Webware

Over the last 13 years, Chris Shipley has been the primary gatekeeper of the twice-a-year Demo conferences, evaluating more than 20,000 applications from companies wishing to present in front of a roomful of reporters, venture capitalists, and analysts.

Now, with DemoFall 2009 beginning Tuesday morning, Shipley is marking the last of 24 Demos she has overseen as she prepares the formal hand-off of the show to VentureBeat founder Matt Marshall.

VentureBeat founder Matt Marshall, who is taking over the organizational leadership of Demo after this week's show.

(Credit: VentureBeat)

For each Demo, Shipley and her team have selected a few dozen companies, giving each a chance to make a name for themselves during a 6-minute presentation in a tiny show floor booth by unveiling something never seen before--or perhaps a great new take on an existing product or service. All told, over the 24 shows, she has given the opportunity to more than 1,500 firms.

Some of them are now household names, and some have long since faded into little more than memories.

As a parting gift to the many Demo alumni, Shipley recently announced the show's Lifetime Achievement Awards, honors that went to some of its most successful presenters. Among the winners were Palm co-founders Jeff Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky, Six Apart founders Mena and Ben Trott, Salesforce.com founder Marc Benioff, WebEx CEO Subrah Iyar, and others.

Given that list and the fact that Marshall is waiting in the wings to usher in the next generation of Demo--to begin next spring--now seems to be a good time to follow in the footsteps of my colleague Josh Lowensohn, who a week ago took a "Where are they now" look at 10 alumni--five good and five not so good--of the TechCrunch50 shows, examining some of the stars and flops of Demo's past.

The good

TiVo

One of Demo's older success stories, it's still hard to believe that TiVo, the first successful service for digital-video recording, is already 12 years old (it was founded in 1997, though service didn't debut until 1999). From its humble beginnings on the Demo stage, the company has gone on to become the standard-bearer in the world of DVRs, even as others have tried to ride its coattails.

Today, TiVo has just more than 3 million subscribers and is boosting its presence among cable users. During the last quarter, cable provider RCN became the first to ever use both TiVo's hardware and software offerings. The company offers three main DVR models, two of which have high-definition capabilities.

Over time, TiVo has become synonymous with DVR technology and, to some extent, has been one of the major thorns in the side of commercial advertisers, who have had to battle against viewers' preference for skipping through commercials.

Palm

Although Palm as a company has had its share of ups and downs, it has to be considered one of the most important players in the history of handheld computing. Today, it is trying to make one of its biggest comebacks ever with its Pre smartphone, one of the few devices that has the potential to take a bite out of the iPhone's market share.

With its original Palm Pilot, Palm essentially created the market for personal digital assistants. And while the company lost some of its edge when Microsoft decided to get into the business with its Pocket PC technology, there is little doubt that the PDA market, and the subsequent smartphone market, owe a great deal of debt to Palm. The original Palm OS was used by millions of people around the world.

Founders Jeff Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky, who were recently awarded Demo Lifetime Achievement honors, left Palm to form Handspring, which produced its own line of PDAs using Palm OS. Eventually, Handspring was sold back to Palm, giving the latter a chance to regain its dominance with the Treo.

Salesforce.com

Marc Benioff brought his fledgling company, Salesforce.com, to the Demo stage in 2000. Unknown at the time, the company has since become a household name in customer relationship management, or CRM, services.

Today, Salesforce.com has more than 63,000 corporate customers, and in its most recent quarter, it earned $21 million on record revenues of $316 million.

Six Apart

After debuting at Demo in 2004, Six Apart became a leading provider blogging tools. Its Vox, Movable Type, and TypePad services are used by many of the most popular bloggers in the world, including HuffingtonPost.com, Boing Boing, and Talking Points Memo.

Founded in 2001 by Ben and Mena Trott, the company got its first significant round of funding, a $10 million B round from August Capital, and soon after, purchased Danga Interactive, the makers of LiveJournal.

Blinkx

Launched at Demo 2007, Blinkx has become the world's-largest video search engine. It has more than 500 media partnerships and currently indexes more than 35 million hours of video content.

The Bad

Ugobe Ugobe, which presented at Demo in 2006, looked poised to become a leader in personal robotics. Furby inventor Caleb Chung was one of its founders. And ts Pleo animatronic dinosaur, both friendly and programmable, was the kind of toy that seemed certain to provide enthusiasts and children alike with hours of robot fun.

