a minute, you get a Web-based phone management system. Conference calls can be set up in real time for up to 20 people. Users can also transfer callers to a voice mail system that can be dynamically configured. Users can test out the service before buying. It looks like a very intriguing service, but the company needs to rethink its tagline: “Toktumi: I’m EASY.”

. Avistar. “Essentially, we provide video for unified communications,” said CEO Simon Moss. Avistar is experienced at moving large amounts of data efficiently across the Internet. By managing the bandwidth between endpoints, the company offers very high quality PC-based video calls. The software interface could use some updating – check out Ooovoo.com for an example of a cool interface – but it’s hard to argue with the performance.

. Santrum Networks. I’m sorry to say that it was difficult to understand their accents, but apparently BloCafe is a next-generation blogging tool that adds rich media, hosted forums, and live conversation. The company believes it fits into the collaboration and promotion markets, helping groups interact more effectively. Available in March.

. Movial. CEO Jari Ala-Ruana said, “Social Communicator makes social media really social.” Though it’s an impressive interface, I didn’t get it, so I’ll have to go look at the booth.

. Ribbit. “We’re the Silicon Valley phone company,” said co-founder Crick Waters. You can answer your phone “anywhere” – including your PC and Web sites. “No downloads, no installs – just a Web page.” Because it does text recognition, it makes your voice messages searchable. And calls can be returned from the PC, Skype, or Googletalk, presenting the user’s cellphone number. The software will also pull in “opensocial” feeds for the user while you’re talking to them. Ribbit claims thousands of developers who’ve used their API to create new Web phones and other utilities; one created a beautiful iPhone interface. The company didn’t mention pricing, but it looks like a very useful service.

. LegiTime Technologies. LegiText is designed to simplify messaging and information management on smart phones. Didn’t grab me.

. Vidyo. The company showed HD-quality video over cable modems, using a “videoconferencing router” that dynamically adapts to the available bandwidth and networking hiccups. The result: It looks even better than Avistar’s (though they could use help on interface design as well). They believe their annual subscription model will reduce the capex costs of high-end videoconferencing systems. Just announced that Cisco has licensed their technology.

gB

@Demo: What Looks Interesting, Pre-Pitch

In years past, I've tried to live blog from Demo. But there are too many people out there who can eat my lunch (Dan Farber, you know who you are) at real-time posting. So I'll concentrate on analyzing the companies that look the most interesting here in Palm Desert.

From a scan of the company listings, here are the ones that stand out to me:

• KonoLive. Collaboration and information-sharing, linking social and business networks. Web 2.0 has in some cases simply created new data silos; it will be interesting to see if they can solve some of this.
• Acesis Point-of-Care. While the federal government has created substantial incentives for doctors to automate, it’s still a market dominated by Luddite users – and a crowd of competitors vying for those who do pop for software.
• Atlastpost.com. Social networks in a map. A non-profit group I work with has done this to some extent in the social capital arena; interested to see if these folks have made it intuitive to use.
• Buzka POPNet. User-recommendation marketing is the next online frontier, but it’s all about the user experience.
• CatalystOffice. I’ve been waiting for a full-featured, completely-integrated set of online applications; is this it?
• Celsias Climate Change Projects. Sure, we all want to stop global warming; but is there a business for a social network-based funding tool?
• MoBeam. Virtual barcode generator. Thousands of potential uses – but will the point-of-sale infrastructure want it?
• SchoolFinder. Looks like social networking meets recommendation engine. The TripAdvisor of education?
• Joggle. Visual Google desktop?
• Good2gether. There are many many social networking sites for good; still looking for the site that gets it right.
• Hubdub. Predictive news markets. Can it attain the scale it needs to generate more-accurate predictions?
• NotchUp.com. Will people really pay you to talk to potential employers – while you still have a job?
• iLeonardo. Looks like sharing “lifestream” data into notebooks, then sharing those with others. The challenge is making information easily findable.
• PCMobilizr. Remote PC access from your cellphone. Previous attempts have sucked.
• Voyant@Home. There haven’t been any good financial management tools since FinancialEngines; maybe this one will have the right levels of integration and recommendation.

I'm sure I'm missing many worthy ones. Tomorrow: the pitchstream begins.

gB

TED Goes Long

Long Beach, that is.

Chris Anderson, TED curator and co-founder of the Sapling Foundation, has announced that the revered gathering is leaving its venerable Monterey Conference Center digs next year and moving to the arts & cultural center in Long Beach, Calif.

Long-time attendees have been long-time gripers about the Monterey location, which can only hold 500 people in the main hall. Though many prefer the simulcast room, allowing conversation, mobility, and cool displays, there's inevitably a feeding frenzy whenever a single seat opens up upstairs. Many of the same cliques of attendees attend the same parties at the same restaurants every year, which can get a little old after a dozen years or so.

