DEMO continues to be my favorite conference — the semi-annual event took place this past week in San Diego, California. It was an uneventful trip from Palo Alto, where I had visited Mediazone, and on to San Francisco for a flight with Southwest (possibly the best airline in operation in the states) to San Diego to join the DEMO opening reception.
There were some key trends that were reinforced at DEMO again this year. Many companies in some way talked about mobile. Most companies either provide a web service or use web services as their platform. The term “cloud” is seeping into the vocabulary. Most companies were media related in some way or provided or used social networking. None of these things are new, by any means, but DEMO confirmed their strategic importance and demonstrated significant implementations. I don’t think any of them have cracked the code so to speak but there were many that had exciting visions and demos. I visited the ones in which I had the most interest. Chris Shipley kicked off the conference with insightful comments about the industry. (See the Demo blog for more on her thoughts). She talked about how the web has evolved from banking and buying things to a social web with a lot of user generated content to a web that will create real market value. Only a small percent of Internet users actually take advantage of the potential of the social web. This next phase will bring down the barriers: syndication, distribution, constant connectivity, on demand and lead to the distributed web. There will be new devices, new protocols beyond the desktop and mobile. Collaboration will become purposeful, not just “social”. All this will be accompanied with advances in usability, security, and authentication.
The Demo conference allows entrepreneurs to show off new gadgets, software, hardware and business ideas and enables the press, analysts, investors, and technology enthusiasts to assess what they see. The product introductions that take place reveal key technology trends over the coming 12 to 18 months. This year there were 72 companies showing off — each getting six minutes on stage to tell their story. Chris screens the companies and introduces them to the audience. After the main tent sessions the attendees get to visit with the companies in the “Demo Hall”. There isn’t time to visit all of them so I try to
be selective — I visited 25 of the companies this time. Some of the ones I found interesting follow. They are in no particular order.
If you asked me which of the 72 launches I found most interesting I would have to say Telnic, Ltd., the “dot tel” company. Having yourname.tel will allow you to store, update and publish all your contact information and web links directly on the Internet. This is not a web service — the data is actually stored in the infrastructure of the Internet. The heart of the Internet is the DNS — the Domain Name System. Among other tasks, the DNS translates humanly-meaningful domain names (like amazon.com) to the numerical address (like 72.21.210.11). The names and numbers are stored in special purpose computers that are scattered around the world. With dot tel, companies or individuals will be able to have their contact information stored there too. It will be the one official place to have directories for people and companies. You will be able to choose how much information you want public (maybe just your name and your web site or blog address) and which data you want to be private.The private information will be encrypted and can be selectively shared with people or organizations that you authorize. People will be able to reach you on their mobile with the touch of a button through the dot tel directory. No web site or hosting is involved. I think this will be a big deal.

Plastic Logic, Ltd. showed an e-book that can display full-sized documents. It is like an 8.5 x 11 Kindle and will replace a briefcase full of documents. It was sort of a computer but not really a computer. I am a bit skeptical on this one.
A number of companies showed how the web is gradually replacing television as we know it. Use your favorite search engine and take a look at Awind Inc., RealNetworks, Inc., beeTV, RemoTV, Inc., Invision TV, LLC, and ffwd.com, Inc. Or just revisit the DEMO Conference Agenda for links to what Chris and team thought about them.
A handful of companies showed products that make creating, sharing, and consuming digital bits more enjoyable. See UGA Digital, Inc., Trinity Convergence, Inc., Blue Lava Technologies, Inc., Kadoo Inc., MixMatchMusic, Ltd., Photrade, LLC, MeDeploy, and The Echo Nest Corp. Photrade is yet another company in the digital photography space. They will allow you to share and protect photos you take, purchase photos that others have taken, and make money from your photos. With the plummeting of high quality digital cameras and the availability of software that can make an amateur photo look professional there is a growing market here.
Mobile will become a bigger and bigger part of our lives. Maverick Mobile Solutions, Pvt. Ltd. has a solution that protects your phone in case you lose it. It sets off various bells and whistles. Not a bad idea as we put more and more personal data on our phones. G.ho.st lets you put your PC on your mobile phone. You have to see it to believe it. WebDiet claims to make losing weight and getting healthy easy by using your mobile phone to enter everything you eat and get an analysis that optimizes your diet. If you want to chat and share more with your friends take a look at Myriad Group.
There were more than a half-dozen companies showing off new ideas for protecting and managing digital assets. As we move more and more of our pictures, conversations, movies, notes, documents, etc. to the digital world, the security of them becomes more and more important. One of the companies I found quite interesting in this area is Usable Security Systems, Inc. (Update Feb. 4, 2013: acquired in 2010 by Webroot) UsableLogin is their product and what they are trying to do is make passwords as we know them obsolete and give us secure access to any web site. All you have to do is recognize a picture you have chosen and remember one simple codeword to log in securely. Some of us have more than 100 login/password pairs. I think Usable may have a problem getting some banking sites to cooperate but even if just 80% of the sites you visit could be handled with a single password the Rachna Dhamija, did her PhD in security at Berkely and she gave a very good demo. See it here.
As a security aside, if you use Gmail, I highly recommend selecting the https option in the settings. This doesn’t guarantee security but it does insure that the data going back and forth between your computer and Google is encrypted.
There were many more great demos. Browse your way through the DEMO Conference Agenda and see what catches your eye.
The flight back to New York on American Airlines offered an unexpected surprise. GoGoInflight offered broadband Internet service. The price was $12.95 and the performance was excellent. I ran a speedtest and found the results to be better than what I get from Comcast Cable at home. The WiFi connection works with both laptops and any mobile phone that has WiFi (like the iPhone).