Our Top Picks from DEMO Spring 2010

The DEMO Spring 2010 conference wrapped up earlier this week, and a plethora of new and existing companies came out of the wood work to showcase their new products, technology, and software. While we saw plenty of praise-worthy submissions, there were some that really got us excited about where the world of mobile tech is heading. Here are a few of our favorite products that could really shake up your mobile tech universe this year.

Venuegen: Second Life Meets WebEx

As a browser-based 3D Internet meeting platform, Venuegen (starting at $90 per month) allows business colleagues to meet and interact with each other in a virtual world, complete with their own semi-realistic avatars. While this service is built on top of a gaming platform, its real-world uses are a bit more serious; its creators imagine companies using Venuegen to take online conferencing to a whole new level, allowing users to meet, collaborate, share, and present information in a variety of environments.

Once you upload three pictures of yourself at various angles, the software algorithmically generates your avatar’s body and face. While the controls are still a bit clunky, your online persona can stand up and navigate the designated meeting area; you can even change your avatar’s facial expressions and execute various hand gestures. The premise might seem gimmicky at first glance, but demonstrations have shown how this app could be quite useful for sales teams, as well as the education market.

eXaudios Technologies’ MagInify: Real-time Emotion Detector

This smart software can actually recognize the emotions of a given caller’s voice. Built on the idea that conversations are made of three elements–verbal content, intonation, and face and body language–MagInify can actually detect stress  levels in a person’s voice.  With the MagInify Call Center, the software actually shows happy people in green and angry callers in red. A floor manager at a call center, then, is warned when a customer is about to lose their cool, allowing them to preemptively step in and diffuse the situation. MagInify can even tell a manager which employees are best at handling such intimidating conversations. Though the software isn’t perfect (eXaudios claims about 80 percent accuracy), it brought home  the $1 million DEMOgod audience grand prize.

Gwabbit: Your Contacts in the Cloud

This company has been around for a while–its Gwabbit for Outlook app, which automatically finds contacts in an e-mail and adds them into your Outlook address book, won a DEMOgod award last year–but Gwabbit just announced a new way to back up your data to the cloud. Dubbed the Gwab-O-Sphere, the service keeps your contacts synced up with a plethora of other repositories of contact information, such as Salesforce. com and LinkedIn. It also alerts you of Facebook or Twitter handles for a given contact. Juggling all this information on your own can be a real time sink, so it’s refreshing to see the steps Gwabbit is making to organize everything for you in the blink of an eye.