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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's CEO shows his motivation for a universal adapter: a mess of cords and plugs.

(Credit: Rafe Needleman/Webware.com)

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 device and charge it. Green Plug makes a chip that goes into a power supply, and the company gives away free software to any company that wants to put it on consumer devices. The chip, using technology they call Green Talk, will recognize exactly the amount of power each device needs, gives exactly that much, and then shuts off, eliminating wasted power.

The other start-up with world-saving ambitions at Demo is Celsias Projects. It's essentially a social network for groups trying to gather volunteers for climate change projects. Each project has its own profile page where volunteers can sign up or discuss the projects.

Thus far there are 80 projects from the U.S., U.K., New Zealand, and more already uploaded.

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, and audio recordings. The content is all archived at an individual profile page at CellSpin.net.

If you simply must send a YouTube video to every single person you are connected to, Movial says it will make that possible.

The 6-year-old company makes a white label application for a PC, phone, or any device that wireless carriers can brand as their own. Called Social Communicator, it shows all of a user's contacts and their online status. All at once, instant messages, text messages, music files, or videos can be sent to all contacts listed.

The demonstration here at Demo focused on sending YouTube videos to everyone or anyone. Individual contacts can be selected ,and even if they don't have Social Communicator installed, the message will still be sent. It's unclear how you decline video spam from your "friends."

No parent left behind: The Tag Reading System

(Credit: LeapFrog)

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 for children. By simply touching the highly responsive Tag reader anywhere on any page of a Tag book, children can bring their favorite stories to life. The pocket-sized Tag platform 'reads' by using a small, sophisticated infrared camera that works as an imaging system to recognize letters, words and symbols printed on the page. Using the PC- and Mac-compatible LeapFrog Connect Application, parents can download audio for each book in the Tag library, then manage content the way they manage MP3 or digital camera files. With 16 MB of onboard flash memory, the Tag reader can hold up to five books at a time."

Leapfrog says the Tag Reading System will launch with an 18-volume library of children's classic books, activity books and activity cards from such publishers HarperCollins, Penguin, Simon & Schuster, Scholastic and others to "showcase beloved characters such as Fancy Nancy, Walter the Farting Dog, Olivia and Miss Spider." (I'd say something snarky about the audio coming to life in Walter the Farting Dog, but it's too early in the week to stoop to such juvenile levels).

As I said, the electronic component of the system will retail for $50, while Tag Books and Activity Boards will carry an MSRP of $13.99 each. The system is geared toward kids aged 4 to 8 and parents who feel guilty for not reading to their kids enough (that would be me).

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.

(Credit: iVideosongs.com)

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 presented in chapters--introduction, verse, chorus, bridge, outro--and titles can be sorted by skill level and genre. For $4.99, professional instructors will demonstrate a variety of songs, and basic instrument tutorials are available for free.

It's not only for guitarists however. There are videos instructing aspiring drummers, keyboard players, and more. But the site is heavily geared toward the guitar, which also happens to be the instrument of choice of the site's founder and Grammy Award nominee Tim Huffman.

Huffman started to take guitar lessons from an instructor as a kid, but became bored learning to read sheet music. "So I set out to learn popular songs by connecting with local musicians who were better than me," he explained in an interview. He kept at it, eventually cutting his college career short to go pro, and in 1984 was nominated for a Grammy. Now after 25 years in the music business, Huffman says he sees a need for connecting artists to aspiring musicians.

(Credit: iVideosongs.com)

"It struck me, how could we take the best people and make them available to people everywhere, anywhere, anytime from a learning perspective," he said.

But it wasn't an easy or a quick process. Huffman said he spent several years getting the company's legal ducks in a row. Now iVideosongs.com has master licensing agreements with five of the biggest music publishers in the world. Both artists and publishers get a direct royalty payment for each video downloaded, according to Huffman. Also, there's no DRM on any of the songs. They can be downloaded to any device.

Though there are currently about 50 songs (60 percent are taught by instructors, the rest by the original artists) in the database, there are 300 lined up and ready to go. They will be released in small batches, and by the end of the year Huffman says he expects the catalog to reach 1,000 songs.