TED2008 has 1320 registrants - with 3000 people on the waiting list. TED2009 will expand to 1450 (or 1500; the announcement says both), all of whom, Chris says, can be in the main hall at the center in Long Beach. There will still be a simulcast room, though, for the roamers.

Believe it or not, 09 will sell out within weeks, if history is any guide. So if you really want to go, click on your invite (you are getting one, right?) the moment it arrives, and pay your fee. How much? $6k for standard attendance, $12k for "donors" (seat preference, pre-conference schmooze with speakers), and $100k for "patrons" (5 year membership, half the original 10 years patrons used to get).

 Still unknown is how TED's long-range simulcast will work this year; the 2008 pressure valve is the use of the Aspen Institute in Aspen, Colorado, to house people willing to pay $3000 to watch all but one session from remote. Maybe next year they can get a little closer - like, say, San Diego...

gB

DLD: Giant Perspectives

A pair of back-to-back panels called “Giants Awake” offered perspectives, if not contrasts, from the Internet markets of India and China.

Vishal Gondal, founder of Indiagames, is an especially passionate and articulate entrepreneur. His company has 300 employees, and is widely considered the most successful mobile games business in India. With 220 million mobile phone users, India is a country that experiences the Internet through a mobile phone far more than through a PC. 

That may seem like a great market for mobile gaming – but 95% of game usage is pirated, according to Gondal. Despite this, Gondal reports that there are now 7 million paid games a month through carriers. His company is trying to sell an all-you-can-eat subscription, like cable networks (which Gondal reports in India cost only $2 a month for 200 channels).

What’s his advice for people looking for success with “The Tiger,” as India is often known? Farakh Balsara, head of Ernst & Young’s Media & Entertainment practice in India, claimed the need for three things: Deep down understanding of the market (“India is not one market; it’s many many markets…”); understand that it’s a low cost/high-volume business; and find a good set of people, partnering when needed (assumedly with companies like E&Y).

“That’s the politically correct answer,” dismissed Gondal. The answer is, you don’t need nobody.” However, he maintained, “To do business in India, you have to get your hands dirty.” It takes time to build relationships and become part of the business infrastructure.  “Fly-in/fly-out operators… they just won’t be successful.”

In the second segment was Chauncey Shey, who co-founded UTStarcom, one of China’s many success stories, which sold mobile phones to 100 million low-income buyers. Now a partner with SB China Venture Capital, he’s investing in a variety of companies, including Alibaba, the most successful online portal in China. But he’s especially positive about streaming video: He says that one of his investments has already clocked 90 million downloads, and has relationships with businesses like the NBA, which recently streamed a Yao Ming game to 2 million simultaneous users.

Also on the panel is Yat Siu, the founder of Outblaze, which provides “white label” Internet services through carriers to over 76 million users. He believes that there is a tremendous amount of innovation going on in China. Case in point: A 21 year old university student created a cartoon character, Tootski (sp?), which became so popular through the Internet, her creation was licensed by Turner Broadcasting – then licensed back by Siu for the China market. “This is only the beginning,” he said, “where more and more talent will come out of China.”

Unfortunately, the moderation of the panels wasn't stellar, and the format didn’t allow the panelists to offer any contrasts between the two markets. But certainly one commonality is the need to adapt offerings to the “low cost/high volume” model mentioned by Balsara, keeping prices low to reach a broad market. What was clear from both sets of speakers is that much of the vibrancy from both countries comes from the sheer size of the markets: The right companies can rapidly reach a customer base on a scale unimaginable in the U.S.

gB

@DLD

After an 11-hour plane flight and 45-minute train into Munich, I dropped my bags at the hotel and wandered from the Marienplatz to the Karlplatz. Not much was open late on a Sunday evening, but small knots of chattering teens still dotted the plaza, and ice skaters sped around a small rink at one end of the plaza.

Early Monday morning, after a short walk in the brisk air to the HVB Forum, home of DLD08. The 100 year-old Forum is the former Bavarian state bank, recently converted to a conference center. It's a multi-level venue that invites exploring, and DLD makes the most of the space.

The breakfast lounge is sponsored by European car rental agency SIxt, whose orange-and-black theme adorns everything from table flags and chairs to the dark clothes and bright ties on the way-trendy young people bustling around serving morning refreshments.

Two 15-foot screens adorn the catwalk above, and banners proclaiming "Uploading the 21st Century" - DLD's tagline - are everywhere. Techno music of no specific nationality thumps in the background. The room begins to fill; sessions start in a half hour.

gB

Off to DLD

Heading to DLD08 in Munich, produced by Hubert Burda Media and Dr. Yossi Vardi (for whom the "Yossi Scale" was named, for the "schmooze" value of a conference). Onboard the flight tonight are Silicon Valley residents such as Mark Benioff of Salesforce.com, and attending are folks like Barak Berkowitz, former CEO of Sixapart, and Randall Rothenberg, CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau. I'll be arriving a tad late, missing the first afternoon, but posting some reports from those who'll have attended.

gB