Webware

In 2005, British paramedic Bob Brotchie launched an initiative to encourage people to put emergency contact information in their mobile phone address books, under the name "ICE," which stands for "In Case of Emergency." He hoped that when emergency workers reached a person who had become incapacitated, they would learn to look up the ICE number on the phone to connect to a person who could speak for the one in need.

The program has succeeded in the U.K. and Australia, and is gaining some traction in the U.S., Brotchie says. He was at the TechCrunc50 event this week pushing the ICE program's evolution: An online "waiting room" at 911ICE.org, where people who care about a sick or injured person can gather, communicate, and possibly learn how to help.

Brotchie is hoping that rather than programming in just one emergency contact, people will program in multiple emergency contacts into an online service. The ICE number that each phone has could be used to call up a service that does several things, starting with reading back medical alerts to the caller (or sending them as SMS). Then it will be able to contact the people on the emergency list, and connect at least one of the them to the caregiver. The ICE service could also, Brotchie envisions, contact all the people on the list, tell them what's going on, and invite them into a "virtual waiting room" where they can keep up to date on what's going on with the phone's owner.

The business model is "still under development," Brotchie told me, but this is still a good idea, from a person who has a bead on how families communicate in personal disasters, and on how the functionality of a mobile phone can be used as a form of electronic life buoy. Very clever.

One product that slipped under the radar in the past week is Rudder, an e-mail-based personal finance manager that launched at DemoFall and is a replacement for the now-defunct Spendview (coverage). Unlike a destination site like Mint.com, the idea of Rudder is not to have you continually visit a site to track financial activity. Instead, the idea is to have it delivered to your e-mail in-box.

I met with its creators last week to talk about what would make someone want to get all of this piped into a place where they might already be getting information overload. Rudder founder and CEO Nikhil Roy told me it's more of a utility for trying to cut through all the numbers and get to what's most important--like how much money you can actually use once bills have been paid.

Rudder's name for this magic number is "what's left" and it figures out what you've got for discretionary spending based on when you're getting your next paycheck and what's in your various savings and checking accounts, compared to credit card payments and other bills that need paying off. The entire process is shown to users, something Roy hopes will educate as much as it does take the work out of doing the math yourself.

In addition to this core overview of your finances, you can also set-up reminders when it's time to pay bills. The system will automatically figure out what bills you're paying after keeping an eye on your bank account and credit cards for a few months. You can also add them in manually.

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There were over 120 different products launched in the past week and the sad truth is that you're only able to use about half of them.

I spent the greater part of Thursday dropping all of the launch companies from the TechCrunch50 and DemoFall conferences into a spreadsheet and making a note on which ones were open to the public--including technology you might not be running out the door to get, like Microstaq's silicon expansion valve (although it's cool--literally).

Here's what I found:

Of the 124 products between both conferences, CNET covered approximately 60 percent of them. You can see links to each product's individual or grouped coverage in the spreadsheet that's embedded below.

The TechCrunch50 actually had 52 companies presenting. An extra one was added at the last minute, along with the customary bonus pitch from demo pit winner iamnews.com. Of those 52 companies, 42 percent of them are now open and available. The other 58 percent are still in private beta or will have something ready later in the year (or in some cases maybe never).

In comparison, 67 percent, or roughly two-thirds, of the companies that debuted at DemoFall have public facing products or services, with the other 33 percent having closed alpha/betas or offering something later this year.

While wrangling up this data, two things became clear. The first is that Robert Scoble was right in that the great majority of the product sites are Web 1.0-design massacres. In many cases simply trying to figure out what a company had launched required going off-site and sitting through its live show demo video (hosted on either TechCrunch50.com or Demo.com).

Also quite a few companies had nothing about the new product launch on their press pages, many of which hadn't been updated in months. Considering most of these companies have had a day or two to pull it back together, it should have been easier for me, someone who looks at dozens of new sites a day, to be able to parse out the what, when, and how much of your latest product or service.

Compare that with something like Apple.com where the newest products are the very first thing you see when you visit. Sure Apple has more money, but considering many of these places dropped 18 grand and copied Steve Jobs' presentation style, some resources should have been put toward marketing outside that few minutes on stage.

