There was a good, but not earthshaking, lineup of products at this year's Demo 2008 conference (see all stories). The show didn't offer any new products to capture the hearts and minds of the general public or even a majority of the tech elite. There was no Pleo, no Moobella, no Palm Pilot--all products introduced at Demo in years past. But there were several very strong new ideas and products here. These are my top picks.
Blist. This is the Flash- and Flex-based database I raved about yesterday. It is the database that FileMaker should have become by now--and it's all online. It has rich features and a gorgeous front-end that's simple when you want it to be yet also supports complex table design. Read: Blist: Awesome Web-based database.
Blist is also part of another story at Demo: The rise of Flash applications. See also Spout, a killer Flash authoring environment, and Joggle, an AIR application that manages your photos, no matter where they are stored. The design and usability of these applications put many "traditional" software competitors to shame. And they're all cross-platform.
Delver, a search engine with a strong social twist. It returns search results from people in your social circle, and ranks them according to relevance and strength of connection to you. It's no replacement for Google, but if you want to ask all your friends for advice all at once--without bothering them--it's killer. Delver uses your implicit social network, which is much smarter than requiring users to specify in advance who their friends are. Read: Damn clever: Delver makes search social.
Ribbit makes a voice platform, aka Web telephony. It's a powerful technology that will allow developers to do cool things with voice services, without dealing with traditional telephone switches and cantankerous phone companies. There's a Salesforce application already. At Demo, the company showed off its own homegrown consumer application, Amphibian, a useful application that melds your mobile phone with your Web presence. Amphibian does new stuff like pull up the social network profile pages of people when they call you. Creepy. But cool. Read: Ribbit hops into Web telephony. See also, Toktumi, a business VoIP product I like a lot.
Jodange Top of Mind is a tool by quants, for traders. It looks at the published opinions and prognostications of market analysts and correlates them with stock moves. From that data it tells you which writers are the ones that either predict or influence the public markets. Why I like it: Because it's a real business. Access to this service costs $10,000 to $15,000 a month for a small workgroup, and people in the financial business will pay it if the data bears out. The company will also release simplified widget versions of its data that consumers can put on their Web start pages.
If you're interested in predicting your own financial outcome, also see Voyant At Home (Read: Voyant tells you when you can't retire.)
Green Plug. This is an initiative to build the universal DC power supply. Key components: Devices tell the supply what voltage they need, and the supply shuts off power to a device when it indicates it's fully charged. It's greener that traditional power supplies and could be a lot more convenient for consumers as well. It's a small step toward a revolution in power delivery for electronic devices, and the revolution is long overdue. Read: Demo goes green.
Video advertising online is certainly becoming more common, but it's still difficult to get a good handle on exactly the kind of impact those types of ads are having.
Three companies came to Demo to push their individual strategy on how to improve the placement of video ads and the information gathered about them.
Liquidus: This 6-year-old Web marketing company has come up with a quick way for digital cable providers to produce and push video classified ads to the Web and TV screens via video on demand. Liquidus' video publishing platform aggregates video ads from a variety of sources and allows cable or broadcasters pick ads for specific local markets. The platform turns each ad into a Flash video, which can be altered depending on the market it's intended for. The appeal Liquidus is emphasizing here is volume: the company says they made more than 1 million video ads last year.
TubeMogul: TubeMogul has devised a way to put a single video on multiple platforms at once, and a comprehensive dashboard set up to to track who views the video ad and more. Once uploaded, a video ad can be distributed to a variety of platforms simultaneously--YouTube, Yahoo, MySpace, etc. The results for that one ad across all platforms are aggregated into a single display, so no need to track each platform's performance individually. Trends for who is viewing each video, for how long, and how often, as well as comments audience demographics, and comparison statistics to competitors are available for free.
Visible Measures: This company promises to give more detailed information about measured behavior of a Web video ad's audience. Specifically it gathers and displays data regarding what happens after a video is played. The coolest function is an animated graph that shows an advertiser or publisher, as a video is playing, what viewers are doing--rewinding, clicking back, or leaving the video. The company gets its detailed data by integrating directly with the Flash video player. In addition, Visible Measures tracks when a video has been linked to or picked up by other sites.
