DEMO 2006: Day Two - Morning

• MyPeople: US nation-wide phone service, allowing you to call by dialing or speaking the number (or the name). Other services include reminders, wake up calls, one call-tell all, etc. Sounds cool but for one thing: an annoying “This is so exciting” greeting message that I would hope you can turn off or change.
• Echo Communications: tool to extend the access of online communities to mobile phones, including Skype. The system seems to extend presence as well as allow Skype users to call a mobile user through a straight Skype connection.
• Zink Kat: Chili is a cordless device targetting the teenage market, aggregating the functionality of a cordless phone, internet radio, MP3 player, CD management, etc. It connects to a base station that is attached to a PC. The PC run text-to-speech and speech-to-text software that transforms user interactions in voice messages/commands. This might have some applications, but I wonder whether teens would find this so hot (does it connect to MySpace).
• Transparensee Systems: sees the next opportunity in search in enabling fuzzy queries in structured data (as in you query a database and get matching results, and then get delivered approximate results that only match a subset of components). An example, in real estate search, allows the user to enter house hunting criteria, and indicate which ones are more important than others (price vs. size, etc.).
• Nexidia: has developed technology to find keywords in audio and video content, and point to the relevant piece of media. Advanced searches include “find keyword(s) A AND keyword(s) B within 5 secs”, and allows for keywords to be mispelled since it relies on phonetics. Nexidia licenses its technology that allows the indexing and retrieval of media content, but not offer a consumer service – too bad.
• Kosmix: has developed technology to automatically categorize the web – the first real innovation since PageRank (Anand’s claim :-). Kosmix crawls the web (3.2B pages indexed) and assigns a category to web pages (Health, Travel, Politics for now), which allows the company to deliver more accurate search solutions. Their technology can be used to quickly deploy vertical solutions, in a matter of weeks (“where you can search less, and find more”). Matt Marshall wrote a great piece on Kosmix launch.
• Truveo/AOL: Tim Tutlle, Truveo’s (former) CEO, actually presents the AOL Video portal – which will include Truveo’s functionality (after its acquisition) in a few weeks. He demonstrates the Intel VIV technology, allowing the access of AOL Video content through a TV set.
• Panaratio Database Services: has developed a solution to explore and analyze analytic databases, and visually build hypercube queries. Results are displayed through graphics, lists or tables. It allows to handle very large amounts of data (millions of rows, hundreds of columns,…) on a laptop. Very powerful, if you need this kind of functionality.
• Zimini: announces the beta availability of a its online coupon platform. It is based on a piece of software that consumers install on their PC, in which they enter their personal profile. This will allow these consumers to receive promotional offers that match that profile, are always up-to-date, and avoid being spammed as nauseam because they were one interested in one specific promotion. Online merchants will use Zimini to build their campaigns, and limit the scope of their offer to relevant consumers. Intriguing.
• Sprout Systems: announces MailRoom, a solution for small businesses to manage, prioritize and in some cases automatically reply, to the email they are receiving (stats mentioned is that SMBs spend up to 50% of their time answering). It is based on a Web-based UI that provides ready-made forms, email answers and workflows to speed up email management. This sounds interesting, but I am concerned about the scalability of the demo’ed solution to hundreds of emails, and thousands of contacts.
• Eeminder: gives access to corporate data from handheld platforms, in a bi-directional way. Also analyzes emails sent to team members in order to add relevant information, and turn them into tasks that can be integrated in a CRM system. Includes a consumer free version.
• iotum: a Web 2.0 call management application that allows users to chose which calls they want to pick up, and those they route to voice mail automatically. It uses MSN Messenger’s status as an indicator of availability. Upon setting up an account, you enter your phone numbers, upload your contacts, and define contact calling rules.
• Open Connect Systems: announces soaComprehend, a solution that discovers business processes implemented on mainframe systems through “green screens”, and build custom web-based UIs/web services to optimize user mainframe interactions.
• SharpCast: new Photo management solution that offers seamless mobile, pc and web access of the same library. Modifications done to a photo on one incarnation of the system is transparently replicated on others (in quasi real-time). Photos is the first media type made supported by SharpCast, which will offer others in the future, as well as a set of APIs.
• LocaModa: technology “powering the web outside”. Allows brands to connect with audiences in concerts, cafes, etc. by displaying on a large screen or a wb site  messages received via emails/text messages or RSS (this is an example). A second application enables consumers looking at a screen in the street to drive the content of that screen via a cell phone (this is an application in the real estate market).
• BroadRamp: is a content delivery platform that simplifies formats, compression,etc. It allows for the access of multimedia content from any browser without requiring any download. This provides instant access to multimedia audio or video. E-commerce capabilities are also included in the platform.
• Yahoo Photos: world’s largest photo services (30M uniques last month, 3B photos in the archive, twice as big as the second largest). Yahoo is demonstrating the new version of their Ajaxy user interface. Includes tagging, friends photos, access to YIM and Yahoo Mail address book. Cute.
• Vizrea: facilitates the upload of photos snapped on camera phones onto a PC, blog or web site. Integrates with Nokia Album, Nokia’s photo management solution, and extracts geolocation if available.
• Smilebox: online photo packaging solution, generating slideshows, scrapbooks, greeting cards, etc. based on thousands of designs. Nicely done. My experience of watching my kids do scrapbooking is that they like to touch, cut, glue things and – let’s face it – create a mess. You just don’t get that online. From the press release: Smilebox, Inc. also announced today that it received $5 million in funding in a round led by Frazier Technology Ventures in Seattle. This is in addition to $1 million in financing Smilebox, Inc. previously received from angel investors including Rob Burgess, former chairman of Macromedia, Jonathan Gay, former CTO of Macromedia and Rob Glaser, CEO of RealNetworks.
• Vivid Sky: custom device, and software, providing information and services to attendees in a sports stadium. Allows fans to find their seat, order food/beverages, get in-stadium coupons,… Also gives access to instant replays of the play, including the possibility to choose the camera to be used to provide the perspective.
• Newsgator Technologies: announces a private label hosted solution that provides publishers with an easy mean to integrate RSS feedreading on their own website, and offer an online – branded – feed reader to their users. SFGate is the first customer (announced today) of this new service.
• SimpleFeed: feed management solution (similar to FeedBurner). Provide categorization, simple subscription, etc. The couple of features that I noted were: 1) the ability to add CSS templates so that branding can be maintained for feed items when accessed through a feed reader, and 2) it is possible to make the content of a web site available through a feed by importing its content into SimpleFeed. You can therefore subscribe to web site changes, which is pretty powerful.

PS: Photos, spell checks, etc. to be done later.

Tag: demo2006, demo

Comments

[Charles Jolley]

Jeff:

Thanks for mentioning us! We've thought quite a bit about how our software will scale up for our typical users, but I would be very interested in your thoughts. Come by booth #20 this afternoon and I would love to talk to you about it.

Cheers,
-Charles

[Robert Carlton]

Jeff:
Thanks for sitting through our presentation of Zimini, and sharing your thoughts on our product. We're really excited about the launch of Zimini; and would love to hear from your readers how we could make it even better.
Robert

[Stephen Randall]

Thanks for mentioning us and including a screenshot. The Network Truth project is something we're excited and passionate about.