demo

It's intellectually lazy to divide the world into two types of people, but when it comes to using computers to create music, it seems to be true.

The first group are what I'd call digital music enthusiasts. They compose almost exclusively at a computer, using a MIDI controller and/or sounds from a wide variety of third-party digital sources--loops from a program like ACID, beats and virtual synthesizers from a program like Reason, short samples that they recorded themselves or spliced from another source.

I'm a member of the second group, the reluctant analog dinosaurs. We came … Read more

The game that introduced an entire generation to the joys of deathmatching takes the first step toward a comeback with today's release of the Unreal Tournament 3 PC demo. Starting at noon Pacific time, gamers can snag three levels of the game from Fileplanet--two deathmatch maps, named HeatRay and ShangriLa, and one Capture the Flag map, named Suspense.

We've had several chances to try our hand at early versions of the game over the past few months, and it's shaping up to be a good solid online multiplayer shooter, evocative of the classic Quake and Unreal games … Read more

There were a ton of products to evaluate at the DemoFall 2007 conference in San Diego this week. A few stood out, and not all for the right reasons. Check out the vid to see which products will likely make real revenues, solve real problems, and save you a boatload of money. Plus, because not everything we see at these shows is a winner, we've got products we expect to see soon on the Home Shopping Network, and the one service most likely to totally creep you out.

See all the DemoFall stories.

Call me a killjoy, but I usually find it difficult to get excited about small business accounting software. I just took a look at CashView, though, and talked to a few people about what it does. It performs a much-needed function for small businesses and could save a lot of them a lot of time and hassle.

Here's what it does: When you get an invoice from a service provider, you either e-mail it (for PDFs; if it came as a Word or Excel file, convert it) or fax it (if it came in the mail) to the address … Read more

The third-party Robo-One 12 coverage keeps rolling in. Robots Dreams has a video montage of this year's bipedal robot competition in Japan that showcases this year's special challenge: to have robots catch and throw a ball.

Results and throwing styles vary. From two-handed soccer throw-ins to one-armed frozen ropes, they're all here.

In keeping with the fun-lovin' 1980s theme inherent in video montages, the clip is accompanied by a Night Court theme song soundalike.

We gave Matchmine a small writeup from the DemoFall conference yesterday, but I wanted to dive into the concept here a little more. What Matchmine is trying to do is create a universal preferences system. The pitch is that instead of rating the movies and music and blogs you like on each site you go to that has ratings, you rate your preferences once, and then any future sites you go to can grab those prefs immediately to serve you recommendations that will be good for you.

The recommendations are created independently of any site's users, and thus can'… Read more

This was the most entertaining idea at DemoFall so far, and probably the most ridiculous: MixGet (site not live yet). It's technology that turns individual cellphones into synchronized music players. So if you have a crowd of people together, one person's phone might play a guitar track, another vocals, another drums.

The presenter tried to justify this product as a potential new kind of ringtone, but I'm not sure I see it. This project is from Redsquare Ventures, which is trying to bring Russian entrepreneurs' ideas to market.

I love this idea. But I don't see … Read more

From Demo: Truphone works on mobile phones that have WiFi and can route your calls over the data network instead of your cellular connection. Pretty useful for saving money, especially for international roaming, when calls cost a fortune.

The big news is that the company has managed to port Truphone to the iPhone. So now you can make really good use of that WiFi radio in it. In the demo, the presenter showed a call from a phone with no SIM card in it.

FastCall411: Now this is clever. If you're looking for a service provider, you tell FastCall what you're looking for (for example, a plumber), and then it dials up to ten plumbers at once on your behalf. The first provider to respond is the one you're connected to. FastCall also builds profiles of providers based on how responsive they are.

If you've ever dialed around for someone to handle a service need for you, you'll appreciate this for sure.

From DemoFall 2007.