DemoFall 09 kicked off in San Diego today and the first session included some interesting new applications and technologies. Here are a couple of my favourites – one software, one hardware:
Sunnyvale-based Micello launched an indoor mapping service for the iPhone that provides users with a clickable layout of indoor facilities like shopping malls, college campuses and so forth and potentially fills a hole in Google’s otherwise excellent mapping service.
Micello demonstrated the app, which adds another layer to a Google Maps screen, by drilling down inside a shopping mall to see individual stores and then conducting a local search for ‘shoes.’ Micello then displayed the stores in the mall that sell shoes.
Of course, the real utility of the app to consumers depends on the number of indoor facilities that have been mapped. Micello claims it takes about four hours to add a new indoor map and says it is currently adding about 10 locations a day but hoping to ramp up to around 100 a day.
There have been relatively few hardware innovations on show at demo so far but one, Emo Labs’ invisible speaker system, stood out.
Emo’s engineers set out to solve an annoying problem: Despite their relatively high cost, most flat panel TVs deliver disappointing audio because their speakers have been shrunk to fit inside ever-slimmer cases.
Emo overcomes this limitation by using a transparent plastic membrane which acts as an invisible or ‘zero footprint’ speaker diaphragm. This plastic film can be layered onto the TV screen itself to create an invisible speaker capable of delivering reasonably high quality stereo audio.
I was concerned that the plastic membrane might adversely affect image quality but as far as I could see, it did not have any noticeable impact other than increasing reflections. (Emo says the plastic film can be coated with an anti-reflective skin.)
Aside from HDTVs, Emo thinks the technology could be applied to computer monitors, mobile phones and other consumer electronics devices.
