For the 122 companies that were featured presenters at DemoFall and TechCrunch50 this week, the pressure of making their cases onstage to the audiences of press, venture capitalists, and analysts is now over.
To be sure, those companies now have to make good on the products they introduced, and the market will soon make it very clear who the winners and losers are.
But as the dust settles from DemoFall, where I and my colleague Elinor Mills spent Sunday through Tuesday watching dozens of companies' presentations and talking to many of the people behind those products, I have a few thoughts on the event to share.
First, despite TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington's obvious desire to kill Demo as an important place for many tech companies to launch their products, the fact that TC50 happened at the same time did not have any noticeable effect on Demo.
I say that as someone who spent Sunday evening trying to work the crowd at the traditional first-night cocktail party hosted by Demo lead organizer Chris Shipley and her team. If there was any less attendance at the event due to the timing of TC50, it certainly was belied by the crush of people standing around drinking and talking, making it nearly impossible to move around, and by the packed auditorium at the Sheraton San Diego, where DemoFall took place.
Arrington also told me last week that he expected most of the technology press to be at his event. And not being there--several CNET colleagues covered that show--I can't speak to how many were. But I can say that the press section at Demo was no less full than at any previous iteration of the event I've been to. And the press section on the Demo Web site on Wednesday has links to many dozens of stories written during the two days, which indicates to me that the companies presenting at Demo got a pretty significant amount of coverage.
And because I gather TC50 had a pretty healthy crowd as well, I conclude that despite the meager state of the economy today, there is ample interest in new technology products, especially those that are Internet-related, as nearly every one of the ones at Demo was and, I gather, at TC50 as well.
So, absent any "Demo is dying" story line, the focus fairly needs to be put squarely on the companies that presented and their products.
As with any such conference, there was a wide spectrum of quality among the 72 companies that took the stage for six minutes apiece Monday and Tuesday. I've been to four previous Demos, and this one felt very much like the others. Indeed, the structure is the same each time, with very little variance. And why not? If your formula works, why alter it?
There were certainly a few stand-out companies, and perhaps the most impressive of the 72 presentations was one by Plastic Logic, which showed off its ultra-thin e-Reader. I think we still have a long way to go before this kind of device is mainstream, but the one Plastic Logic showed Monday morning was the best I've yet seen. The prototype the company showed was light, supposedly has long battery life, and can display on its rather wide screen books, newspapers, magazines, PDFs, and many other documents.
There were also a few easy-to-identify trends, and fortunately, those trends were different than in previous years.
In the past, I had felt Demo put far too much emphasis on photo- and video-sharing services: Over the four previous times I'd attended, I'd seen so many different versions of the same basic business model that I wondered if any of the companies behind them had ever heard of YouTube or Flickr.
This time, to me, the most interesting trend, as I wrote Tuesday, was companies building either entire businesses or significant parts of their businesses on iPhone applications.
I didn't talk to every company that showed at Demo this week, but I identified at least 10 different iPhone app plays, and Shipley herself had told me informally at the Sunday night cocktail party that she expected around a couple of dozen iPhone apps to be shown during the two days, either on the stage during the companies' six-minute presentations or on the show floor when they have a little more time to explain themselves and what they're doing.
Mapflow's application designed to help drivers offset some of the cost of commuting by using their iPhones to find riders was just one of many products shown at DemoFall for Apple's hit mobile device.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)In addition to iPhone applications, at the show.
Among them: iWidgets, which launched a service that helps brands syndicate their content on Facebook member pages, and social sharing platform Kadoo, which allows people to share their Facebook data with anyone, whether or not they are on that network. SkyData lets people get their Facebook information on their mobile device; and FamilyBuilder is letting people link together
Another area of concentration was search. Intelius launched iSearch, which offers comprehensive people search; Semanti offered up its semantic-based Web search SemantiFind; Infovell introduced a new way to mine the deep Web of unstructured data that is hidden from major search engines; and Rebus Technology's desktop search helps people find digital documents as well as paper documents that are faxed and scanned.
Other presentations were geared toward empowering consumers. RealNetworks introduced RealDVD for people who want to rip DVDs to their hard drive just like they do CDs. HeyCosmo helps automate party and event planning, even making phone calls for you . And 's new hands-free service lets people use voice commands to retrieve and send e-mails and text messages over their mobile phone, as well as send dictated text messages, use voice to reply to e-mail messages, and listen to text-based messages. And for the online news junkies among us, SpinSpotter debuted its new service that lets readers un-spin the news they read.