Pleo, from Ugobe. It looked likely to be a big hit but fell victim to the recession.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET)

But the company probably came along at the wrong time. Ugobe found itself in the position of trying to sell a product that cost too much, just as the global recession was kicking in.

While Pleo got positive reviews and had a wide range of fans, it simply couldn't gain a foothold in the market. Ultimately, Ugobe filed for bankruptcy protection earlier this year, and today, Pleo is sold, albeit with little marketing, by a company called Innvo Labs.

Filmloop

Launched at DemoFall in 2005, FilmLoop was intended to be an online service that presented a tray of moving images that slide from right to left across a user's screen, showing each picture and then advancing to the next.

The goal was to create a community in which users could invite anyone they wanted to join, and even add photos, to, their loop. There was no limit to the number of people that could be added to a loop, meaning that an entire community could participate.

The company also hoped to become a photo newswire of sorts, and it had relationships with hundreds of professional photographers.

But things didn't go as planned for the company. By early 2007, it had burned through millions of dollars of venture capital and had laid off most of its staff. In large part, that was because there were other companies providing similar services, and FilmLoop's service simply never picked up a critical mass of users.

Peerflix

Also launched at DemoFall in 2005, PeerFlix aimed to be something of an open-source Netflix.

The idea was that users would send each other their own DVDs, and would search for and figure out where to send their DVDs through PeerFlix's servers. The company hoped to take advantage of the collective library of movies of its users, and it thought that members would trust each other enough to send off their own personal property to strangers.

From the get-go, the idea seemed problematic, in part because it required a critical mass of users in order to maintain an attractive collection of films. By early 2008, PeerFlix died. According to my colleague Rafe Needleman, who liked the service at first, "instead of getting more reliable as its user base grew, the service got less and less reliable, most likely as users stopped participating in it."

WebDiet

It sounded like a good idea when it was announced at DemoFall in 2008: WebDiet, a service designed to help people find healthy restaurant food, regardless of where they are.

The idea was that people would enter--either via a Web interface or through an iPhone app--dietary criteria and then see healthy food options arrived at by combining those criteria with location-based data. WebDiet even planned on partnering with restaurant chains with online menus so that users had a wide range of choices right from the get-go.

But good idea or not, a year later, and WebDiet is still in private beta, not a good sign this late in the game. It's certainly possible that it will still launch publicly and make an impact on people's eating habits, but at this point, it seems like the odds are against it.

Ham-It

Announced at Demo 09 last spring, Ham-It was touted as a "mobile-centric single-stop shop to globally connect and match consumers with local providers of day-to-day consumer services with capability to collaborate and schedule."

At the time, I wasn't sure what that meant, and I'm still not. And it looks like potential customers never understood either, as the company appears to have all but disappeared.

The DemoFall 2009 roster

Starting Tuesday, these companies will be taking their 6-minute turns on stage at this year's DemoFall. Stay tuned for full coverage of the show.

80legs
Anaplan
Answers
Armorize Technologies
Article One Partners
Burt
CallSpark
Cazoodle
Cortera
Digitrad Communications
DotSyntax
Emo Labs
Enthusem.com
ePulze
Faculte
Freeddom Tecnologia e Servicos
Fuze Box
Glam Media
Gogrok Technology
Hand Eye Technologies
Hashwork
Hevva
Hewlett-Packard
Indigo
Intelius
Kryon Systems
LeapFile
Liaise
Lunchster
Micello
MicroAssist
MoLo Rewards
MyOwnRealEstate.com
MyVocal Holdings
NativeTung
Piryx
Point of Wealth Systems
Rseven Mobile
RumbaFish Technologies
Scientific Media
Symform
Third Iris
TotalTrainer
Traackr
TravelTrac
TuneWiki
Tungle Corp
Twirl TV
VicMan Software
Waze
Webroot
Weels Corp
WhoDoYouKnowAt
YiqYaq
Zorap
Zuora

In addition, these 14 companies are part of Demo's AlphaPitch program, in which presenters get 90 seconds to make their case:

Cardagin Networks
Diditz
Dubzer
Enroute Systems
Gelato Dating
Infochimps
Keen Systems
Melior Technologies
Nubli
Pinyadda
Ringful
Sarithi LocalMart
ShareGrove
TrafficTalk

Want to sit back, relax, and watch comedic cat videos? Blinkx, an online video search engine, wants to help you unleash your inner couch potato.

