Demo is one of a few conferences I attend regularly — this year was the eleventh year for me. The program this year was very interesting as usual including 61 companies showing off their technologies and solutions. Forty nine companies were on stage and another 19 got a “hot seat” where they received sixty seconds to describe their value propositions. The best part of the conference was to see so many old friends among the 500+ attendees and share our latest business cards. For the first time in 36 years, mine didn’t say IBM on it. (That doesn’t mean I didn’t talk about IBM to everybody I could though). It was a special treat to be on a panel with Dan Bricklin, Mitch Kapor, and Les Vadasz to discuss the future of technology and innovation. Much of our discussion focused on blogging and WiFi. It isn’t possible to describe all the exciting new things I saw at Demo but I am appending a list of my crib notes with links to the various companies. If you have any inkling that innovation has dried up, you should take a look.
Note: I am posting this now but will clean up these links and add the missing ones during my flight back to NY.
Demo 2003
Chris Shipley, Executive Producer
Companies are listed in the order they were shown on stage. All were available in the Demo Tent for detailed discussion and demonstration.
Monday February 17, 2003
Breakthrough Demonstrations
Chris Shipley says these are “unique products that defy categorization and represent real change in their markets”. They were sprinkled among the other demonstrations
Pixim – Digital video technology which allows images to be seen regardless of light levels. Very useful for surveillance cameras. Digital image sensor and digital image processing are combined at the time of capture. Each pixel acts as a camera. A scan of
an area will reveal objects and people that normal cameras can not pick up.
Vivato – Indoor WiFi switch that covers an entire floor of an office building. Creates WiFi zones.
Lifescape Solutions Inc. – Picasa Sharing Network does magical things with pictures
ActiveWord Systems Inc. – a really unique, creative, and productive tool for leveraging your personal productivity
ManyOne Networks – a new way to browse the web visually.
IronPort – An email information service that provides unprecedented visibility into a sender’s identity allowing flexibility to block or approve.
EFI – electronics for imaging – PrintMe Enterprise allows a user to print from any device to any printer in the enterprise with a single printer driver. Will be sold on a per seat license basis.
BravoBrava – Pulls together multi sources in a mosaic: TV, streams from the Net, photo albums
Digital Sun – a wireless sensor network that controls irrigation of lawns reducing cost by up to 50%
Castbridge Inc. – Lightweight technology for sharing word and excel documents Enables interactive file sharing.
Socratic Learning Inc. – A Web site that has tutors for use by children. Targeted at inner city kids.
Internet Radio
TerraDigital Systems LLC – Player Internet Radio. Very creative UI that allows you to use your finger to browse album covers. Delivers up to three separate channels of music. Also plays streaming Internet and AM/FM. Wireless range of 500 feet.
FullAudio – Online music service. Hundreds of thousands of music selections. You can select music in numerous ways. It has channels, stations, trakpacks, dj discussions which add personality to music, teach you about artists, etc.
Finding Information
Groxis Inc. – Visual representation of data. Provides content management of large amount of pieces of information and provides a vivid graphical/color image map to browser through the information. Product is called Grokker.
OpenCola – broad based search that includes web, documents, peer-to-peer connections. Very sophisticated.
Meaningful Machines – Knowledge Acquisition Engine looks at a large corpus of documents and finds the equivalent terms you might mean. Enter God and it comes back with heaven, The Lord, etc.
Spam Fighters
Mail Frontier – uses large white lists; customers, vendors, etc. It also uses blacklists. There is also a p-p network of people who agree on what is spam. Can also set categories; e.g. sexual content that will not be admitted. Update Mar. 2013 – acquired by Sonicwall
Cloudmark – Product called Authority. Doesn’t use normal rules approach or white/black lists. It uses what they all spam DNA or spam genes.
SenderBase.com – gateway filtering white/black lists. Looks very sophisticated.
Managing IT Assets: Maintaining What You’ve Got
Euclid – enterprise infrastructure monitoring of business processes such as procurement, customer service, cash flow, costs, overtime, quality, etc.
Vieo – Systems management, adaptive application infrastructure management. They have an appliance. The appliance uses application tuning “knobs” to allocate number of applications servers, network bandwidth for each available application. It claims to optimize resources.
VMWare – one million users. 300 people and profitable. Showed with Five Operating Systems running simultaneously on an IBM xSeries. Now has SMP support.
Managing IT Assets: Building New Applications
Certive – Rapid business intelligence. Transforms and extends data. Multidimensional capability to pull data together to analyze how a business is operating. Includes ability to predict anticipated results.
Laszlo Systems Inc. – provides an improved UI within a web page for transaction oriented web sites. Uses existing server side infrastructure and any browser. Uses an xml development environment and javascript.
Managing IT Assets: Web Services
Dorado Corporation – Uses web services to link individual applications within banking and real estate. Enables end to end process for consumers. Looks like one application to the user but it is actually many messages and applications talking to each other.
AptSoft Corporation – Uses web services to enable applications to talk to each other. Focused on financial services. When a customer takes some action, such as a large withdrawal or an address change, the customer service application is notified. Creates business objects to facilitate the communication.
Tuesday, February 18, 2003
General Session
Sprint – Demo of phone stuff. Very hard to relate to. I am biting my tongue on this one.
Security
BBX Technologies Inc. – an operating system layer that traps, trips, prevents, eliminates attacks. Government agencies said to be using it.
Preventsys Inc. – Network audit and prevention system. Looks for policy violations.
Liquid Machines – protection of sensitive information. Enables denial of access to files no matter how they might be stolen. Goes well beyond password protection or network access.
Delean Vision – Uses a camera to recognize/authenticate people based on skin. It makes a digital skin print that is based on color, reflectivity, etc.
Small Business
Succeed Corporation
Panel
Making History: The Next Chapter Dan Bricklin, Mitch Kapor, John Patrick, Les Vadasz
Pictured left are Mitch Kapor, John Patrick, and Les Vadasz photographed with a camera on Dan Bricklin’s lap during the panel. Pictured right – the view backstage before the panel went on.
Device Computing
Eka Systems – EkaNet Device Networking Platform delivers a self-installing, self-configuring wireless device networking platform.
IBM – The infoScope blew people away. A handheld digital camera-equipped PDA takes a snapshot of text in various languages, sends it to an IBM server, translates to English, and displays the results.
SupportSoft – In a collaboration with IBM, delivers a comprehensive device management solution. A pervasive necessity.
Evolving Email
Stata Labs – Bloomba, an Outlook email substitute with very powerful and very fast search. Technology designed to kill folders as primary way to organize things.
Oddpost Inc. – Very clever approach to web based email. Uses xml, dhthl, and soap. While dhtml updates the browser page, soap calls talk to the server. Does away with page refreshes and other web anomalies. Uses basian analysis to remove spam.
Open Field Software – Ela Pro looks at your inbox and organizes your email. Uses an adaptive learning agent to know where things should go.
Collaboration
Tacit Knowledge Systems – ActiveNet drives and coordinates collaboration throughout the enterprise. Includes people whose interests align with yours. Launches people into collaborative tool.
WebEx Communications – Their demo crashed but worth looking at. I saw it in person and it does work.
Kubi Software Inc. – Transforms email into a collaborative tool.
Instant Messaging
ActiveBuddy Inc. – Wireless application development platform. Develop applications without having to engage the service provider.
NetGen Video – Easy to use interactive and tools to implement video instant messaging.
- Conference Update
- Demo 2003 – Photo Gallery
- Dan Bricklin’s blog entry on Demo 2003
