DEMO2007

There's no shortage of video on the Web, but how to separate the grain (feature films) from the chaff (videos of your cat)?

Less than 1 percent of films produced worldwide actually get distributed in the U.S., according to Jaman.com. Hence the new product Jaman, showing at Demo 07 just now.

Jaman cuts out the middleman and lets independent North American filmmakers and South American and South Asian filmmakers get their cinematic works online. For a fee of $1.99 to rent and $4.99 to buy, people can then sift through and watch any of the … Read more

Adobe has been pitching its Apollo technology since last year. It's the new platform that will let you install Web apps on the desktop. At Demo 07, we got a nice demo of an eBay app--a Flash interface to the auction site. The app kept working when the Internet connection was pulled. When the demonstrator's laptop was plugged back into the network, the app synced its data back to eBay.

Honestly, the idea of apps that work when disconnected is becoming less important as bandwidth becomes more ubiquitous, but it's still interesting, and the Apollo demos look … Read more

Sci-fi time at Demo 07: call in to Qtech's ReQall, speak your ideas and to-do lists, and the service then does smart things with them. For example, if you save a task for a particular date, ReQall will feed it to you when you call in on that future day.

It also does speech-to-text conversion, and can e-mail you your notes, or put them on a desktop widget.

Pretty cool idea. For me, it depends on the speech-to-text quality. Can't wait to try it out.

Lick and stick, or pick and pack? I don't know. And if you don't either, and you're trying to start an online store, you might want to check out Shipwire, which will handle your online business' shipping needs for you. Instead of having your suppliers ship goods to you that you then have to warehouse and ship to your customers, you ask your suppliers to send everything to Shipwire, which will handle all the heavy lifting, licking, sticking, and packing.

Unrelated: Eyejot is presenting right now. We posted an Eyejot review yesterday.

CircleUp describes itself as a "social-communication service." It's an e-mail and instant-messaging tool that allows users to send a single e-mail to a community and receive one, aggregated response rather than a flurry of incomplete or even tangential responses.

The Newport Beach, CA company is debuting here at Demo 07. It works like this: click that CircleUp toolbar embedded in your Outlook, AOL Instant Messenger or Yahoo Messenger window. Type in a question, choose how you would like to receive your answer from your community (examples: Who's bringing what to the potluck? What time works best … Read more

OK, the first Demo pitch isn't a consumer company at all, but it's important: the Kauffman foundation is announcing the iBridge Network, which makes it easy for tech companies to find university research projects that may be available for licensing. This is going to be better than browsing the patent database, that's for sure.

Chris Shipley is pitching the companies at the Demo 07 show as being for "the empowered individual." We are becoming "creating consumers." Thus the drive toward Web sites that let us create media, and also products that let us better control the media we consume.

Demos are starting now. There are 68 companies pitching in the next two days. Erica Ogg and I will cover the most interesting products and services for consumers and for small business folks.

For more business and enterprise reports from Demo 07, don't forget to check out Dan Farber's … Read more

Vringo bills itself as a video ringtone service, but don't let that fool you. My theory is that the company uses the term to convince traditional media types--like those at AlwaysOn's conference this week, where I heard about Vringo--that it's a viable business model for mobile marketing. "Ringtone," after all, is an easily-recognized buzzword, and it's pretty well-known that tech-savvy kids are willing to shell out money to pay for ringtones of the hottest Top 40 tracks. (I might not be a kid, but I admit that I did pay for a vintage Super … Read more

There are several Web start-ups that I see over and over again at new-tech conferences but none that launch a new product at each show. That's certainly what it feels like Zoho does. "Look, it's another conference! Let's launch another product."

So here we are at Demo 07, and of course Zoho's got something new: Notebook. If you've used Microsoft's OneNote, you'll grok it pretty quickly. It's a content editing system that lets you create multiple sheets in one document. You use tabs across the top for major sections, and … Read more