Some presenters also aimed to that plague consumers and corporations. For instance, Usable Security Systems has come up with a way for people to remember only one password for every site they log into on the Web. introduced a service that helps people locate and disable lost or stolen phones. Unity Solutions introduced Lanxoma, software that will allow executives to keep an eye on IT workers in the hopes of reducing insider security threats. And CoreTrace's Bouncer software automatically creates a white list of safe applications and blocks applications that aren't on the list that could contain malicious software. And Fortressware offers protection against data leaks, allowing companies to block printing, copying, and forwarding of sensitive documents.
Probably the biggest company to present a new product was Best Buy, which launched a service dubbed Giftag that lets people create wish lists composed of items from anywhere on the Web.
All in all, Demo proved it was alive and well. It lured a large crowd, a significant number of press outlets, and even featured an onstage discussion between influential tech writers Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher.
I wrote in April that the winner of the DemoFall/TC50 showdown would be the one that got Mossberg. But in the end, it wasn't at all about which event carried the day, since it seems both had packed houses and energized companies.
The winner, one hopes, will end up being the companies whose products end up making differences in real people's lives.
CNET News' Elinor Mills contributed to this report.
At DemoFall, Mapflow demonstrated its iPhone application, designed to automate carpooling. The product was just one of many shown built around the iPhone at the event.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)SAN DIEGO--At Demo and DemoFall, there are always easily identifiable trends among the dozens of companies chosen to present their products.
In previous iterations of the events that I've attended, those trends have been photo-sharing services, online video hosting, Web 2.0, and the like.
This week, the trend--at least as I've seen it--has been the number of companies here with iPhone applications. Not every one of them is talking prominently about the applications they have, but Demo lead organizer Chris Shipley told me informally that she thinks that there must be at least a couple dozen companies with iPhone applications here out of the 72 total presenters.
I'll be the first to admit that I was slow to understand the value of iPhone apps, and I suppose that's because it took me awhile to buy one of the devices, and even longer after I did before I started trolling the Apple App Store looking for the best and brightest of what was out there.
My major introduction to the applications was a day I spent last month in Seattle, basically letting a series of them control my life for a day. And more recently, I have found myself blown away by some of the most simple applications imaginable. For example, Showtimes determines where you are and then comes up with a list of movie theaters--sorted by proximity to you--and shows the films showing at each and the times for each film.
As I said, it's totally simple, and pure genius.
Ultimately, while other mobile phones have many of the features of the iPhone, I don't think that there will be any others in the near future that combine GPS, a great interface, the power of an operating system like OS X, and a network of developers eager to reach out to an audience of users as devoted to their devices as iPhone owners.
Back here at DemoFall, there is definitely no shortage of companies that have developed applications for the device, and some of them seem very promising to me, even though most have yet to appear in the App Store.
I have my own ideas, as I stated above, why I think iPhone apps are the future of software, but I thought these developers would have opinions even more valuable than mine, since they're building businesses around the platform.
WebDiet built an iPhone application designed to help people find restaurants that serve the kind of healthy food they want to eat.
(Credit: WebDiet)Among the companies incorporating the iPhone into their Demo products are WebDiet, Telnic, SkyData, The Echo Nest, and Rudder.
"Right now, (the iPhone is) the platform with the most immediacy," said Richard Bryce, CEO of Mapflow, a company here with a product centered around an iPhone app. "Especially for the consumer market."
It's easy to see why Bryce would think so.
Mapflow is a very interesting product designed around the idea of helping drivers offset the high costs of gas by finding people who need rides to pay to fill empty seats in their cars.
"Most of our lives are ad hoc," Bryce said. "We're trying to apply the iPhone's smart technology to give that ad hoc, on-demand capability to carpooling."
The Mapflow system works by letting drivers define routes--either one-time, or repeat--they're following and the number of seats they have available to fill. The iPhone makes it simple to do this through lists that can be easily displayed and because the phone's GPS chip quickly determines where the driver is in proximity to anyone looking for a ride.
