demo

The heck with decades of one basic way of making speakers. A Waltham, Mass., company says it has developed an all-new and much better system, and hopes to change the way the consumer electronics deliver sound.

The idea behind the new speaker technology, known as Edge Motion, from Emo Labs is to jettison the traditional magnet-and-cone model in favor of something a lot more space-efficient, an innovation that is crucial in today's environment of rapidly shrinking devices. According to Emo Labs CEO Jason Carlson, while flat-screen TVs, for example, are getting thinner and thinner and the picture getting better … Read more

Seventy new products will be announced at the DemoFall 09 conference Tuesday and Wednesday. Looking over the lineup one finds, as usual, some companies refreshing existing product lines, many entering into crowded markets with marginally better if unexciting technology, and others having solutions for very specific vertical markets. But some, thank goodness, do sound more generally interesting. Some are trying to solve big problems in new ways, or are addressing emerging technology or business issues that other companies haven't yet even recognized as markets. And then there are those that sound too weird to work.

Those are the companies that I will be paying special attention to at Demo. Here they are, and why. Note that some of these write-ups are based on incomplete information from the companies, so the descriptions may not be exactly right. Watch CNET's DemoFall coverage for the latest updates and on-the-spot reviews.

Opportunity: Combating e-mail overload

Liaise and Nubli EmailSmarts are both showing products to combat e-mail overload. Liaise, for which I got an advance briefing, watches what you type in Outlook and when it sees you creating what looks like an actionable message ("Pam, I need those copies today!"), it creates trackable items flagged by person, date, and task. You can easily modify how the system flags items, and mark off items as they're done. More importantly, when you're going into a meeting with people, you can print out a list of everything you've committed others to. It works with Outlook so far, other systems to come later -- including, possibly, instant-messaging apps.

EmailSmarts works the other way. It prioritizes incoming e-mails to you based on some presumably brilliant algorithm that takes into account how you reply to people as well. Both Liaise and EmailSmarts are Outlook plug-ins. See also: Xobni (from the TechCrunch50 conference in 2008). Microsoft business development people are sniffing around at these apps, so there is an exit strategy for good e-mail add-ons.

Trend: Crowdsourced traffic data

TrafficTalk sounds basically like a voice chat room for people who are driving, with a focus on traffic. Obviously it'll put people in a room based on location and direction of travel, and possibly based on destination. (I can't help but think of CB radios.) Sounds a lot safer that using a screen-based traffic-reporting tool, although how drivers are supposed to monitor this and have their usual mobile phone conversations at the same time I don't get. See also: Waze, which will be showing an update at Demo.

Trend: Price pressure on cloud computing

Symform is an online data backup service for business, but instead of hosting its own storage servers, Symform give subscribers only as much online storage as they make available on their own network to others. Since Symform isn't actually providing storage, it can sell its service more cheaply than a standard online backup provider. Of course the data is encrypted. And since it's based on business-class servers, it sounds more reliable than Crashplan, which is a similar service for consumer PCs. But it'll be a tough sell. I expect that most businesses will pay the extra money to know who is storing their backups. (This is the "too weird to work" concept I was talking about in my intro.)

Opportunity: Modernizing online dating

DateCheck will make it easier to stalk, I mean, check out, prospective dates. The clever motto says it all: "Look up before you hook up." Of course everyone who uses the Internet checks out potential dates first via Google and Facebook. This just might make it easier.

Gelato is supposed to make creating a believable, sorry, I mean compelling, online profile easy. It scans your existing accounts like Facebook, Twitter, and Netflix to piece together a profile of what you're interested in, and it keeps it up to date for you. It also might be more accurate than what people say about themselves.

Emerging business: Personal data aggregation

OrganIP from Digitrad has a compelling pitch: It is supposed to connect you to the people you want using just their names. I have a feeling, though, that it will require that users register their names, possibly on the .tel top-level domain, since Digitrad also runs Yes.tel, which is a contact management service that connects your personal domain to your personal and social services like Skype, Gmail, Facebook, and Twitter.

… Read more

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.

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 … Read more

I'm at the Facebook Fund Demo Day event in Palo Alto, listening to COO Cheryl Sandberg blithely dismiss the entire Facebook Platform that the company launched in 2007. Since 2008 the big thing has been Facebook Connect, the utility that allows developers to build sites that can be logged in to using Facebook IDs. More importantly, Facebook Connect allows developers to access Facebook users' social networks in their own Web sites.

