DEMO 08

The InfoComm audio/video trade show is in full swing, and Texas Instruments DLP Products has pounced out of the gate with a couple of intriguing prototypes that look to push projector technology to the next level.

First up is TI’s revolutionary lamp-free projector that utilizes a PhlatLight LED light source and a BrilliantColor chipset for delivering a 1080p picture, while eliminating maintenance costs such as lamp replacements and filter changes (and seeing a 30% lower power usage).  Initially, the technology will be included in home theater projectors (a first for that category) that are set to hit the market later this year, but should trickle to the corporate side of things sometime afterward. Expect Optoma to be one of the first companies to adopt this new technology.

On the topic of Optoma, the company has announced plans to build a miniature stand-alone projector using the TI’s DLP Pico chipset. If you’re not hip to pico projectors here’s a mini-crash course: They’re super-small projectors, typically the size of a cell phone or smaller, designed to be hooked up to a cell phone, handheld gaming console, digital camera, PMP, etc, for sharing content with others (they can also be embedded directly into those devices). Optoma’s pico will be available in Asian and European markets later this year, with the U.S. getting some pico love sometime in 2009. Look for more information as we shimmy our way to Texas Instruments’ booth.

Here’s one last view of the sun setting behind Santa Rosa Mountain as DEMO 08 came to a close. Chris Shipley, the executive producer of the conference, noted two things during her introductions on the second and last day. First, she speculated that this would be “the last DEMO where social media is going to be a category onto itself,” she said. Having a social media aspect to your business has become so commonplace that companies will have to be reorganized along different lines.

One of the themes recurrent through the second day was about making searches smarter. “Google’s great, but it’s not enough,” Shipley said. Now that people are able to amass huge volumes of data with Web searches, it’s up to entrepreneurs now to help them make better sense of all of it.

Leading the “why didn’t I think of that” category is Delver, formerly known as Semingo, which combines Google-type searches with social networks. The company’s search engine crawls through social network sites, and builds a “social graph,” a tree representing your friends and friends of friends, and what they’ve posted that’s relevant to the terms you’re searching. In this way, the founders argue, search results have more significance, since they’re connected on am emotional level to the person doing the searching.

Putting news articles and current events into context graphically is the aim of Silobreaker, whose site creates several different charts showing the relationship between people, places, and issues. One of the most interesting is the “Network” chart, which treats the different categories as hubs connected to each other by spokes. For example, a search for “Hillary Clinton” (as in this link) will show connections to “Barack Obama,” “Bill Clinton,” and so forth. Hovering over any particular term brings up a window showing biographical information, as well as how that term is related to the original search query. Users can also move the hubs around the screen, even pull irrelevant ones into a trash bin. There’s still a few kinks–the chart kept disappearing while I was using Firefox on my Mac–but this could prove to be an invaluable tool for researchers and news hounds alike.

Jodange, another next-gen search engine, tracks what opinion makers are saying about certain topics, and charts their sentiments over time, and how their statements affect, or reflect, market trends. It can also be used to track topics in general, and what a number of people have been saying about it over time. I can see this site being used by the “I told you so’s” of the world, or by people looking to take weathermen or sports commentators to task for faulty prognostications.

There’s plenty more of interesting ideas and products that we saw at DEMO 08. Stay tuned to read more about them on this blog and in LAPTOP magazine.

We’ve known about LiveScribe’s Smartpen for a while, but we were finally able to try it out for ourselves at DEMO 08. Guiding us through was Byron Connell, the chief marketing officer, pictured at the right.

At just 1.3 ounces, the pen is very light. Its thickness, somewhere between a regular pen and a highlighter, makes it easy to hold for extended periods of time. There’s a small OLED display along the top part of the pen’s barrel that displays time, battery life, and a number of other features. It also comes with a magnetic USB dock that doubles as a recharging station.

In order to use the pen, users need to write on LiveScribe’s special paper, which has millions of microdots in the background. A small camera in the pen, just below the pen point, looks at the dots at a rate of 72 frames per second, and records what it sees. The camera doesn’t look at your pen strokes, per se, but scans a 6-by-6 grid of dots (about 1.8 mm square), and records that to the pen.

