demo

PALM DESERT, Calif.--NotchUp wants to pay people to take job interviews.

In lieu of job boards and nagging phone calls from recruitment agencies, those in the market for a job or career change can put a price tag on their availability to talk to prospective employers. The company is making its official debut at Demo 2008 on Tuesday.

NotchUp membership is currently invitation only or by application. It works like this: Companies looking for employees can offer a meeting price to a candidate, typically between $300 and $600. Candidates are pre-screened by NotchUp to ensure they are serious about … Read more

Busy and absentee parents, meet your new best friend. As part of Demo 08, the emerging tech conference which takes place in Palm Desert Januaury 28 to 30, LeapFrog is unveiling a new handheld learn-to-read technology that interacts directly with real books. Available this summer for $50, the Tag Reading System uses a pen-based reader (pictured) to provide audio for the stories, "as well as the fun-filled games and activities spread throughout the pages."

The press release describes the product this way:

"The Tag handheld works with Tag-enabled books to create an independent and interactive reading experience … Read more

PALM DESERT, CA-- In addition to the stories we just ran on products making their debut at Demo 2008, there are a few others we're watching out for and will report on if they're worth the coverage. Stay tuned to this blog for more previews, and starting tomorrow, evaluations of on-stage presentations and one-on-one demos. At the end of the show we'll do some quick comparisons, such as all the social networking sites and tools launching here.

The Demo conference officially opens on Tuesday, and if the official sessions themselves are interesting, I may do some liveblogging … Read more

Catalyst Office is a Web-based small business collaboration suite. It appears to have a solid e-mail, IM, calendar, and to-do application, and it's also supposed to sync with Outlook. It also handles the check-in and check-out of business documents. Unlike other online suites, like Zoho and ThinkFree, Catalyst does not offer online editing of work documents. Rather, its file management system checks out documents to users as they need them and fires up a local editor (Word, Excel, or presumably other desktop productivity apps like those in the OpenOffice suite). The system stores all work documents on its own … Read more

TimeDriver is a service for appointment management. I have a deep interest in this category of apps, since coordinating the scheduling of demos and interviews is one of the least pleasant parts of my job. In the good old days, I had an assistant for this.

TimeDriver lets its users set up a "schedule now" button on their Web site or in e-mails. Pressing the button lets the other party see only the times that the user has made available, and it makes sure appointments are not double-booked. It coordinates the user's available times with his or … Read more

Iterasi is a new bookmarking tool previewing today at DEMO. I got a demo of the service in action a few weeks back, and am looking forward to getting my hands on it for a review when the beta begins within the next month. The basic premise of Iterasi is that you can save any page you're looking at for later. It's almost like a screenshot, except that it preserves links, formatting, and any content that was on the page when you were viewing it at that moment. The end result is a bookmark that you can share with others that retains what the page looked like at that point in time. The creators tell me this is especially handy if you want to show someone a page that's behind a security login or on a local intranet.

To begin saving bookmarks on Iterasi, users need to install a small browser plug-in that will let them "notarize" any page they're on for later retrieval. I told the creators the notarize moniker reminded me of getting legal documents signed, but they think it will grow on users, and that it made more sense than making up some word that just sounded nice. The notarize button resides in the top right-hand corner of your browser, and also lets you jump to your bookmark list with one mouse click.

To sort through all your notarized content there's a home screen that lists everything in reverse chronology and can be parsed quickly using any tags you've added. You can either browse by text links that looks a little similar to the detailed file view in Windows Explorer, or a list view, which shows each saved site as a thumbnail. The service has a built-in search tool that will sort through the tags, site names, and any content that was stored on each page. You can also put multiple items into folders, and send them off to other Iterasi users, or your contacts via e-mail.

One of the most interesting features, and one I'm really looking forward to getting my hands on, is the… Read more

There's another way besides certain popular video games to emulate your favorite guitar heroes--have them teach you themselves.

An Atlanta-based start-up is launching iVideosongs.com on Tuesday at the Demo Conference in Palm Springs, Calif. Users can pay to download videos of famous guitarists and expert music teachers giving detailed musical instruction in high definition.

For $9.99 each, artists such as Graham Nash of Crosby, Stills & Nash, Jeff Carlisi of .38 Special, and Alex Lifeson of Rush, spend time demonstrating how to play all the different parts of some of their most famous songs. The lessons are … Read more

The twice-yearly new product orgy called Demo 08 kicks off tomorrow, but we have a few previews of presenting companies we wanted to write up before the CEOs take the stage. First up: SkyFire, a browser for smartphones.

CEO Nitin Bhandari told me that his goal with Skyfire is to do "true desktop rendering," including media support, on a tiny screen.

Bhandari showed me a demo during our Skype call, and it appears that his browser does just what he intended. Displaying a sports site, Skyfire played the video and audio on it very well. The browser also … Read more

It may not be quite as rapid as the company had hoped, but Livescribe is ready to show the world its Pulse.

The digital pen company showed off a prototype of its technology at last year's D: All Things Digital conference, but missed its goal of shipping by year's end.

And although Livescribe is unveiling more details on the product at the Demo trade show in Palm Springs on Monday, it won't actually be shipping the product until March.

But a demo last week from CEO Jim Marggraff shows that the pen has a lot of interesting … Read more