{"id":325,"date":"2007-09-25T22:52:00","date_gmt":"2007-09-26T05:52:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/paulgillin.com\/2007\/09\/best-of-demo-day-one.html"},"modified":"2007-09-25T22:52:00","modified_gmt":"2007-09-26T05:52:00","slug":"best-of-demo-day-one","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gillin.com\/blog\/2007\/09\/best-of-demo-day-one\/","title":{"rendered":"Best of Demo – Day One"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Demo<\/a> is one of the few conferences that I have consistently made an effort to cover over the years. There\u2019s a cool factor associated with the myriad early beta and pre-beta products being shown here, but what\u2019s more important is that Demo is a leading indicator of what\u2019s going to be hot in the IT market in the coming year. It\u2019s like getting a jump-start on the newest trends. <\/p>\n

When I look back at my choices for the most interesting Demo technologies<\/a> of 18 months ago, I\u2019m 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\u2019t mean this process isn\u2019t important.<\/p>\n

Among the interesting demos I saw today (and keep in mind that these are demos, which are only one stage removed from fairy dust):<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>LiveMocha<\/a> \u2013 This product sits closest to the perfect intersection of cool and practical. If you\u2019ve 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. <\/p>\n

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. <\/span><\/p>\n

Baagz<\/a> \u2013 I absolutely loved the demo of this service. I just hope it\u2019s as good as the demo shows it to be. Baagz is a spinoff product of Exalead<\/a>, a French search-engine company that specializes in semantic search. Semantic technology derives information about web pages that isn\u2019t explicitly stated on those pages. A lot of people think it\u2019s the next generation of search.<\/p>\n

Baagz users can set up personal \u201cbags\u201d of information about whatever interests them. Say the topic is Paris<\/st1:place><\/st1:city>. You create a Paris<\/st1:place><\/st1:city> bag and then drag information from around the Internet into your Paris<\/st1:place><\/st1:city> bag. Semantic search derives additional information about your collection of choices that makes your bag perform better on the site\u2019s search engine. That makes it easier for others to find you based upon your interests.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s commonly used today. This is a very cool concept for presenting an idea that\u2019s intuitively useful.<\/p>\n

CoComment<\/a> \u2013 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\u2019s commenting, what they\u2019re saying and when conversations are changing. This technology isn\u2019t cool so much as it\u2019s very practical.<\/p>\n

YuuGuu<\/a> \u2013 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\u2019t many. Sure, GoToMyPC<\/a> and VNC<\/a> 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\u2019s applications without requiring a lot of setup and configuration.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s signed on seeing the results. The product is free; the company plans to make money off of telephone conferencing services that complement it.<\/p>\n

SceneCaster<\/a> \u2013 We\u2019ve all seen those cool 3D programs that show us what hotel rooms and restaurants look like. If you\u2019ve ever wanted to create rooms of your own, there weren\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

I particularly like the company\u2019s revenue model: businesses pay to have their products represented in 3D for you to drag and drop into your scenes. So if you\u2019re designing an office, you can add chairs from Eurotech<\/a> to your scene for free. The back-end would have a link to a commerce site where you could buy the sponsor\u2019s chairs to fit the scene.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Radar<\/a> \u2013 I wasn\u2019t 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\u2019s essentially what Radar has done. <\/p>\n

The company\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n

Once Radar has a critical mass of content being displayed through its reader, you can ima<\/p>\n

gine a lot of ways to layer value on top of that, including recommendation engines, commenting, tags and other Web 2.0 features. It\u2019s still early-stage technology but with a lot of promise.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s it for this (late) night. Descriptions of more cool products coming on Wednesday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Demo is one of the few conferences that I have consistently made an effort to cover over the years. There\u2019s a cool factor associated with the myriad early beta and pre-beta products being shown here, but what\u2019s more important is … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[41],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pTy95-5f","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gillin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/325"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gillin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gillin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gillin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gillin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=325"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gillin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/325\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gillin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=325"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gillin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=325"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gillin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=325"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}