Posts tagged demo-conference

Demo 2006 Note: Kosmix

Check out this cool subject matter specific search site. Currently they have 3 subject matters, Health, Politics and Travel. Looks nicely done. Kosmix.

Technorati Tags: cool, cooltool

Off to Demo 2006

I’ll be at the Demo 2006 conference for the next several days. Next post from Arizona!

Technorati Tags: demo2006

Meetup in Phoenix AZ, February 7th

I’m trying something – organize a bloggie meetup when I am in Arizona the second week in Februray. Check it out and join me if you like!

Technorati Tags: blog, blogbridge, democonference, meetup, phoenix

An actual “trial balloon”

A company that was launched at the Demo conference (which i am going to this year) is deploying in North Dakota:

“A trial balloon will be launched in the next few weeks to test the idea, said Schafer, who left office in 2000 after eight years as governor.” (from Associated Press)

It just struck me as funny.

(People ask: how much time does it take you to do a post every day in your blog? This one took less than 100 seconds. Would have been less if not for this parenthesized meta-joke.)

Technorati Tags: democonference

BlogOn Conference: I’m on the advisory board

BlogOn is a conference being organized by the inimitable Chris Shipley.

The full name is “BlogOn 2005 Social Media Summit”.

And yes, **yours truly is on the advisory board FWIW.

The conference is in New York City, on October 17 and 18.

Look here for more information.

You probably know Chris Shipley from the ...

[DEMO 2005] Top Demos

There’s already so much written about Demo 2005, it seems like there’s not much to add. First off, let me recommend Conferenza Premium Reports. It’s a very reasonably priced subscription service that provides first hand reports of all the major and not so major conferences. Shel Israel’s report on Demo 2005 is comprehensive and excellent.

My list of top demos, extremely briefly A word about methodology. As I watched the 7 minute demos, I would write 2 or 3 bullets of what struck me, and a grade from A+ to F. Of the 60 or so demos, these rated an A- or better.

...

[Demo 2005] The Enron Corpus

The demos at this year’s DEMO are quite good. One interesting thing I noticed is that there are several productsconnected to keeping companies out of legal trouble due to problematic internal and external emails, or to help get them out of trouble if they get into it. In several demos we were treated to examples based on the “Enron internal emails.” The first two times I thought I was seeing a coincidental picking of the same humor by two seperate companies.

But when it came up again, I went searching, and wouldn’t you know that during the discovery process of the whole Enron ...

Behavior Signature Analysis (Demo Series

Behavior Signature Analysis (Demo Series 10) This is a little arcane but I thought it was an interesting pattern among several products launched at Demo 2004. “Behavior Signature Analysis” is the idea of learning something about the intent or higher level purpose of an activity by doing pattern analysis on some aspect of it’s low level behavior. There were several companies showing products that tried to do this at the Method invocation and HTTP Request levels: that you can tell something about meaning strictly by analyzing patterns of low level.

Memento: BC Krishna has built a really cool new solution to measure and understand the actual use of busi...

What you may not know

What you may not know about Eclipse. (Demo 2004 Series 10) If you are a Java developer and you haven’t checked out the Eclipse Development tool from www.eclipse.org, then you owe yourself a treat. Who knows if you get excited about that kind of thing, but it gives me chills. Here are some claims to fame:

It’s free.

It’s open source

It’s as good as better as that paragon of tools Microsoft Visual Studio

It’s fast

It’s visually stunning as a Windows desktop application

And … It’s written in Java!

Check it out, you won’t be sorry. **But that’s not really the topic of this post. **

Back at Demo 2004, mValent demonstr...

Update on Digital Photography. When

Update on Digital Photography. When I wrote a few days ago about OurPictures Network. a new service that was launched at Demo 2004, it wasn’t available yet. I just found out that they have started running a free trial. I haven’t experimented much with it yet, so I don’t know how good it is.

Flipstart from Vulcan (Demo 2004

Flipstart from Vulcan (Demo 2004 Series – 9): This is a weird little device. It’s essentially a Windows XP computer using thumb keyboard. The dimensions are (from memory, now 4″ x 6″ x 1″) It has a 30Gig disk, and fast chip. It also has built in Wi-Fi. It has a port replicator allowing full size keyboard and screen to be attached. The screen is very high resolution. All in all it looks attractive and kind of useful.

But the pitch was that this was a new approach to mobile computing, what you would come up with if you started with a blank slate, etc.

Watching the demo and then playing with it, I have to say that it didn’t really live up to that...

Social Networking (Demo 2004 Series

Social Networking (Demo 2004 Series – 8) I’ve written a few times about Orkut and LinkedIn and the kind-of-funny-kind-of-strange infatuation with Orkut among the Digerati that seems to have peaked and now died off. Anyway, Friendster was demoing at Demo, so I had a chance to look and talk to them. I learned a few little things:

First off, Friendster has a strong Yahoo influence. I sense that maybe some of the people there came from Yahoo, which tells me that a likely direction for them is to be **acquired by Yahoo at some point. **

Friendster tries to position itself away from a dating service and more as a general purpose Sociall Networking service. When asked to compare themselves with Orkut and LinkedIn, they claimed to have some millions of users and far more than the other guys. Their comment about Orkut – “it’s 85% men” – tells me something about how they really perceive themselves.