It might sound weird to pick up strangers in this manner, but Mapflow requires that all users register with their name, a photo, and a credit card, and that means that drivers can feel confident that whomever they pick up is probably going to be safe. And when they arrive to pick up the rider, the iPhone displays the rider's picture so the driver can be sure the person is who he or she is supposed to be.
In addition, drivers and riders alike can choose preferences for the type of person with whom they want to travel. This means, for example, that women can choose to ride only with other women.
Further, the service has a quick and easy rating system--again, enabled by the iPhone's elegant interface--that allows everyone to weigh in on the people with whom they've traveled.
Riders pay about 30 cents a mile to use the system, and Mapflow makes its money from a 15 percent commission on the transactions. Drivers pocket the rest.
Clearly, there are many questions the company must answer before the product becomes profitable--and of course, it must first release the application, which it plans to do in about four weeks. But this seems to me to be a very good use of the device, especially given the growing emphasis on getting people to stop driving one to a car.
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SAN DIEGO--What would happen if you mashed up LinkedIn and Monster.com and threw in a dose of steroids?
A company called Paidinterviews that presented at DemoFall here Tuesday morning thinks it has the answer.
And that, the company said, is its Paidinterviews new job site and candidate recruitment site.
The first side of it is designed for job candidates trying to find a new position.
Initially, they would upload pictures of themselves, previous employment references, examples of their work and other information employers might want to know about them.
Then, they can deploy a series of widgets that allow the candidates to show exactly how they want to be presented on the site. They can define an asking price that is essentially 5 percent of the salary range they'd like and then they can put together a list of benefits and other attributes about a new job they'd like, in order of importance to them, such as salary, health benefits, education reimbursement and the like. They can then drag and drop such attributes into the exact order of importance to them.
At that point, they can turn to the "watercooler," what the company likens to Amazon.com product ratings. Here, candidates can peruse a list of potential positions that meet their criteria and look at ratings of the hiring companies posted by previous and current employees.
And finally, users can join groups centered around professional interests with the idea of helping members of those groups identify potential companies and positions they'd want to pursue.
From the employer's side, Paidinterviews also offers useful tools.
First, hiring companies can see lists of candidates who are interested in their available positions, and the tool ranks those candidates in order of the likelihood of a match, from strongest to weakest.
I'm not in the job market right now, and I have found in the past that job-seeking sites never really do a good job with the journalism industry. But for people in many other industries, I suspect that a tool like this will be, at the least, a good adjunct to more established sites, especially as the site builds a bit of critical mass of users.
TravelMuse brings Web 2.0 functionality to the task of group travel planning.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)SAN DIEGO--One of the nice things about Web 2.0 is that the interactivity it promises can be applied to almost any kind of application.
That's the basis of TravelMuse's new social trip planning service, which it unveiled at DemoFall Tuesday.
The idea of the so-called Social Trip Planner is that a group of people expecting to travel together can use a rich Web site to plan and organize their vacation and share information about what they're doing amongst each other easily and automatically.
The service starts with what the company calls its "inspiration planner," which is designed to help a group traveling together--be it a family or several friends--figure out a destination that meets everyone's needs.
First, the group defines where they're beginning their trip and then specifies the number of people on the trip, how many hours they are willing to travel and how long they have for the trip. Then, they can choose tags from a long list of activities that each person wants to do.
At this point, the service produces a list of potential destinations that meet the criteria defined by the group.
This in and of itself is impressive, as anyone who has ever tried to put together a trip with a group would know.
But the service has many other features as well.
The first is a stored wish list, which the company says users could treat like Neflix's DVD queue. In other words, if the service gave you multiple trips that you'd like to go on, you can save the ones you don't choose for the future.
The social trip planner also allows users to find searched-for trips other people have created to see what else might be fun.
Then, based on the criteria a group has defined, the service offers up suggestions for hotels and other services at the destination, and as the group is putting its trip together, they can drag and drop those suggestions into the planner.
If things need to change after the planning has begun, you can swap out an entire day's activities for another by simply dragging and dropping, and everyone involved is automatically notified of the changes.
This seems like a valuable service, especially for families with kids who want to figure out a vacation alternative to Disneyland, but who don't really have any idea where they want to do. Because it offers vacationers the ability to pick and choose the activities they want from a large this, the service seems likely to be able to help people like this meet their needs.
SAN DIEGO--Who needs a computer to access the many social networks people are members of these days?