The British company is redesigning its Web site by adding three new buttons: "Entertain Me," "Inform Me," and "Give Me My Own Channel." The idea is to help people get different classes of videos--entertaining videos, news, and videos related what they've sought before--without having to explicitly search for it.

"You don't have to say what you want. We'll just find it for you. We'll just supply it to you passively, like with TV," said Chief Executive and founder Suranga Chandratillake.

The "more information" button, a.k.a. the geek button, gives the more passive consumer a more control over the individual video and the stream the service queues up for watching.

(Credit: Blinkx)

Online video is booming. December was a record month, with U.S. viewers watching 14.3 billion online videos, 41 percent of them at Google, which operates YouTube. Blinkx's business is to try to connect people to these videos using search technology that looks not just at metadata such as video titles, but also words that are spoken and detected with speech recognition technology.

Of course the key for businesses is making money on the popularity of online video. Blinkx sells ads, probably with an ads-per-minute formula similar to what people are used to with TV, Chandratillake said. However, "When we first launch, we won't put on a lot of ads," he said.

Having tested the new options a bit, I can confirm the service works--and that getting your work done is tough when inundated with a dancing horses, Bruce Lee playing ping-pong with nunchucks, and adorable bunnies in bowls. It's nice that there's a skip-ahead button to pass on the stuff you don't care about, but after a few videos, I got three Paul Hunt transvestite gymnastic comedy routines in a sequence of four videos, and after about 20 videos I started getting repeats. So it looks like Blinkx's algorithm could use some sprucing up.

What I miss: no full-screen mode, no volume adjustment, no ability to rate videos to train the engine what entertaining videos you like (though there is a "similar videos" button), and no ability to click out to the original video if you want to rate it, share it with friends, or leave a comment.

The new Blinkx modes aren't totally passive. While watching the videos, users can click on a "more information button," which Blinkx internally calls the geek button because it enables more control and options for what's showing.

For example, Blinkx analyzes the video content, letting people skip ahead to different scenes via thumbnail images shown in the video player. And the application also can show faces of people in the video, letting users click on them to skip around the video.

The company's service shows video from a variety of sources. In the case of video from about 450 partners, Blinkx hosts it, but some is hosted elsewhere and embedded at the site, and in the case of the search results, Blinkx only offers descriptions and thumbnails that link to other sites' video.

The company has 65 employees and is hiring, Chandratillake said. In the six months ended Sept. 1, the company garnered $6.5 million in revenue; analysts expect $13 million to $14 million for the full fiscal year, which ends in March, he said.

"We expect to hit profitability in 2010," Chandratillake added.

Blinkx, a British video search compan that already tried to acquire online advertising firm Miva, announced Wednesday that it is placing another bid to acquire the company.

Only this time around, Blinkx's offer is just $0.55 per share for Miva--less than half its original offer of $1.20 per share.

"Blinkx believes the proposal is highly attractive for Miva shareholders, particularly in light of issues in the Miva business and current market conditions," a release from Blinkx reads. "Blinkx's proposal represents a 108 percent premium above the closing price of Miva common stock of $0.2643 on November 18, 2008, and a 39 percent premium over the average closing price for the 30 days prior to November 18, 2008."

Miva has faced some serious issues over the past few months. Its stock price has been negatively affected by the economic downturn and reports of online advertising slowing haven't helped. To make matters worse, the company experienced a GAAP net loss of $10.5 million during its last quarter on just $28 million in revenue, making the possible acquisition bid appealing to some shareholders who fear an even greater decline in value.

For its part, Blinkx didn't go easy on Miva's performance or its inability to fix its problems. In a statement, Blinkx executives claim "Miva has reported a decline in cash for the past four quarters, and Blinkx is concerned that valuable time has been wasted whilst Miva's resources dwindled, resulting in constraints on capital to facilitate growth. Moreover, Miva has resorted to an expensive line of credit to fund future operations, which is also likely to impact future growth prospects in exchange for short-term working capital benefits."

For all of Miva's problems, Blinkx still believes the company is worth acquiring. Blinkx executives claim that its own "matching technology" would immediately improve Miva's platform and that more search traffic from the company's ad network could be monetized at higher rates through Blinkx's technology.