The social network companies just left the stage at Demo 2008. Looking for inspiration from the group, I got this: The future of social networking will belong to companies that leverage the implicit, or derived, "social graph." I do not think that companies that are trying to create new online communities (from the Demo companies: iLeonardo, HubDub, AtlasPost) will own the future.
However, companies that divine the social network from what is already online are on to something. In that group there's Delver, which I reviewed last night, and these two interesting companies from the Demo session that just ended:
YouChoose: This company has just built a talk back widget for blogs. What's interesting about it is that instead of just running a comment thread for a blogger, it collates the discussion from other blogs and sites. It brings together sparse communities and can help make them richer and more active.
I have some issues with the YouChoose concept--in particular, bloggers that use it won't have a tight link to their commenters--but the idea of automatically creating groups around content is powerful.
Redux: This is a smart idea. It's a matchmaking site (for friends, not hookups, but that's really up to you). You tell it who you are and answer questions about your interests, and it recommends people from its network that it thinks you will like hanging out with. It can also suggest events you will both may like. It even has an "entourage" feature that groups recommended friends into posses and suggests events for all of you.
The key difference here is that you don't have to start by building your network. It kind of does that for you.
Redux is a membership site, which is not ideal. You have to join it and tell it about yourself, and it matches you with people also on the network. But I don't see why the idea can't be extended to scan existing social sites and profiles (assuming they open up) to match people even if they're not on the same social site you are.
Dude. Beer?
People are getting social network fatigue. There are too many social sites and they are too different. It takes too much time and effort to manage your online relationships. The companies that figure out how to leverage online content and help manage your relationship data for you are the ones that will own the next phase of online social networking.
Capzles takes the idea of telling a story with a photo album or a vacation video and puts it all into one multimedia package.
The start-up calls its product "social storytelling." Of course, this means the stories you make with its Web-based authoring tool are eminently shareable with anyone and everyone.
Using a patent-pending Flash-based technology, photos, video clips, and audio files are uploaded to Capzles in a linear, chronological strip. Each image or file can be scrolled through horizontally and selected. Each can have a caption, links, and a blog.
It seems best suited for creating stories in an episodic fashion, rather than for sharing single photos or videos. There are a variety of premade backgrounds, themes, and fonts to choose from if you're not the supercreative type. And if you are, there's a color picker and a gradient tool for designing a Capzle from scratch.
Capzles is also a place to look for Capzles made by other people. Users can search by topic or keyword for others' stories they've created. Besides a typical listing of results, the results are also presented in a timeline fashion to find specific stories created at a certain point in time.
The site is still in private beta.
Standout Jobs' Reception is a hosted recruiting service for companies. It replaces the lame jobs pages that many companies run with a more developed service, including application forms, applicant tracking, support for videos, discussions, and so on. I like the idea, but I like JobScore's (review) model even more: With permission, it puts applicants that aren't hired into a general pool that hiring managers at other companies can pay to see.
Seen at: Demo 2008
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Cozimo is a tool for real-time collaboration around photos and videos.
It promises tight synchronization--at the exact frame level in videos--when multiple viewers are online, and a timeline-based annotation system that sounds a bit like Viddler's video-commenting feature.
Founder Joshua Rosen, who presented his product at Demo 08 Wednesday morning, said the genesis for Cozimo was a bit of desperation. Working on the artwork for the movie Peter Pan several years ago, Rosen and his team were split up all over the world and finding it hard to find time to edit images and video for the film. His boss said that if he don't find a way to get it done, they'd all be fired. Rosen's solution? Cozimo.
It works like this: An image is sent to your e-mail by one of your colleagues. When you open the image, it launches Cozimo's collaboration tool. Anyone invited to the project can mark up and leave comments on the image or video in question. Chat windows appear to talk in real time about the changes.
It also works with video clips. Everyone online sees the video play in real time and any can leave notes on particular frames. It has a clean, simple interface and appears very intuitive, but Rosen is not the only one to come up with this idea. See also: ConceptShare, Octopz, and ReviewBasics.