While thousands, or even millions, of people regularly switch between services like Facebook, imeem, MySpace, and others, it can be cumbersome to do all that switching.
That's what Xumii, which presented at DemoFall Monday afternoon, has set out to obviate.
The idea is that users will be able to access their various social networks through their mobile phones on a single application, rather than having to rely on computers and full browsers.
Xumii allows anyone to access friends and information from multiple social networks on their mobile phones.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET Networks)In the demonstration, the company showed how users can access a list of friends from any social network they're part of, a list that will show each friend, the service they're part of, and whether they're online or not.
That's pretty cool, and another nice feature is the ability to share photos or other files with people on that all-encompassing friends list. So, for example, a user could access their Flickr photos, select a picture, and then have it sent to any friends on their list.
Ultimately, what's nice about Xumii is that it will allow people to take their social networks in their pocket, and not worry--as I'm sure many do--that while they're on the go they are out of touch. This way, they can stay in touch no matter where they are, and they can continually update their friends with the latest things they're doing, or the most recent photos they've taken.
Whether this is a good thing for us and our ability to detach ourselves from our computers is a question for someone else to answer.
G.ho.st allows a virtual computer to be accessible via mobile devices like the iPhone.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET Networks)SAN DIEGO--Why carry a computer laden down with data and applications with you everywhere when you could access all that information from any browser?
That's the proposition behind an Israeli company known as G.ho.st, which presented at DemoFall here Monday afternoon.
Already, the company, whose name is also their URL, has a browser-based version that allows anyone to access all this data from anywhere. The idea is that by doing it this way instead of through traditional virtual computer software, which requires a lot of configuration, you can access your data from any computer.
Now, G.ho.st is offering their service through mobile devices like the iPhone.
This means that it will be possible, with the iPhone and other mobile phones, to access much of what is available on your computer. It may not make it possible to do everything that you can do on a full browser, but at the very least, it would be possible to find, examine and modify data without having to be on a full computer.
Further, the service will allow you run productivity applications that can access Word documents, email messages and even PowerPoint presentations.
Asyncast's Rocketron service is designed to give users custom news via mobile devices without the use of their hands.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)SAN DIEGO--We all spend a lot of time with our hands too busy to handle and manipulate mobile devices. That, for example, is one of the reasons many states now require drivers to have hands-free headsets for making phone calls.
But what if you're riding a bike and want to get news updates without having to play with your device in order to hear what you want?
That's the premise behind Rocketron, a new service from Asyncast unveiled at DemoFall Monday.
The idea is that users can speak commands into a headset, for example, "Sports news," and the service will stream only that kind of news to them. The same goes for technology, business, political or other kinds of news.
In addition, if the user doesn't want to listen to a specific story, they can say, "next story," and Rocketron will skip to the next news item.
Even better, the system has a Web interface that allows users to set preferences for the kinds of news they want to hear. And one of the choices in that interface is a way to set filters so that they can weed out certain kinds of stories that are subsets of a major topic.
For example, if someone is interested in news about Yahoo, but doesn't want to hear stories related to the ongoing takeover rumors related to Microsoft, they can choose to filter out anything that relates to Yahoo as well as Microsoft.
This is a nice feature, especially because for many of us there are plenty of major topics we want to hear about without having to listen to every last update. That could be useful for politics junkies, or sports fans or just about anyone you can imagine.
Photrade is built around the notion of a democratic stock photo site that lets photographers control ownership of their images, even as they earn ad revenue if others use them for commercial purposes.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)SAN DIEGO--These days, I hear about new photo sharing sites just about every day.
That's especially true when you go to a conference like DemoFall or its winter version, Demo, where over the years, I've seen more photo sharing sites than I could ever care to count.
At the same time, the stock photography business has been turned on its ear by the emergence of Web 2.0 and phenomenons like crowdsourcing.
On Monday here, a startup called Photrade took the stage to show off their new service, which combines both photo sharing and stock photography in a bid to give people a way to earn some money with the digital cameras that are ubiquitous these days.
In effect, the service is about connecting photographers, publishers and advertisers in a single marketplace, Photrade CEO Andew Paradise told me in an interview recently, that lets the photographers get paid when publishers use their pictures.