The second thing is that TechCrunch and Demo's post-show launch directories offer a decent user experience but could be better. I'll give TechCrunch's site the slight edge for its less busy look. There's a URL to the company at the very top of each page, and a link to the data wiki Crunchbase, which pulls in related story links from TechCrunch's blog, and occasionally posts from competing sites.

Demo's site does a far better job at getting you in touch with people at the company, which could be more useful post-show to possible investors and members of the press. In either case, to find press coverage and reactions from other outlets you'll have to do some deeper digging either through something like TechMeme, or each company's press page.

Below is the list of all the products and services from both conferences. You can see it full screen here.

Note: CNET's judges for this article were Dan Farber, Josh Lowensohn, Elinor Mills, Rafe Needleman, and Daniel Terdiman.

Correction at 7:30 a.m. PDT: The current name for the GPS-based ride-sharing product is Mapflow's Avego.

More than 120 companies presented at this week's competing start-up conferences: DemoFall and TechCrunch50.

As usual with conferences like this, many of the products were either derivative or best described as cool, new features that will be commonplace in a year. But there were some breakouts--companies showing unique technology, or standout thinking.

CNET covered the two events extensively. After their conclusions, we gathered to compare notes and select our top products from both shows, the products that we thought differentiated from the pack through innovation, consumer need, business model, or some combination. These are our top 10 products, the CNET Best of Shows:

Fitbit
Small, wearable activity monitor and pedometer. Transmits your data to the Web, where you can track your activity and bring in friends to encourage you along. Fitbit was a runner-up for the top product launch at TechCrunch50.

Why we like it: We agree with Josh Kopelman: "Buying this is more of an IQ test than a financial decision."

Chances for success: High. Great idea, great design, great online component. And people need it.

Seen at: TechCrunch50

Fotonauts
Beautiful and thoughtful photo sharing site. Being called a Wikipedia for photos, or a more modern Flickr.

Why we like it: Better sharing and management tools than we are accustomed to online; balances presentation controls with the social angle.

Chances for success: Decent. CEO has solid experience (former CTO of NeXT and Apple's application division), and cost of developing is not too high. Potential for viral growth is good.

Seen at: TechCrunch50

GoodGuide
Online guide to buying healthy, green, and humane products.

Why we like it: Has great product data presented in a compelling and simple interface. And the timing is right; people care about this information.

Chances for success: Very good. Looks addictive and useful. Great business model. (Site has buying links to products.)

Seen at: TechCrunch50

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On Wednesday evening five of Hollywood's content producers gathered at the TechCrunch50 conference to chat about what the entertainment industry is doing to adapt in the ever-changing landscape of content consumption.

The underlying theme of the panel was the "balancing act" that Hollywood has to manage to make sure its response to pirating and user-generated content does not keep legitimate users from bring down the entire system. That said, there was very little discussion of digital rights management.

Of the panelists, Joss Wheton, the creator of the popular TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Internet series Dr. Horrible's Sing Along, said frankly that the studios are "trying to re-create the model of creating a successful television show where you pour in millions and get many more millions back," but that the problem was really about rethinking an "antiquated" system that's worked so well for so long.

TechCrunch's Michael Arrington, who was moderating the panel, asked if it was simply an issue of ownership. Producer and director Stan Rogow said simply that it was no longer an allegiance game. Viewers were simply going to the content they liked, however they could get it, and that Hulu was the first real acknowledgment of that. "When two of the biggest brands in the network got together they didn't all it FOX/NBC," he said. "They called it Hulu because there are clearly negative connotations."

Part of overcoming those negative connotations requires changing how content is delivered, including the restrictions that keep users from being able to get at it. Wheton's Dr. Horrible series was another test of that, with a paid option through iTunes, alongside an ad-supported, limited time viewing window on Hulu. Hulu's limited run of Dr. Horrible wasn't an instance of restriction as much as trying to entice people to come and get it, or as Wheton put it "a place where you can have a time-specific event in an old fashioned way."

Besides Hollywood's latest creations hitting the Web legally, another interesting topic was celebrities making use of the Web for self promotion. More and more we've seen recording artists put more effort into things like personal blogs and short-form videos without any kind of official production. Wheton noted that this tends to work better for Internet video stars because that's how they started, but when celebrities do it, it can backfire and remove some of the "mystique" that makes them celebrities in the first place.