Miva has yet to respond to the acquisition bid. But if Miva does accept it, Blinkx would use cash to complete the acquisition.

Blinkx's BBTV product has been given a Web overhaul as of today. Gone is the need to download a special application and instead BBTV-indexed clips will show up in normal Blinkx search results. The company is also maintaining a directory of each content provider and their various shows so you can scan BBTV-indexed shows in one central location.

The real draw of BBTV over traditional video indexing is that Blinkx has gone over each video and pulled out text transcripts so users can jump to specific parts of the video based on what's being said. Compared to newcomer VideoSurf, which was previewed at last week's TechCrunch50 conference, this promises to bring a little more utility to things like news reports as opposed to professionally produced content.

The updated BBTV experience follows suit with other "lean back" video products with shows taking up the entirety of your browser real estate. There's no "full screen" option unless your browser has such an option (like Firefox or Internet Explorer), however this ensures user interface is readily available, including a special Blinkx search bar that lets you do a quick search no matter what you're watching.

Blinkx is still making the software version of BBTV available for those who want to download it. The company has made no mention of whether this will be discontinued in favor of the Web version. In either case, both products are still advertisement free, although it's sure to be an eventual part of the equation considering BBTV-scanned shows can be plugged into Blinkx's contextual ad platform AdHoc.

Blinkx's BBTV technology scans over videos and pulls out the text transcript. To jump to that part of the video you can simply click on the scene or word you want. This technology formerly required a software download, but as of today you can check it out on the Web.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Suranga Chandratillake

(Credit: Blinkx)

Blinkx, whose technology lets people search for videos hosted elsewhere on the Internet, is making it possible for other Web sites to incorporate its search results and share any resulting revenue.

Through a program called Red Label, the company is opening its application programming interface (API) so other sites can pipe video search queries to Blinkx, retrieve the results, and publish them, said Chief Executive and founder Suranga Chandratillake.

"If you have fewer than 10,000 searches per day, you can have access for free. If you have more than 10,000, we ask you to monetize it and share with us," Chandratillake said. Sites can incorporate Blinkx's advertisements and split revenue evenly; those sites that already have monetization under way must work out a specific revenue-sharing plan with the company, he added.

(Credit: blinkx)

Blinkx already had several one-off search deals with various sites including Ask.com and Lycos, and the Red Label project makes such partnerships easier to set up in the future, Chandratillake said. Blinkx has two new deals with such partners that are using the API: MSN UK and Rambler Media, he added.

Blinkx searches videos not just by examining textual metadata such as titles, tags, and descriptions that accompany videos, but also by performing speech recognition to convert audio to text and by visual recognition that can recognize text and some famous faces in the videos themselves.

Reuters is reporting that shares of Blinkx, a publicly traded video search site based in the U.K., climbed 50 percent on Friday following rumors that corporate giants Google and News Corp. may be vying for an acquisition.

On Friday morning, Blinkx shares were trading at 36.75 pence, their highest value since September. That puts the company's valuation at 102 million pounds, which is equivalent to $199.2 million.

Blinkx has been publicly traded since 2007, when it merged with search engine Autonomy. As part of a clause in its initial public offering filings, Autonomy is slated to receive $50 million in the event of a buyout--and that clause expires on May 24. That may have fueled the acquisition rumors.

Google could potentially want the video search technology to fuel its YouTube property.

Imagine being able to watch movies or TV shows in high-quality, full-screen glory on your computer and being able to jump directly to a particular place in the video based on the transcript and click on a word in the transcript to pull up more information.

That's what Blinkx BBTV (Broadband TV) promises when it launches on Wednesday.

Blinkx is bringing the world of TV and DVD entertainment to the PC, but incorporating the interactivity of the Web to make it a richer experience. The service, which requires a small software download, is free of charge and free of ads, for now. Ads will come later, says Suranga Chandratillake, chief executive of Blinkx.

I could have used this service this weekend when I became completely obsessed with The Beales of Grey Gardens, a cinema verite film about Little Edie and Big Edie Beale, an eccentric mother and daughter who, despite being aristrocratic relatives of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, ended up living in abject poverty with a gang of cats and raccoons in what was left of the family estate in East Hampton, N.Y.

