DEMO 2006: Day One - Afternoon

After a long break during which I got demos of RawSugar, Kosmix and – yes – Moobella’s ice cream (which has a very impressive technology, and less impressive taste). Here is a quick review of the companies we have seen this afternoon.

• Gravee: new search engines that is attempting to change the economics in place in the search market by sharing revenues with the actual owners of the content that is being surfaced through organic search (getting up to 70% of the ad share). Content which has been commented/ranked/tagged is also elevated in the results page, and any click-through on an ad on that page will see the owner of the page get a portion of the revenue.
• Polyvision: platform for group computing and collaboration – called the Virtual Flipchart System, that involves connected whiteboards system that make drawings available to remote users on their computers.
• VSee: peer to peer video conferencing system, based on a super simple user interface and user experience. VSee is also optimized in terms of bandwidth (requiring 1/2 of the typical bandwidth of other systems), has a high level of video quality and responsiveness. It also allows for application sharing. Because of the very high quality of the video, human interactions feel more “real”. Very impressive.
• Kaboodle: the social search and shopping application (that I am involved in). Manish has demoed the latest functionality rolled out just before Demo, showing how Kaboodle users will typically search for a given item on Google, save the information on Kaboodle, check if other users actually have performed a similar research to benefit from it, and eventually zero in on the best choice. "Kaboodle before you buy" is the word.
• Plum.com: Collect and share anything on the web. Founded by Hans Peter, and husband of Julie Farris (both being on stage). Plum is a bookmark application that allows users to extract information from pages and save them in local collections. These collections can be displayed according to a suite of displays (including a blog view), and are mashup-ready, taking in RSS feeds as live collections.  Pretty cool (and they have a blog).
• RawSugar: allows web site or blog editors to build  an automatic categorization of their content, and enable flat/hierarchical access to this content. It is also possible to integrate, and synchronize, one’s del.icio.us archive. I need to try and integrate RawSugar on Software Only and figure out the benefit to… you guys (the readers).
• Riya: Munjal Shah, Riya’s co-founder and CEO, demonstrates Riya’s photosearch functionality. Riya’s secret sauce is its automatic extraction and recognition of faces. The collective wizdom is used by the system because as a user, I can benefit from the training sets of other users, and therefore not have to tag each and every photo I am uploading (I can’t believe that I am part of the demo with a picture of me and Mike on the big screen). Much work has been done on the UI since the initial tests I have done. Rocks.
• TagWorld (just founded by DFJ): a “better version of MySpace” according to Freddy Kruger, the CEO of the company, who mentions that 700K users have joined over the past 3 months. Oliver Muoto demos the new social classifieds and stores functionality released today, with with he lists a movie, and creates a store, in a couple of minutes. A very cool implementation of social networking, photosharing, social commerce,...
• Krugle: an new search engine for developers (Koders seems similar), allowing open source code or IT information to be found, and downloaded in one’s development environment/source code control.
• Jitterbit: open source integration company launching at Demo today, offering a front-end tool enabling developing to program and deploy web service-based applications in a powerful way.
• IPswap: new marketplace allowing users to buy/sell/request “stuff” for a given price. The demo presented to us shows a user asking the IPswap community a solution to extend the reach of a wireless router for $25 – which got fulfilled. It is also possible to set the revenue share of that item for future sales. The goal of IPswap is to put together end users and developers without intermediaries.
• LogLogic: sells a drop-in appliance that collects the logs of different applications on a network, and enables storage for security and compliance purposes. This would have saved me *so much time* when I was trying to debug our Unix back-end deployments (15 years ago, doh).
• Persistent Technologies: desktop/notebook solution to save the system configuration, and restore it upon the next reboot. The demo was actually the CEO tearing apart his laptop (removing key files, hacking the registry,...), rebooting it and showing that it was back up and running without any IT intervention. Very useful.
• Avokia: high availability software solution for large, mission critial, ecommerce applications, databases, web services,...
• Extricom: launches TrueReuse, a dense wireless LAN amplifier for the enterprise, increasing coverage and mobility.
• iGuitar: has developed a USB interface for guitars, connecting them to computers (PCs AND Macs) and allowing musicians to capture music played on their guitar through different recording programs like GarageBand. Basically turning guitars into a computer peripheral that can serve a market of 60M guitars ($3B).

Best demo (personal taste): Riya (and not because I was in it :-), closely followed by Kaboodle, Plum, iGuitar and TagWorld.

Tag: demo2006, demo

Comments

[DaveMc500Hats]

"just f*o*unded by DFJ" -> "just funded by DFJ"

last i checked it was the entrepreneurs, not VCs, who found companies.

(altho if VCs *find* companies, they can of course then *fund* them too :)

[Russell Limprecht]

Thanks for the report. I use Rawsugar. You can see my tag cloud from Rawsugar.