The pen has a built-in microphone about halfway up that is effective for close-up interviews. In our brief test, it did a decent job of eliminating background noise. There’s also a standard headphone jack in the top of the pen. The company includes a set of earbuds which have microphones embedded in them; these are used for creating stereo recordings, and are intended for use in large lecture halls, or in places where a source is moving around. These, too, did a good job of recording audio and playing it back in stereo.

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This is the view outside the Marriott Desert Palm, where the conference is taking place. Jealous? Me too. I shot this picture during the lunch break yesterday, but otherwise, I’m stuck inside a windowless auditorium with several hundred people. So why am I–and everyone else here–sacrificing the fresh air and scenic vistas for a darkened, climate-controlled room?

In short, because some of the products being shown here are truly innovative. They’re not just cool for cool’s sake, but they tackle problems in innovative ways.

Of the 39 presenters during the first day, several stood out–the kind of companies and products that people talked about over lunch and drinks–as particularly innovative. Here are three of them, selected at random.

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One of the companies whose presentation and product stood out during the first day of the DEMO 08 conference was SkyFire, a browser for Windows Mobile devices that, in their words, puts the full web on a mobile device. We had a few minutes to play around with it on an HTC Mogul at the company’s booth, and although it’s not yet ready for primetime, it did an excellent job of reproducing full web sites on mobile devices.

When it debuts (the beta version should be available in the next few weeks), SkyFire will be available for Windows Mobile 5 and 6 devices, with support for other operating systems to come later. The app loads in about 15 seconds, not the most blinding of speeds, but the company says they’re working to improve that.

It’s a proxy-based service, so Web requests go through SkyFire’s service, which reformats Web sites for its browser. Even so, it was extremely fast, loading pages just as quickly as a traditional browser.

ESPN.com loaded in about 5 seconds, complete with the annoying video that starts playing automatically. This time, though, it was a welcome surprise, as it streamed smoothly, as did Family Guy videos on YouTube, and 30 Rock videos on Hulu. We noticed very little, if any lag, pixilation, or stuttering.

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The format of DEMO08 is rather interesting: Each company only has 6 minutes to make their pitch in the main room, so they have to really distill their presentation to the essentials. For the most part, they’ve practiced their lines, some so much so that it almost feels like an infomercial, albeit with something you’d actually want to buy–no one’s cutting tomatoes and tin cans with Ginsu knives here.

The presentations boil down like this: There’s a brief introduction (usually by the CEO and a second in command), who then pose a problem, and how their company solves that problem with a brief demonstration. As Chris Shipley, the executive producer says, it’s a bit like drinking from a fire hose. At the same time, it’s a refreshing format that generally keeps the audience from drifting off. Shipley also has a folksy manner about her as she introduces the companies, which makes the conference a bit more intimate.

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Chris Shipley just kicked off DEMO 08, first with a little dance on the stage, and then told those assembled (and the several hundred watching online) how the presenting companies were chosen.

Of the hundreds of companies interviewed, the 77 presenters were selected not just for their originality, but also for how they represent the current market, and in the near future, or at least what Shipley & Co. believe will be the pressing problems of the coming years.

“We’re not driven by raw numbers or caps as much as we are about bringing great products here to see and representative of a wide range of ideas, not just Web 2.0 or search algorithms,” she said.

Individuals driving design, according to Shipley, is one of the core issues at DEMO 08. “As individuals continue to pile on the internet, they put tougher demands on our infrastructure, such as higher bandwith and greater security,” she said. And, as consumer-targeted, Web-based applications, such as banking and document sharing, have been made more attractive and easier to use, new design demands will be placed on business apps that are decidedly user-unfriendly.

To one extent or another, “we’re defined by the technologies we use,” said Shipley. “All this power to drive markets means little if we’re not driving improved experiences for ourselves.” It’s not just enough to incorporate text, voice, and video, but it has to be intuitive. It’s not the most groundbreaking of insights, but the hope is that improvements in consumer-oriented tech will drive better business innovations.”

Starting today, a technology conference with a message slightly more aspirational than other tech shows. Over the next two days, some 77 companies will present their plans and products to an audience of investors, executives, and journalists eager to hear about the newest solutions to today’s technological challenges.

As part of the criteria, a presenting company’s idea or product “cannot currently be in public distribution, be an upgrade to an existing product, be in an already saturated market category, or been widely covered in the media,” according to the organizers. It’s one of four DEMO conferences that are being held this year; San Diego, China, and Munich will also play host.

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