January 29, 2008
DEMO 08: Seventy-seven show-and-tells
Palm Desert, California: Here at DEMO 08, we have two days of product launches by 77 companies unveiling new web tools and services, hardware, software and the latest in consumer electronics.
Products like the Roomba vacuum cleaner and Pleo the robot dinosaur were introduced at DEMO and the room here is packed with media and venture capitalists watching six-minute demos of the next big ideas.
Some highlights from the opening session:
Iterasi unveiled its "Notarize" web toolbar. This is bookmarking on steroids. Iterasi captures a complete web page when you click on its button. That means not just the link, but an image of the page and a full html version that will render just as you first saw it. This has become more difficult as sites have become increasingly complex with the use of Ajax, but search results pages and annotated maps can be saved as you created them. The page can also be tagged and filed to make it more findable.
LeapFrog, the educational toy company which has sold 30m of its LeapPad platforms worldwide and more than 70m LeapPad books, introduced its new Tag device. The pen-like peripheral is aimed at helping four to eight-year-olds to read. Pressing on any word or object in Tag-enabled books makes the pen speak the word. It can also be connected to a PC to download words for new books and to upload information on the child’s reading, showing a parent how their child is progressing.
One of the irritations of current mobile phone browsers is that they lack the software capabilities to play video. Skyfire launched a browser for mobile phones at DEMO that can handle Flash, Ajax, Java and Quicktime elements in web pages. The bad news is that is still in private beta and only works on Windows Mobile devices currently. The presenters said users could also listen to last.fm music, and later showed me how other kinds of non-Flash-based internet radio like the BBC could be heard.
The storage company Fabrik showed off Joggle, which it described as "aggregation through virtualisation". Joggle, built on the Adobe Air platform, finds your content whether it is online or offline and presents it in a single view. Fabrik showed a window of thumbnail pictures that were stored on a combination of Flickr, a USB thumb drive and a MyDocuments folder. Content such as photos and music can be dragged into a slideshow creation tool that can then be served as a widget on a users’ blog or MySpace page.
SpeakLike showed an instant-messaging translation service. An English speaker typed in English in his chat window, but his words appeared translated into Spanish in the window of his Spanish friend. The reply in Spanish was translated back into English. SpeakLike also demo’d an English to Chinese conversation. The company uses a mixture of machine translation and human interpreters, which raises questions about how the business will scale and make money.
Finally, Notchup showed off a job recruitment service for people not looking for jobs. The idea is that people happy in their jobs but interested in listening to good offers are the most sought-after recruits. Companies can pay tens of thousands of dollars to headhunters to reach these people, but Notchup cuts out the middleman. Workers enter their CVs and use a calculator for their skills to set a price of say $500 that they expect to be paid to be interviewed. Companies contact them directly although the worker’s anonymity is initially preserved. Notchup says 50,000 people and 400 corporate clients have signed up in the past eight days.
