demo

Xtranormal makes a fun tool for making animated shows with cartoon characters. It could also be a tool for making machinima, if the company manages to license characters from game companies.

In the demo I saw last night, Xtranormal's Paul Nightingale wrote a simple script, where he wrote a few lines for two characters, added some emotion tags and gestures, and put them in a setting with a prop. He pressed the "render" button and generated a cute little animation. Quality was very good--certainly better than Saturday morning cartoons. The cuts and angles were automatically generated and … Read more

This is one of the most innovative ideas at Demo 2008: Delver, a search engine that displays results for you based on what your friends and contacts are doing online. First, you tell it your name, and it scans the usual social networks to find out who your friends are. At this early stage of development, it scans LinkedIn, MySpace, Hi5, and Flickr, but Facebook and Twitter will be added.

Once Delver discovers who you know (and also who's in your extended circle--your friends of friends), it uses that data to return search results. For example, if you're … Read more

Seesmic, aka video Twitter, is still in private beta, but CEO Loic Le Meur is here at Demo 2008 anyway, showcasing a few new features. Nothing revolutionary, just a few nice tweaks. First, you can now easily see video responses to a video post, and in fact play all the responses in a continuous stream. It's like Friend TV.

Also, there's now a mobile application (Nokia N95 only so far), from which you can create and view Seesmic posts. Mobile Seesmics aren't streamed live like they are with Qik or Flixwagon, but it does make it easier … Read more

Not everyone should let their co-workers see their full online social profile, as this guy would likely attest.

Moli.com, which already has a solution for individuals who want to control who sees their profile, is now expanding its service as a platform for enterprise users.

A single account can have public (anyone can see), private (it can be searched for, but not accessed), and hidden (only those with permission from the account holder can see it exists) versions. The aim is to increase privacy.

Moli offers white label, private label, and co-branded versions for businesses.

Companies that purchase the … Read more

SceneCaster, which I covered from DemoFall 2007, is back at Demo 2008 with an add-on to the product, which it is calling SceneWeaver. The service, which lets you create 3D rooms, now lets you link rooms to each other. So if you click on a door you can hop to the room it opens in to. That's more than just a small feature: It lets users create entire worlds. Not that they will. But they can.

Users can also create links to objects, which might make for cool retail experiences.

Also, the service now adapts its 3D display to … Read more

Demo is trying to green itself and is even considering a green-only event for start-ups in the future. This time, though, there are two companies that hope to use tech to evoke environmental change.

Green Plug makes universal plugs for consumer electronics. Taking a duffel bag full of tangled cords and power adapters and dumping them on the Demo presentation stage, founder and Chief Executive Frank Paniagua declared, "The power model is broken, and we have to fix it." (See CNET's First Look video.)

His solution is Green Plug, a three-port DC hub that will recognize any … Read more

Sprout is a Flash authoring environment that puts the two Flash authoring environments I just covered to shame. Completely Flash based, it lets you put all your media into a Flash app that's easily pushed into widgets.

Spout widgets also let viewers subscribe to updates to a presentation via RSS, share them, and so on.

In the demo the CEO showed Spout's clear and capable authoring environment. Unfortunately I can't show you the authoring environment because it's not yet live on the site. There's a video of the authoring environment here. And here's a … Read more

Flypaper, formerly FreshBrew, creates cool Flash presentations without requiring the user to actually know Flash.

The presentations are based on templates, which users can then put their own data in, including audio and video, if the template supports it. The authoring application is a clunky downloaded application, which is weird for a glitzy Flash content company, but it does give you more drag-and-drop capabilities than you would probably get with a pure Flash authoring application.

Still, the output that we saw here was good. The "stories" that Flypaper makes look like professional Flash presentations. Whether you actually want … Read more

Those grainy videos and photos you take with your mobile phone have a simple way to get off of your device and onto your blog, eBay, YouTube, or elsewhere.

CellSpin is a mobile application with a fairly simple interface to directly publish your content to the Web. Once a video is taken, a window appears with options to publish to Blogger, Facebook, Flickr, LiveJournal, YouTube, eBay, and several other blogging tools. After the content is posted, you see a brief ad, and then the application's home page pops back up.

The same process can be done with photos, notes, … Read more