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.

Skyfire's CEO showed me a live demo of desktop Flash video running on a Windows smartphone. (Screen capture from Skype session.)

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 recognizes text and reflows it into a phone-size column when you zoom into it, so you don't have to scroll side-to-side to read.

The technical trick of Skyfire is that it's a proxy browser. The Skyfire app itself isn't a full browser. Instead, big Skyfire servers elsewhere process Web pages, including all the media and browser formats--like Flash, Java, and Ajax--that a normal desktop browser would handle but that most phones can't. Then it streams data to phones, which the mobile half of Skyfire displays. To the end user, it looks like a browser, but the mobile app is just one part of the product.

This means that Skyfire can do things on mobile phones that mobile browsers, including Safari and Opera cannot, at least not without bogging down the phone. The danger is that the Skyfire servers themselves will bog down, because of over-use, and ruin the experience for mobile users. This is the experience I had with Micrsoft's Deepfish, a proxy browser project we covered last year and that appears to have gone dormant. Bhandari told me the service is "built to scale," and that "once at escape velocity," the company can plug in additional servers to handle a growing user base. He would not reveal the technical underpinnings of Skyfire beyond that.

The escape velocity that Bhandari refers to includes not just user uptake, but a revenue model, and it's on that second small detail that my confidence in this product begins to wane. Bhandari may "monetize user activity," which means selling ads, and he also hopes to generate revenues from carriers that want a competitor to Apple's iPhone browsing experience. The first revenue model is flawed--in-browser ads on a tiny screen will be annoying and hard to sell. The second model is sound, but incredibly difficult. Many mobile app companies have withered and died while waiting for a good carrier deal. And in this case, the carriers are going to need extra convincing, because supporting Skyfire means running or paying for a bank of proxy servers.

Although I think that proxied browsing is the right solution for mobile devices, I am not convinced that there's a solid business behind it.

Skyfire will go into public beta in a few weeks for Windows smartphones. Other platforms will follow. You should be able to register for the beta this week at the site.

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 uses for those who take a lot of handwritten notes, particularly folks like college students and, yes, reporters.

Unlike other digital pens that share the same core technology from Sweden's Anoto, the Pulse is a computer in its own right, capable of recording audio and synchronizing the recording with handwritten notes. Those notes can be then played back from the notebook, with the sound linked to the corresponding notes. Recordings can be played at normal speed, as well as slowed down or sped up. The pen requires what's known as "dot paper," standard paper printed with tiny dots that help the pen understand its position on the page.

The company has also come up with a neat way for people to record audio in noisy places. In such locales, our brain uses the differences between what comes in our left and right ears to help filter the sound we want to hear from all the other noises coming into our head.

The company has a set of earbuds that record sound. As a result, the recorded sound can be processed in much the same way.

Like LeapFrog's Fly Fusion, the Livescribe pen can also perform tasks such as language translation and act as a calculator. Marggraff was at LeapFrog before leaving to start his own digital pen company.

Video: Pulse
smart pen
Livescribe aims
to rewrite
computing history.

As for the pen, it's using an ARM-9 processor and comes with either 1GB or 2GB of memory, enough to store 100 or 200 hours of audio, Marggraff said. The high-end version sells for $199, while the one with less memory carries a $149 price tag.

The pen initially can be synchronized only with Windows PCs (XP and Vista), though the company plans Mac support for the second half of the year and promises some interesting developments once it does have Apple compatibility.

Livescribe has also offered up a few other interesting details. In addition to selling notebooks for less than $5 apiece, the company plans in April to start letting Pulse owners print their own dot paper from laser (and some inkjet) printers. Livescribe also has its own Web site where Pulse owners will be able to share their notes and recordings with friends, as well as an application to share them on Facebook.

The start-up also is trying to make its pen an open platform, allowing developers to write their own programs for the Pulse using a development kit based on Java and Eclipse.

Despite its many new abilities, it remains to be seen whether this pen is indeed mightier. Livescribe faces a significant, though not necessarily insurmountable, challenge of trying to create a mass market success where others have found niche success at best.