If I had been watching the film via Blinkx BBTV I would have been able to quickly get more information about the cast and directors by clicking on an information button. And had I not known where East Hampton was I could have instantly located it on a Google map by clicking on a pop-up location tab.

Even more helpful would have been the ability to quickly search for a word in the speech track that automatically transcribes the content and goes directly to the spot in the film where those words were uttered. Little Edie was so mesmerizing and quotable that I found myself rewatching the scenes, but I was limited to searching for them by chapter on the DVD. Clicking on any word in the speech track also brings up a Google search, where I could have gotten quick answers to the many mysteries in the film.

Now the question is what kind of content will be available on Blinkx BBTV? Hard to say, but the company says it has about 250 content partners, including Dogwoof Pictures, a U.K. film distributor specializing in independent films.

The content is all high-quality, except for clips that were designed for viewing on the Web.

I'll definitely be trying this service out.

Blinkx BBTV offers transcripts, or speech tracks, of all content so that you can easily search for specific places in the story and get more information by clicking on the words.

(Credit: blinkx)

Blinkx makes very slick video search technology that has been available for quite some time to consumers through Blinkx.com. One of the site's cool features is that if you enter in a search term, it will play in succession all the videos it finds that term in.

Now Blinkx is popping that idea out of the browser and putting it in a downloadable screensaver app. Blinkx Beat lets you create your own channels that automatically play when your screensaver pops on (or whenever you want, providing Blinkx Beat is configured as your PC's default screensaver). You can also set it to display preconfigured channels like News or Sports.

To select videos from a playlist, you can use Blinkx's attractive but uninformative video "wall," which shows you moving thumbnails of videos in a channel, but not quite enough information to tell if they're worth zooming in on.

All the news that fits in your screensaver.

It's a nice-looking app but it's already gotten me into trouble. I set up the Blinkx Beat screensaver and then got called off to a meeting. The video popped on to my screen, with audio, distracting and disturbing co-workers. When I got back to my desk, I was greeted with glares. Honestly, I never did get content-based screensavers. Who wants to run an app that's most useful when you're away from your PC? But if you want to use your PC as a stand-in for a TV that you'd otherwise always leave on, give it a shot.

Blinkx will be presenting at a New Tech Meetup I'm moderating tomorrow, along with Seero, Seesmic, Mesmo, and Your Truman Show. The event is sold out but I'll report on the highlights afterwards.

I'm a big fan of simple search tools, and one of the areas that's been booming lately is video search. There are dozens of popular services for hosting video, but few for crawling all of them at once. Video search service Truveo, which was quickly gobbled up by AOL after launching in late 2005, has been fairly quiet for the last year or so. Their technology powers video search for AOL, Windows Live Search, Metacrawler, and CNET's own Search.com tool, along with many other services you're likely to recognize. Today they're re-launching Truveo.com, in hopes to compete with Google, Yahoo, and Blinkx's video search tools.

Videos on Truveo play nice and big. If you run across paid, or offsite content, it will shoot you off to an outside page.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Truveo's claim to fame is that they crawl and index both user-generated video sites, along with ones that put out professional media content like NBC and CBS. For example, searching for an episode of The Office will pull up results from YouTube and Google video (what hasn't been taken down at least), along with links to "official" video hosted on NBC's various video pages, and links to various episodes for purchase at online stores like iTunes. It will also list videos from other video services like BBC News, Blip.tv, and Metacafe. The key emphasis, however, isn't on user generated content, as much as professionally produced video content.

A good number of the videos indexed through Truveo will play right in the engine, except for ones that have rights usage restrictions. A big change old Truveo users will notice with the re-launch is that videos play much larger than they used to--many now appear twice as big. There's also an increased emphasis on sharing, and community features--including a way to build your own widget containing a hit list of clips you've bookmarked.

A great use for services like this is for finding recent video clips from news stations. Google's video search is great for finding the most popular content on YouTube and Google Video, but head-to-head, Truveo did a much better job at finding recent clips, and avoiding the "backyard" handicam videos you tend to run into. Blinkx on the other hand was just as capable at finding similar content, although I prefer Truveo's static result pages to Blinkx's visual overload of moving thumbnails and auto-playing videos.

I've embedded an example of the video playlist widget after the jump. There are also several more screenshots. To see them, click the "read more" link below.