The Demo Spring 2010 conference kicked off in Palm Desert, California on Monday with a raft of applications, services and products focused on the mobile, social networking and media technology markets.
One immediate observation is that mobile apps, particularly iPhone apps, are everywhere – Gartner estimates that the mobile apps market will be worth between $20bn and $30bn by 2013.
I particularly liked the very first pitch from Josh Kerr, co-founder of ABJK NewCo who took a baseball bat to an aging fax machine to drive home the market opportunity for Zosh, a $2.99 mobile document application that makes it possible to electronically sign and fax a document from an iphone.
Zosh aims to eliminate the need for the ‘fax machine dance ‘ – waiting for a document, signing it and then faxing it back. Instead, Zosh lets users receive documents on their mobile phones and sign them with their finger.
If like me, you are wondering how you would fit your name on an iPhone screen using a fat finger, ABJK has you covered. The company has developed some neat technology that automatically scrolls the screen horizontally from right to left to give you more room as you use your finger to sign. Then it enables you to resize the electronic signature and position it precisely on the document page ready for sending via fax or email.
I also liked AppWhirl from the company of the same name which “lets anyone make their only mobile application in less than five minutes.” AppWhirl also handles the tedious part of app store development including the submission process and updates. If it really is as easy as it seems, AppWhirl could turn us all into mobile app developers.
There are lots of news aggregators around but Genieo Innovation’s Genieo automatically delivers a newspaper-style personalised homepage for users based on filtered content from news sites, blogs and social networks. Genieo dynamically adapts to its user’s reading habits and browsing activities.
But unlike many personalised news services, Genieo runs entirely on the user’s own PC – no user information is stored on Genieo’s servers protecting users’ privacy.
Meanwhile AirSet is a free or low cost subscription service that lets users easily set up ‘personalised clouds’ for each area of their lives. “AirSet is cloud computing for the rest of us,” said Brian Dougherty, chief executive.
For example, users could set up ‘cloud’ groups for work, family and community enabling them to share information and collaborate on projects. Since the service is entirely web-based, no download is required and users can access the service from any browser.
Airset, which provides up to 1Gb of free online storage, also provides a range of web-based services for its users including an online calendar, contact lists and shared access to music, photos and other digital content. Users can add up to 20Gb of online storage for $9.95 a month.
While it won’t be officially demoed until Tuesday, I also got the chance to play with an innovative new browser called Kylo and a wireless ‘loop pointer’ – a kind of in-air mouse pointer – developed by Hillcrest Labs and designed to make it easier to view and interactively control internet content on a TV from the couch.
The Kylo browser and the drivers for the pointer (which looks like a mini-hoop,) run on a PC connected to a TV and make it much easier to read text on the TV screen and select and control the on-screen navigation tools. It seemed to work particularly well with video content in the demo I saw.