Comparing this years Demo to

Comparing this years Demo to previous years (Demo 2004 Series – 7A) As I’ve been writing these little Demo reports from my notes, I realized that as I have been going to Demo for years (in fact I think I’ve been to almost all of them) I had perhaps an interesting perspective, and this little thoughtlet bubbled in my brain:

In the last few years, the burst bubble seemed to impact Demo by showing down to earth, obvious ROI products and services. This year there seems to be a few more out-there product and service ideas. I thought that was a positive development and perhaps a sign that we are recovering somewhat from the shock of the last 3 years.

Email is not dead (Demo

Email is not dead (Demo 2004 Series – 7) I continue to be an avid follower of what’s going on in the email space. Why? Here are some things to think about:

From my eRoom and Collaboration days, I’ve been very aware of the challenges to achieving adoption. My view is that the challenge exists whenever the adoption of a new application or system requires some degree of coordination between a set of users. Email is by far the greatest example of an application of computers which has very successfully overcome that barrier. I want to learn from that.

Second reason: I’ve observed that the tools we use to work with email (the general striucture email appli...

New in the world of

New in the world of Digital Photography (Demo 2004 Series – 4) The beat goes on in the world of Digital Photography. Two very nice (and one less nice) Photo Sharing products were launched at Demo this year. Quick notes on three of those.

PhotoSite from Homestead. This is a very nice simple online photo album. It’s customizable and has very attractive album pages. There is an annual charge, but it’s probably worth it.

Share-a-lot. This is a different approach. It’s a very easy, peer to peer sharing of photos with specific other people. This is a free service, so the question does arise how they make money. Visually it...

Real Virtual Reality! (Demo 2004

Real Virtual Reality! (Demo 2004 Series – 6) I am not clear as to whether Total Immersion is a product, company, research product or what. But they had the most compelling and memorable technology demonstration. It was an amazing virtual reality experience of what they called “augmented reality.”

Basically what we saw was a video and audio display in real time. The camera started on the presenter as he was talking. In his hand was a long stemmed rose. Except in real life, he was holding his left hand in a fist, and the flower was added virtually. Every move, translation, rotation etc of his fist was perfectly matched with the movement of the rose creat...

Adobe Enterprise document control technology

Adobe Enterprise document control technology (Demo 2004 Series – 5) They have come up with a policy server to control and log access to pdf documents. I don’t think it has a name yet.

It is very similar but much more limited than Liquid Machine’s product (and Authentica.)

They are all somewhat exposed to Microsoft’s recent DRM features in Office 2003. I don’t really know the details of Microsoft’s product but one likely fact is that it works only on Office documents which is a big limitation. P

eople sometimes don’t recognize that this is a severe limitation – after all, the whole world uses Office, doesn’t it. Well yes, but there are some key other formats out there which are every bit as sensitive as Word and Excel. Graphics (Photoshop, Illustrator) and Cad (Autodesk and SolidWorks) come to mind.

Key Computing’s Xkey: (Demo 2004

Key Computing’s Xkey: (Demo 2004 Series – 3) By my informal survey, this was the favorite at demo. XKey is a tiny USB port device (kind of like one of those little USB flash devices) which, by plugging into a laptop, **transforms the host computer into a private, isolated, separate computer, connected by VPN to the corporate network. **

It’s hard to explain in a few words, but basically you plug it into the USB port while your computer is connected to your corporate LAN. Magically files, folders, exchange and outlook data, are all copied onto the device. When you take it and plug it into another (‘host’) computer, you get access to all yo...

Demo 2004 Series – I

Demo 2004 Series – I just returned from the Demo 2004 Conference, and I have some news and ideas that I will be writing about in the coming days. At the highest level, Demo is a conference that I’ve been going to for years. It is in the same league or family as PC Forum and Agenda. You might call it one of the legacy conferences (… to contrast it with the new cool conferences such as the Emerging Technology Forum and BloggerCon.)

If you are interested in what new products are coming out of the mainstream computer industry, Demo is great. Chris Shipley who i...

Search Innovations (Demo 2004 Series

Search Innovations (Demo 2004 Series – 2) – Two interesting Seach products were showcased: Grokker 2 from Groxis and p-Zoom from Big On The Net. They were both variations of a similar idea, with very different visual interfaces.

The core idea is to take the results of a search engine of some kind, and cluster and organize them to make them more understandable. Not a new idea, and in fact, there have been several products who have done this, none of which I can remember right off. Both Grokker and p-Zoom seem to work but in my view they don’t do enough in an e...