In other words, the Facebook app is nearly dead, and good riddance to it. Users don't like adding entire apps to their profile anymore just because some … Read more

Activision invited us to check out a handful of upcoming titles last night in midtown New York City. Among all of the titles we had hands-on time with, Tony Hawk: Ride certainly stood out. Not only was it fun to play, but the fact that Mr. Tony Hawk himself sat in to tell us about the game added another dimension to the experience.

Jeff: I thought I had heard someone say "Tony Hawk is here" as Scott and I entered the Activision demo, but I just brushed that off as "Oh, the new Tony Hawk game is here." Sure enough, the legend himself walked into our private game demo room and explained to us the process in which Tony Hawk: Ride came to be.

Hawk was honest, saying the franchise had run its course with a conventional controller. Now that game peripherals are becoming much more commonplace, it was clear that a skateboard controller needed to be introduced as an obvious evolutionary step.

After hopping on the board for the first time I was immediately transported back to 1994 when I had a brief stint with the sport. The accessory itself is simply a skateboard deck without trucks or wheels. It feels solid, though it may take a minute or two to find your balance.

The board is an impressive piece of hardware that's loaded up with motion sensing technology and four infrared sensors. When your hand breaks one of the IR beams coming out from the board, the game interprets that as a grab. When you've stopped, a drag of the foot on either side will get you moving again. The motion sensing comes into play when you want to do spins in the air to increase trick points. … Read more

There's been some buzz this week around Pixel Qi's 3qi display technology, which integrates e-paper attributes with LCD to create a versatile and potentially very energy-efficient screen. The idea is that with a flip of a button you can go from a traditional high-resolution color LCD experience to a low-power black and white mode to an even more energy-efficient e-paper mode that allows you to easily view text in bright sunlight.

This week the technology was demonstrated at Computex in Taiwan, and it seems very impressive. If these types of displays can be produced cost-efficiently, they may revolutionize … Read more

If you've got the talent, Magix's Music Maker can provide you with a digital mixing tool that rocks. Expect a fairly steep learning curve if you're new to the program, but don't let that intimidate you: along with a robust feature set, Music Maker comes with tutorials and direct links to the help forums.

The new features are robust additions to the already loaded feature set. The built-in drum machine, BeatBox, has been overhauled and is more flexible. The Infobox feature teaches you about music as you're producing it, as well as displaying long-form tooltips … Read more

Correction: This story originally misstated the status of PersonalRIA. PersonalRIA is still alive, but in hibernation mode until the market recovers.

Last year, 124 products were unveiled during the TechCrunch50 and DemoFall conferences. A week later, we went through and sorted out which ones you could actually use. As anticipated, most were closed off from public use. Was this a surprise? No, but it showed which companies were ready for business versus those that had a snazzy PowerPoint presentation.

It's been a little more than seven months since then, and I've gone through the list a second time to see what's changed. So what has? The number of products and services that are open for use has increased from 71 to 94. And impressively, only one of the companies that launched out of the 124 total are no longer in existence.

Here are a couple of charts that help put a face on the numbers, including the ones from our first go-around:

Note: We considered sites that were listed as having "private" or "invite only" betas as closed. This is because there is no guarantee that you could get immediate access once you signed up to use them. For physical products, like the Fitbit or software, we counted whether or not you could purchase or download them. We've also given both charts an equal number of products in the X axis to show scale.

To put things in perspective, a week after TechCrunch50 concluded, 42 percent of the products were open, with the remaining 58 percent still in private beta, in production, or attempting to get funding. Demo fared slightly better, with 67 percent of the launched products open, with the remaining 33 percent behind closed doors. You can see the makeup of this in the chart above.

One thing to note with these numbers is that the Demo conference had a slightly higher number of launching services at 72, compared with TechCrunch's 52, however the apples to apples comparison degrades when you begin to break down Web- and software-based services verses physical product launches--something we should have noted the last time around. TechCrunch50 only had one real hardware launch with the Fitbit, a Wi-Fi and Web-enabled pedometer and sleep tracker, while the rest were all software or Webware. Demo on the other hand, had 7 products that were hardware-based, including UbiSafe, a GPS beacon you could use to track people or objects, and ioDrive, which is a NAND flash-based storage solution for servers.

Gwabbit (covered here and here) is one of those programs I sincerely want to like. The Microsoft Outlook add-on that can populate an Outlook contact field in a click has a catchy name invoking all manner of iconic "wabbit" images, and a concept applicable to the breadth of office employees. However, it also has a finicky algorithm, at least in my case. It required too much manual labor to finish populating an incomplete contact record, and a $20 price tag for a version 1.0 application that may only work half the time.

In Gwabbit's defense, when … Read more