Demo is one of the few conferences that I have consistently made an effort to cover over the years. There’s a cool factor associated with the myriad early beta and pre-beta products being shown here, but what’s more important is that Demo is a leading indicator of what’s going to be hot in the IT market in the coming year. It’s like getting a jump-start on the newest trends.
When I look back at my choices for the most interesting Demo technologies of 18 months ago, I’m struck by how few of those companies have achieved prominence. However, many of the concepts they were working on have succeeded in other forms. New platforms always create a flurry of innovation followed by a long cycle of consolidation and retrenchment. This phenomenon will play out in social media the way it happened in PCs, LANs, Internet 1.0 applications and other smaller markets in the past. That doesn’t mean this process isn’t important.
Among the interesting demos I saw today (and keep in mind that these are demos, which are only one stage removed from fairy dust):
LiveMocha – This product sits closest to the perfect intersection of cool and practical. If you’ve ever tried to learn a language by computer, you know that the process is slow and one-sided: the instructor talks and you listen or practice.
LiveMocha leverages community to make learning languages easier. Traditional courseware is wedded with feedback from native language speakers who help each other master the finer points of writing and speaking. Your feeble scribblings in Spanish can be critiqued by people who really speak the language. And a VOIP feature lets you connect in real time with native speakers while supporting you with translators and organizers. My wife tried this product this evening after I told her about it and said it really works. LiveMocha gets bonus points for that. Best of show to this point.
Baagz – I absolutely loved the demo of this service. I just hope it’s as good as the demo shows it to be. Baagz is a spinoff product of Exalead, a French search-engine company that specializes in semantic search. Semantic technology derives information about web pages that isn’t explicitly stated on those pages. A lot of people think it’s the next generation of search.
Baagz users can set up personal “bags” of information about whatever interests them. Say the topic is
Other people can access your bag and leave comments, add tags or integrate their own Web clips. Over time, you develop communities of people with like interests, and the semantic search helps hone your areas of focus. The demo of the bag space is very cool, although I suspect it requires a lot of processing power. The interface makes it a whole lot easier to collect interesting information than the snip/bookmark approach that’s commonly used today. This is a very cool concept for presenting an idea that’s intuitively useful.
CoComment – The Internet is awash in conversations, and keeping track of all the exchanges that interest you is daunting. CoComment lets you aggregate conversations from across public and even gated websites like Facebook and MySpace, so you can easily see who’s commenting, what they’re saying and when conversations are changing. This technology isn’t cool so much as it’s very practical.
YuuGuu – YuuGuu is AOL Instant Messenger for screen-sharing. If you thought there was already technology out there that let you quickly and easily share your PC screen with others, there really aren’t many. Sure, GoToMyPC and VNC have had screen-sharing for a long time, but few, if any services make it easy for large numbers of people to quickly and seamlessly share screens and manipulate each other’s applications without requiring a lot of setup and configuration.
Contact anyone on your buddy list and invite them to share your screen. The process is a few clicks.You can quickly and easily hand the baton off to others to control your screen, with everyone who’s signed on seeing the results. The product is free; the company plans to make money off of telephone conferencing services that complement it.
SceneCaster – We’ve all seen those cool 3D programs that show us what hotel rooms and restaurants look like. If you’ve ever wanted to create rooms of your own, there weren’t many options to do so. SceneCaster lets you create 3D environments and modify them with a minimum of setup and no programming. You can then share those designs with others and interactively edit and comment upon them.
I particularly like the company’s revenue model: businesses pay to have their products represented in 3D for you to drag and drop into your scenes. So if you’re designing an office, you can add chairs from Eurotech to your scene for free. The back-end would have a link to a commerce site where you could buy the sponsor’s chairs to fit the scene.
There’s a corporate play here, too. The company says it has several business customers who use the 3D authoring and rendering engine to create models of products to demonstrate to customers.
Radar – I wasn’t blown away by this demo when I first saw it, but the more I thought about it, the more I liked it. We interact with many websites these days, and we learn a different interface for each one. What if the content from those websites could be aggregated into a single interface? That’s essentially what Radar has done.
The company’s software player makes it possible to view content from literally hundreds of sources in a single viewer. Radar has cut deals with a lot of the top content sites to make their stuff available through its player. Users will be able to customize these master views by importing their own RSS feeds.
Once Radar has a critical mass of content being displayed through its reader, you can ima
gine a lot of ways to layer value on top of that, including recommendation engines, commenting, tags and other Web 2.0 features. It’s still early-stage technology but with a lot of promise.
That’s it for this (late) night. Descriptions of more cool products coming on Wednesday.