The idea for the site, Paradise explained, is that there are more and more talented photographers taking pictures and posting them online. The days in which only traditional professional photographers can take the kinds of pictures advertisers would want are over, in other words.
But until now, Photrade argues, talented amateurs haven't had a way to get paid for their work. And at the same time, it has been difficult for photographers to maintain control over the pictures when they're posted online.
So Photrade aims to solve those problems.
On the one hand, Photrade helps protect photographers by embedding custom watermarks in users' pictures with a system that also allows for updating and changing the watermarks any time they want.
In addition, the system allows photographers to track usage of their photos, so that they can determine who is using them. And, if they decide they're not happy with someone specific using a photo, they can block access to that picture. But if that happens, the user gets a note allowing them to ask the photographer for permission. This, of course, is a path to asking for payment for use of the picture.
And in a further bid to protect photographers' intellectual property, Photrade uses tools to make it difficult to steal photos without permission.
The financial aspect of Photrade is an embedded advertising system in which advertisers can link to contextually relevant photos. And in that case, a small text ad is embedded in the frame of the photo in a place that viewers can easily see but which doesn't interfere directly with the photo itself.
Photrade gives photographers a way to share their pictures and make some money from ad revenue in the process.
(Credit: Photrade)This, of course, is the revenue model. And while most photographers will never earn a penny with their work, those whose work attracts attention and advertisers could make out well on this service.
In that regard, Photrade is much like other stock photography sites, except that anyone can add any photos they want to the site, and the revenue comes from advertising, not just from publishers using their pictures.
MixMatchMusic allows musicians to find other artists whose guitar, drum, keyboard or other riffs complement their own for the creation of complete songs. Once mixed and matched, the songs can be published and the independent artists can earn money from them.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET Networks)SAN DIEGO--There are millions of musicians in the world who are talented but haven't gotten lucky enough to get a record contract.
These days, the Internet makes it easier for these artists to find an audience, but there are still countless numbers of musicians who have some skills, but perhaps not all the ones--such as drumming--that might be necessary to finish a song that could make them money.
That's where a company called MixMatchMusic comes into play. It has built a system that it thinks will help these artists find the collaborators and the audience that will result in finished songs they can make money with.
For example, if a guitarist writes a nice riff that could make the basis of a commercial song, but doesn't have a band to play the rest of the instruments the song needs, MixMatchMusic is a community site where that artist could find the other pieces of music that could complete the song.
Of course, this relies on a critical mass of content being uploaded to the community, but assuming that happens, this is a nice idea.
The guitarist in the example could then find a piece of keyboard music that matches the riff and then a piece of drum music that complements the other two.
The system's editor mixes the different pieces together and allows the artist to edit them into a complete song. Once it's done, he or she can publish it.
That's interesting enough in and of itself, but the system also makes sure that any artist who contributed part or all of a song gets credit--and therefore payment--for the song if and when it sells any copies.
Once published, the song becomes publicly available for downloading, including for purchase, and if money starts to come in, the artists share 85 percent of each dollar earned.
Additionally, once a song is published, each contributing artist is alerted that their music has been used, letting them know that they may have some money coming in, or at least letting them know that someone has utilized their contribution in a complete song.
From the fan side, there's a nice component to MixMatchMusic, as well, because it allows end-users to take the songs on the site and create easy mashups with them. And this, too, gives artists a way to get their music out there, especially to community of music lovers who like independent tunes and who like to play with that music for their own needs.
Invision.TV has created a personal recommendation engine for the Web that allows viewers to get a better selection of Web-based video content to watch.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)SAN DIEGO--There's so much video content on the Web today--YouTube, ESPN, news sites, and so forth--that it can be difficult to find what you want to watch.
That's the premise behind Invision.TV, a company that has created a dashboard for aggregating and sharing Web-based video content.
The idea is based on interactive TV program guides that many of us are familiar with through our subscription TV services, for example. But instead of giving you selections of content from TV services, the video all comes from the Web.
The service embeds many Web video sources' players into its dashboard, while with others it simply links out to sites. But either way, it gives users seamless control of a wide variety of content and an easy way to find what they want to watch.
Additionally, it has a social networking element, allowing users to share video content with friends on, say, Facebook.
All told, this seems like a nice way to deal with the massive amounts of video content that's available online at any time--and to keep up with your favorite sites' videos, all without having to search sites individually.