Ultimately it's just a game of getting some very large companies up to speed with a set of consumers who have a new device and way to access it every few years. "It's control of money, control of product, control of what comes out after," Henchy said. "People are still talking about DVDs and what extra content goes on that. It's just a matter of time before (it goes) back to (what happened with) music. We've gotta figure it out."

The final start-up presenter at TechCrunch50 summed up many of the themes at the event--mobile, social, and on the iPhone.

Goodrec is a service for mobile browsers that features recommendations from people you trust. Rather than rambling reviews, GoodRec has a simple thumbs up, thumbs down, or mixed rating (no stars) and short text messages for evaluating restaurants, bars, movies, books, and other entities. The service also allows posting of photos and other content associated with making recommendations.

The challenge for GoodRec is getting distribution and users to create a social web of recommendations. Users are already giving recommendations on Facebook, MySpace, Yelp, and a variety of other other services. "We learned that a barrier to making reviews is that a lot of people are willing to do it privately, so GoodRec has Facebook-like capability to limit who sees your recommendations," said Goodrec CEO Mihir Shah. Goodrec also has proprietary technology for providing recommendations to users based on personal taste and recommendations from friends, he said.

"This kind of functionality married to Twitter is a powerful application," said TechCrunch judge and former Yahoo executive Jeff Weiner. As a standalone application, Goodrec has a lot of competition. Integrating deeply with a Twitter-like service and other social networks may be the best route for Goodrec to succeed.

GoPlanit is a service for travelers to find things to do in places they've never been. It removes the need to buy travel books by automatically figuring out your itinerary based on budget, physical health, and how much free time you've got.

The automatic planning feature is only available in a handful of cities, but is quite similar to autofill in Apple's iTunes. Clicking the "plan it" button automatically drops in things to do, and if you don't like one of the picked items you can delete it and get it filled in with something else that's nearby.

It uses a recommendation engine based on rated items from other GoPlanit users and reviews from places like CitySearch, Yelp and local newspapers. The items are placed in your schedule based on hours of operation per business or attraction, and grouped together by location. You can tweak a bunch of sliders like how much "intensity" you want, and how much you're willing to spend and it will adjust accordingly. For someone who is out of shape or a physical fitness nut this control will let either party tweak it to the appropriate level.

The site comes with a companion iPhone application so you can get mobile access to the itineraries with the phone numbers and addresses. This also lets you change something on the fly, or see other items from GoPlanit's directory. You can dump your entire itinerary into Google Calendar too.

Where all of this has real potential to come together is when it can take the recommendations from past trips and put them toward future ones. In a perfect world this would mean you'd have more targeted things to do when you're visiting new places. A post-trip debriefing on what was good and bad is a good first step.

GoPlanit is one of the few services from the TechCrunch50 conference to make its launch at the exact same time of its demo. You can check it out here.

Launching right now.

GoodGuide is a new product recommendation system focused on "safe, healthy, and green products." It will tell you what chemicals are in your toothpaste, or if your socks are made with sweatshop labor.

The company's real value add is in acquiring the data on the products. The packaging of the data into a site is the easy part, but we think they've done a great job at it.

That's it, simple story. Looks like a great product and service. iPhone app coming, and expansion into other areas as well: Food, toys, electronics, adding to the current lineup of 60,000+ personal care and clothing items.

For the 122 companies that were featured presenters at DemoFall and TechCrunch50 this week, the pressure of making their cases onstage to the audiences of press, venture capitalists, and analysts is now over.

To be sure, those companies now have to make good on the products they introduced, and the market will soon make it very clear who the winners and losers are.

But as the dust settles from DemoFall, where I and my colleague Elinor Mills spent Sunday through Tuesday watching dozens of companies' presentations and talking to many of the people behind those products, I have a few thoughts on the event to share.

First, despite TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington's obvious desire to kill Demo as an important place for many tech companies to launch their products, the fact that TC50 happened at the same time did not have any noticeable effect on Demo.

I say that as someone who spent Sunday evening trying to work the crowd at the traditional first-night cocktail party hosted by Demo lead organizer Chris Shipley and her team. If there was any less attendance at the event due to the timing of TC50, it certainly was belied by the crush of people standing around drinking and talking, making it nearly impossible to move around, and by the packed auditorium at the Sheraton San Diego, where DemoFall took place.