(Click the image for demo videos.)
Xtranormal makes a fun tool for making animated shows with cartoon characters. It could also be a tool for making machinima, if the company manages to license characters from game companies.
In the demo I saw last night, Xtranormal's Paul Nightingale wrote a simple script, where he wrote a few lines for two characters, added some emotion tags and gestures, and put them in a setting with a prop. He pressed the "render" button and generated a cute little animation. Quality was very good--certainly better than Saturday morning cartoons. The cuts and angles were automatically generated and kept things engaging.
The product does text-to-speech conversion so you don't need human actors, but it will also lip-synch recorded speech if you want the voices to sound real.
The Web-based version of Xtranormal will have some limitations in regards to the number of characters it will support (two, I think), their actions, and the fact that you have to "render" each animation before you can see it. A downloadable version will allow more characters, more interaction between them, and it allows for a real-time preview of your show.
Also coming: A tool to make character models from real photos (see also, BigStage, from CES). How about Xtranormal porn? "It's only a matter of time," Nightingale said.
This will be a really fun product to play with when it comes out in the second-quarter. A private beta is scheduled for April.
See also: SceneCaster, which could end up making sets for Xtranormal characters.
Results are based on the contributions of your friends (and their friends).
This is one of the most innovative ideas at Demo 2008: Delver, a search engine that displays results for you based on what your friends and contacts are doing online. First, you tell it your name, and it scans the usual social networks to find out who your friends are. At this early stage of development, it scans LinkedIn, MySpace, Hi5, and Flickr, but Facebook and Twitter will be added.
Once Delver discovers who you know (and also who's in your extended circle--your friends of friends), it uses that data to return search results. For example, if you're searching for "Las Vegas," it will return pictures your friends took in Vegas, blog posts they've written about trips there, or even posts where they are just mentioned. It also finds Yelp reviews they've written about restaurants in Vegas, and so on. And you do not have to tell Delver that a MySpace friend also has a Yelp ID; the system's core technology draws the line from your explicit connections to their other contributions on the Web.
Delver will not replace old reliable Google. It delivers different results for each person, not consistent results for everyone. And to some extent, the quality of your results will depend on the quality of your social network. But it may well change the way you look at search. Instead of searching the sum of human knowledge (or close to it), Delver searches through the collective wisdom of your friends and associates. It's a great new idea.
The service will be presented at Demo 2008 on Wednesday. The private beta launch is planned for March.
Seesmic gets N95 support. But you don't get Seesmic.
Seesmic, aka video Twitter, is still in private beta, but CEO Loic Le Meur is here at Demo 2008 anyway, showcasing a few new features. Nothing revolutionary, just a few nice tweaks. First, you can now easily see video responses to a video post, and in fact play all the responses in a continuous stream. It's like Friend TV.
Also, there's now a mobile application (Nokia N95 only so far), from which you can create and view Seesmic posts. Mobile Seesmics aren't streamed live like they are with Qik or Flixwagon, but it does make it easier to play in the network.
See my previous review, Seesmic: It's video Twitter and then some.
As promised in an earlier version of this post, I have secured more invitations to the Seesmic private beta. Send an email to rafe@seesmic.com (which is not me; I won't see these). The first 100 emails will get access codes. Good luck!
Not everyone should let their co-workers see their full online social profile, as this guy would likely attest.
Moli.com, which already has a solution for individuals who want to control who sees their profile, is now expanding its service as a platform for enterprise users.
A single account can have public (anyone can see), private (it can be searched for, but not accessed), and hidden (only those with permission from the account holder can see it exists) versions. The aim is to increase privacy.
Moli offers white label, private label, and co-branded versions for businesses.
Companies that purchase the service can add, for $3.95 per month, an online store with a catalog of their products, using video, audio, text, a shopping cart, and online payment.
Moli also offers detailed information about who is viewing each store and profile by gender, average age, and geographic location, so businesses can better target customers and offer more detailed data to advertisers.
