Demo! Day 1

I'm liveblogging from Demo! today and tomorrow. I did this last year, giving a blow-by-blow at what I was seeing, but I didn't find that to be very insightful so I'm going to try something different this year. Check back throughout the day.

Really strange setup for the wireless network this year, it took me a little while to figure it out

The reason why I like Demo is that it is the one conference of the year that covers multiple industry segments, including consumer hardware and software, enterprise, and enabling technology, and does it in a way that ties everything together. The action is fast and furious with a great many companies presenting over the 2 days and an excellent roster of speakers. Demo is also somewhat intimate in that everyone is approachable, Chris Shipley does an awesome job of producing this event and what I really appreciate is that she makes every effort to recognize people who are Demo regulars with invitation only receptions and personal introductions, she is the consummate host.

As I browsed the list of presenters I was pleasantly surprised to see that the great majority of companies are enterprise software in focus. This is encouraging because I, like many other investors, have been of the belief that the really cool innovation is happening in the consumer segments. Just look at the excitement around CES for proof of this. So needless to say, it’s encouraging for me to see how many software and hardware companies see enterprise as a viable market for them to attack. I also expect to see software as a service as a central theme this week, and it’s something I’m really intent on seeing in detail… will report back on that for sure.

Here’s a rundown on some companies that are presenting in the opening segment.

iControl Networks
Home control and automation

Lot’s of systems are available to do this, but they are usually quite expensive and complex to install (we are going through this right now in our own home). This system has a collection of sensors and monitoring devices, a control hub, and a software portal, which looks pretty nice from here. This looks super easy to install and configure. There is also a really cool interface for a cellphone or PDA… although I have to comment that these interfaces always look good in the demo and never work as good as the demo. This is something to look into if you are interested in such things, I’m going to check it out later in the Demo pavilion.

VKB
Bluetooth keyboard

Worth pointing out that this is a virtual keyboard, the device projects a keyboard image onto any surface and can be used with a PDA or other mobile device. You really have to see this thing to believe it. In terms of demo sex appeal, this has it. They had some trouble getting the demo to work, but this is a cutting edge product so it doesn’t surprise me that there are some glitches.

I’d love to have one of these for my smartphone… and can you imagine how laptops would look if the keyboard was virtual like this. I can also imagine a lot of uses in industrial controls. Very cool.

MDA
3d Camera and scene modeler
All I’m gonna say about this is that the television show CSI should have one of these.

You HAVE to see this stuff in action to understand it.

Meru Networks
Wireless networks

Cellular wireless LAN (which seems to put it in competition with WiMax), but this is 802.11 technology. It seems like VoIP is a big driver for wireless network companies, which I can certainly see. The demo consisted of showing a streaming video in a before/after scenario. As expected, the before run was choppy and the audio was losing synch with the frames. The after shot was flawless, along with the added twist of the presenter doing an audio overlay via VoIP. This is about as good as you can expect with the current state of the art, I am impressed.

Now if they could only make the Demo wireless network work better, I am having trouble getting online.

Mission Research
Software for nonprofits

This is a category of software that doesn’t get much attention, but it’s a big opportunity with unique requirements. We participate in a range of non-profits through our charitable giving efforts and the level of automation is pretty limited, mostly Excel spreadsheets and such.

I think I’ll get a copy of this for each of our portfolio companies; they all qualify as non profits :0

This app has a great interface and user experience, there’s a lot that enterprise software developers can take away from looking at how this app works. One thing that I really liked is that they are building in social networking technology into the app.

Motorola
iRadio

Okay, the guy started out by saying that “this will fundamentally change how you…” Like I’ve never heard that phrase before! But I have to say that the demo was pretty frickin cool.

There is so much innovation happening in radio right now, with satellite, HD radio, this product, and much more all making radio interesting again.

Serious Magic

Video blogging tool called vlog. Great demo, the presenter used the product to do the entire demo. I think this company gets a Demo God award.

The second product is a powerpoint add-on that actually has the potential to make powerpoint slides more interesting... no word on if it will make powerpoint presentations any better, but at least they will look better.

Seriously (no pun intended) this Ovation product is really compelling and if I actually gave presentations with powerpoint I would buy this product based just what I saw today.

NTERA
display technology

this is a nano-based hardware technology that makes LCD screens have a white background instead of a grey background. Hopefully there is more to it than that.

NewTech
broadcasting visual effects.

Not interested.

Theme Watch: It's clear to me that video delivery over the internet is a major theme, but more importantly, video production in the form of webcasting and video blogging. I guess most people prefer to watch a video than read text... I'm probably the exception.

Satori Labs
enterprise hardware for healthcare

digital pen with a PDA and a clipboard (remember when Cross Pens tried that years ago?). Forms used in healthcare are digitized when they are filled out.

I've tried handwriting recognition and have never been satisfied with it. There's too much review of what you just wrote to see that it did in fact digitize correctly. This technology seems to overcome many of the hurdles, it did demo very well, but I'd have to see a real world customer trial before I'd invest in something like this. Even though the handwriting piece worked well, the application still managed to introduce more steps that like approval and transmittal that medical professionals may balk at.

This does bring to mind the post that Barry wrote recently about documents being the new interface to applications.

Realtime Enterprises

Web services-based technology for yada yada yada. The demo didn't seem to work so I'm not sure exactly what this is. By the way, demos sometimes don't work, it's not a big deal.

Streambase
streaming database technology

Cool. This is a neat company and I'm excited to see them here. This company is doing some incredible things with high performance database technology, which is essentially processing information without storing a lot of it. This is really important for things like financial trading transactions, RFID and much more.

I heard that the pilot apps they developed with some Wall St. trading shops were processing over 140,000 messages per second, which is absolutely incredible. We're looking at this deal but they already closed the round so I don't think we can squeeze in, but I would love to get in on this.

This is just another reason why Demo is such a good event, not only do you get the wild-eyed first time entrepreneur, but you get the seasoned pro like Mike Stonebraker.

Mediabolic

another platform that changes television... this is a hardware device that at first blush looks like another media server. Let's see how the demo goes.

this is a little difficult to describe, but it looks like they use web services to integrate web-based applications into the media server. The example they showed used a movie trailer to initiate a netflix transaction adding the movie to your queue. There's more stuff that takes RSS feeds for tv, kinda cool. I'm going to check out this company in the demo pavilion to learn more about it.

Teleo
VoIP calling service

Demo didn't work, I don't know what they are doing. This isn't there fault, the network just went down.

JotSpot
Wikis

Great UI. Lot's of play on Shirky's "situated app" thesis. This doesn't look like a wiki in the sense that we have become accustomed to, it's much more like that database application, kind of like a hosted MS Access product. Of course, there's much more than just the db, but that's the first thing I thought of.

The versioning is very wiki, and it's worth pointing out that this should be in more applications. Good data integration, and a clever services layer built into the scripting system that allows you to integrate with services like Hoover's and Salesforce.com.

Comments

[Pradee]

Great...info...can we get links at the end of day. If it is not much of a trouble.
Links for Day1
1.iControl Networks
2.vkb
3.Meru Networks.
4.Serious Magic

We can just bookmark it and go through it.
Thanks,
--Pradeep.

[jeff]

I've been adding links in my downtime, just keep checking back for updates to the post.

Plus I think I'll break out the posts to be more readable, that should help.

[Pradeep]

Thanks a TON...
--Pradeep