OK, the first Demo pitch isn't a consumer company at all, but it's important: the Kauffman foundation is announcing the iBridge Network, which makes it easy for tech companies to find university research projects that may be available for licensing. This is going to be better than browsing the patent database, that's for sure.
Chris Shipley is pitching the companies at the Demo 07 show as being for "the empowered individual." We are becoming "creating consumers." Thus the drive toward Web sites that let us create media, and also products that let us better control the media we consume.
Demos are starting now. There are 68 companies pitching in the next two days. Erica Ogg and I will cover the most interesting products and services for consumers and for small business folks.
For more business and enterprise reports from Demo 07, don't forget to check out Dan Farber's … Read more
Vringo bills itself as a video ringtone service, but don't let that fool you. My theory is that the company uses the term to convince traditional media types--like those at AlwaysOn's conference this week, where I heard about Vringo--that it's a viable business model for mobile marketing. "Ringtone," after all, is an easily-recognized buzzword, and it's pretty well-known that tech-savvy kids are willing to shell out money to pay for ringtones of the hottest Top 40 tracks. (I might not be a kid, but I admit that I did pay for a vintage Super … Read more
From January 29 to 31, the AlwaysOn OnMedia NYC conference filled up the luxe Mandarin Oriental Hotel in midtown Manhattan with "disruptors," but not the kind that would be running around trashing the penthouse suite (at least that wasn't my impression of the crowd). These were, rather, the companies that "blogazine" AlwaysOn chose as its "AO Media 100," the year's featured start-ups that are shaking things up along the fault line between traditional media and the Internet. Most of the panels and presentation series, as well as the AO Media award winners … Read more
There are several Web start-ups that I see over and over again at new-tech conferences but none that launch a new product at each show. That's certainly what it feels like Zoho does. "Look, it's another conference! Let's launch another product."
So here we are at Demo 07, and of course Zoho's got something new: Notebook. If you've used Microsoft's OneNote, you'll grok it pretty quickly. It's a content editing system that lets you create multiple sheets in one document. You use tabs across the top for major sections, and … Read more
Flickr member Hamad Darwish is now a part of computing history, with two of his photographs included in Windows Vista. Usually Microsoft doesn't approach people with (we're assuming) large checks unless they're vying for a name or settling a lawsuit, but Darwish's work wowed Microsoft so much they hired him for a photo shoot.
Apparently there are three more images from Flickr users shipping with Vista, along with a few from Microsoft employees, too.
This is a cool use of services like Flickr. While Corbis, iStockPhoto, and Getty Images are all a hotbed for finding good … Read more
PALM DESERT, CA -- There are nearly 70 companies launching new products at the Demo 07 conference, which starts tomorrow. I arrived at the show a few hours ago, and I've been poring through the conference materials trying to plan my attack. I'll have a video crew with me, and Erica Ogg, another CNET blogger, is here too. We hope to shoot some cool demos and interviews, and we'll write up the most promising new products.
We can't cover every company, so we're going to focus on the ones below first. They look like the … Read more
SplashCast, launched today at Demo 07, is a free service that allows users to combine all sorts of media into one master playlist. That playlist can then be embedded on Web sites and blogs or sent directly to friends and family with a simple URL. It's basically the online equivalent of a mix tape. It's similar to YouTube's playlist maker, but with SplashCast, you can also throw pictures, text, and audio into the mix.
What's really cool about SplashCast is that your already-shared media doesn't need to be uploaded again. Pulling videos or pictures from … Read more
There's a new Wi-Fi sharing service launching at Demo 07: Whisher. This service competes with Fon, but has a very different architecture. (See News.com story.)
Fon asks its customers to install Fon-powered Wi-Fi access points on their broadband connections, and it makes them all into a global shared network. Whisher, by contrast, collects the access keys to the existing routers that its subscribers already use. In other words, to put your broadband connection on the Whisher network, you give the service your Wi-Fi access point's ID and security code (WEP or WPA key), and then Whisher holds … Read more
Users can now leave comments on annotations, making them nice jumping-off points for focused discussions. Also, each "trail" gets its own Web page as a "trailhead." That's so Google will pick up the trails and index them. … Read more
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