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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.

I'm sitting in the audience at DemoFall listening to organizer Chris Shipley interview three young entrepreneurs (Emile Petrone, 22; Michale Callahan, 24; Arash Sabet, 25) about their innovations. The technology they're talking about is fascinating: Sabet, for example, designs surgical equipment, including a brain retractor he's developed in his work with neurosurgeons. Callahan showed off his Audeo throat mic that reads silent, pre-vocal utterances and converts them into computer input or audible speech. Petrone is working on Knowble, which looks like a social network for researchers.

How do these young guys do what they do? They're smart, but Shipley is digging in to find that they are not loners. These inventors seek out and work with smart teams and with mentors. They don't even like being called "inventors," since it connotes a solo stereotype they're trying to move beyond.

They are not from Silicon Valley, either. They have to work harder for the money. Callahan is "pro-California" though. It's clear he'd rather invent than scramble for money. All of them are idealists. And why not? At this point in their lives they can afford to be.

L to R: Chris Shipley of Demo, Arash Sabet, Emile Petrone, Michael Callahan

(Credit: Rafe Needleman / CNET)

All you angel investors, do us all a favor: Take that money you were going to give to your next me-too Web 2.0 startup and shunt it over to people like these.

Myxer introduced a new feature at DemoFall: a widget to instantly upload photos, videos or ringtones to mobile phones.

(Credit: Myxer)

It's aimed at people who want to make money on things like wallpaper and ringtones but don't have the technical know-how or the resources to distribute it themselves. Mobilized by Myxer is a delivery platform that can push any content to any phone. They've promised to keep up on the constantly fluctuating mobile standards and phones that enter the market so you don't have to. The only requirements are that users own the content they want to distribute, and know how to drag and drop the content into the publishing wizard.

And, hey, it's got an endorsement from Tay Zonday, the Internet phenom behind "Chocolate Rain" who sells the ringtone version of his song for $1.99 through the service. What else could you ask for?

(Credit: WMS Gaming)

How to bring an $86 billion older-than-old-school industry into the present? WMS Gaming, a company that makes 80 slot machine games for casinos a year is mixing mechanical slots with digital tech. At DemoFall they showed off a new Monopoly Money Grab game.

Most of the thousands of slots on casino floors with old-school handle, which has basically remain unchanged since late 19th century. Mechanical slots are more trustworthy to people, says WMS. So they decided to combine the two--transparent display technology over traditional mechanical slots. The benefit is there are more mathematical outcomes with digital reels.

The company is also looking to add networking to casinos for new ways to have players interact, make them multi-player games, and save games.

Vyro Games presented a way to de-stress by playing a game. Call it the ultimate in casual gaming.

A biosensor, or a little egg-shaped "personal input pod," connects to a mobile phone via Bluetooth and pits you versus the computer or someone else to see who can relax the quickest. Stick your finger in it and it tracks your heart rate. Vyro is pitching it as a health aid, citing stats including that there are 12.8 million work days taken off due to stress.

There are two games so far: in the first, the more you relax, the faster the dragons on screen fly. In the second, Storm Chaser, the more calm you become the more calm the storm becomes on screen. Cute. Everything's a competition these days, apparently.

See the video for Rafe Needleman's interview with Vyro CEO Paul Kewene-Hite.

FixMyMovie is a new service that takes your pixelated digital video clips and does its best to fix them. The technology stems from MotionDSP's processing technology, which is similar to what's used in government intelligence operations to improve those dark and grainy security films--like you see in movies.

The entire process is fairly straightforward: Just upload and tag a supported movie file, and the service will crunch it on its servers. You get a note by e-mail when it's done. Once it's finished you can preview the first 10 seconds of the enhanced version, as well as compare before and after results live, by pressing the "compare" button. What's even cooler is a stills mode that lets you compare the before and after with an easy-to-use slider that follows your mouse. Whatever's on the left of the slider is the old, with the new on the right.

To grab the improved film, there are download options for multiple formats, including iPod-formatted H.264, Adobe Flash, and Windows Media. You can also grab quick embed code to stick it in any blog, which I've done after the break.

I tried out the service on several video clips this morning and got improved results on every single one of them. The most dramatic improvement of all was with text, which managed to turn almost unreadable pixelated words into legible sentences. Just be wary, though: The service can only handle clips up to 352x288 in resolution, which means the VGA videos from your digital camera aren't going to cut it. Older cameras, on the other hand, are fine.

FixMyMovie is launching in beta at this morning's DEMOfall conference in San Diego with $25 worth of free processing for everyone while still in its beta period. Eventually, FixMyMovie plans to charge users for the option to enhance video and still images, which can also be captured manually by users within the Flash player. I can see this service being hugely popular, as everyone wants better looking video clips, and ways to improve older, lower resolution clips.

Update: It's worth noting you need the latest beta of Adobe Flash 9 to view videos on the service (which makes the neat, live before and after feature possible). You can pick it up here, or just get a feel for what it can do with the screenshot below.

FixMyMovie did a great job with this choppy and pixelated video clip, making small bits of text actually legible.

It feels like I write this headline every year or two: a new company has engineered a new and better way to enter text.

It really is a clever way to get text into a small device.

(Credit: Kannuu)

The latest: Kannuu, presenting at the DemoFall conference tomorrow. This one uses the four-way directional pad of your mobile phone or remote control as the input mechanism. For each letter you enter, you get four choices (one each for up, down, left, and right) for the next letter or the rest of the word--guaranteed by the system to be the most likely things you'll want to type. You can also get another set of selections if none of the first four are what you want.

I have seen dozens of alternative text-entry schemes, each more clever than the last. Of them, only T9 has achieved any traction on mobile devices. But most people still use the incredibly inefficient "multitap" scheme for entering text on mobile phones. And all smart-phone manufacturers still offer Qwerty keyboards of some sort.

Why is it then that new input methods take hold? I submit three reasons: first, keyboards are predictable. With every button you press, you know exactly what you are going to get. That means you can type with little or no attention paid to the screen. There are people, mostly young, who can actually touch type in multitap. I believe that having to monitor the screen carefully as you type is a killer.

Second, predictive keying technologies fall apart on proper names, even when they fall back to next-letter frequency as a predictive technology (as opposed to database lookup). So whenever you want to type a name or street, you either have to slog through a prediction engine that may appear to have suddenly become brain-damaged, or turn it off entirely.

Third, it's not end users you have to convince if you want to build a successful alternative keyboard. It's the device manufacturers. And they're chicken.

So I'm skeptical, and I come to this conclusion honestly. I have been utterly wrong in predicting the success of several previous keyboard replacement schemes, each of them brilliant. None of them are in wide use today.