Arrington also told me last week that he expected most of the technology press to be at his event. And not being there--several CNET colleagues covered that show--I can't speak to how many were. But I can say that the press section at Demo was no less full than at any previous iteration of the event I've been to. And the press section on the Demo Web site on Wednesday has links to many dozens of stories written during the two days, which indicates to me that the companies presenting at Demo got a pretty significant amount of coverage.

And because I gather TC50 had a pretty healthy crowd as well, I conclude that despite the meager state of the economy today, there is ample interest in new technology products, especially those that are Internet-related, as nearly every one of the ones at Demo was and, I gather, at TC50 as well.

So, absent any "Demo is dying" story line, the focus fairly needs to be put squarely on the companies that presented and their products.

As with any such conference, there was a wide spectrum of quality among the 72 companies that took the stage for six minutes apiece Monday and Tuesday. I've been to four previous Demos, and this one felt very much like the others. Indeed, the structure is the same each time, with very little variance. And why not? If your formula works, why alter it?

There were certainly a few stand-out companies, and perhaps the most impressive of the 72 presentations was one by Plastic Logic, which showed off its ultra-thin e-Reader. I think we still have a long way to go before this kind of device is mainstream, but the one Plastic Logic showed Monday morning was the best I've yet seen. The prototype the company showed was light, supposedly has long battery life, and can display on its rather wide screen books, newspapers, magazines, PDFs, and many other documents.

There were also a few easy-to-identify trends, and fortunately, those trends were different than in previous years.

In the past, I had felt Demo put far too much emphasis on photo- and video-sharing services: Over the four previous times I'd attended, I'd seen so many different versions of the same basic business model that I wondered if any of the companies behind them had ever heard of YouTube or Flickr.

This time, to me, the most interesting trend, as I wrote Tuesday, was companies building either entire businesses or significant parts of their businesses on iPhone applications.

I didn't talk to every company that showed at Demo this week, but I identified at least 10 different iPhone app plays, and Shipley herself had told me informally at the Sunday night cocktail party that she expected around a couple of dozen iPhone apps to be shown during the two days, either on the stage during the companies' six-minute presentations or on the show floor when they have a little more time to explain themselves and what they're doing.

In addition to iPhone applications, at the show.

Among them: iWidgets, which launched a service that helps brands syndicate their content on Facebook member pages, and social sharing platform Kadoo, which allows people to share their Facebook data with anyone, whether or not they are on that network. SkyData lets people get their Facebook information on their mobile device; and FamilyBuilder is letting people link together

Another area of concentration was search. Intelius launched iSearch, which offers comprehensive people search; Semanti offered up its semantic-based Web search SemantiFind; Infovell introduced a new way to mine the deep Web of unstructured data that is hidden from major search engines; and Rebus Technology's desktop search helps people find digital documents as well as paper documents that are faxed and scanned.

Other presentations were geared toward empowering consumers. RealNetworks introduced RealDVD for people who want to rip DVDs to their hard drive just like they do CDs. HeyCosmo helps automate party and event planning, even making phone calls for you . And 's new hands-free service lets people use voice commands to retrieve and send e-mails and text messages over their mobile phone, as well as send dictated text messages, use voice to reply to e-mail messages, and listen to text-based messages. And for the online news junkies among us, SpinSpotter debuted its new service that lets readers un-spin the news they read.

Some presenters also aimed to that plague consumers and corporations. For instance, Usable Security Systems has come up with a way for people to remember only one password for every site they log into on the Web. introduced a service that helps people locate and disable lost or stolen phones. Unity Solutions introduced Lanxoma, software that will allow executives to keep an eye on IT workers in the hopes of reducing insider security threats. And CoreTrace's Bouncer software automatically creates a white list of safe applications and blocks applications that aren't on the list that could contain malicious software. And Fortressware offers protection against data leaks, allowing companies to block printing, copying, and forwarding of sensitive documents.

Probably the biggest company to present a new product was Best Buy, which launched a service dubbed Giftag that lets people create wish lists composed of items from anywhere on the Web.

All in all, Demo proved it was alive and well. It lured a large crowd, a significant number of press outlets, and even featured an onstage discussion between influential tech writers Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher.

I wrote in April that the winner of the DemoFall/TC50 showdown would be the one that got Mossberg. But in the end, it wasn't at all about which event carried the day, since it seems both had packed houses and energized companies.

The winner, one hopes, will end up being the companies whose products end up making differences in real people's lives.

CNET News' Elinor Mills contributed to this report.