Blogging from Demo

Demo 2004, Day 1:

I enjoy Demo more than most conferences I go to, the format is quick and penetrating, the people are exciting, and who couldn't like Scottsdale in February (while it's raining in SF!). The conference this year promises to deliver the goods, with a broad technology agenda and a good roster of demonstrating companies.

Here's the "official" demo blog: http://demo2004.blogs.com/weblog/

Thanks to Aruba for offering the free Wifi connection I am using to post my blog updates.

Chris Shipley's Opening Remarks:

- Chris made a salient comment about how many of companies demo'ing this year have shipping products and paying customers. This is a good thing.
- 67 products are being demo'ed this year, I think last year was 50.
- The big driver in enterprise IT is a bottom up movement of individuals bringing portable technologies into and out of the enterprise. Protecting corporate assets as they move from corporate networks to the unprotected space is critical.

Liberated Desktop:

- very cool product called XKey was demo'ed by Seaside Software.. This little device is a USB processor, encryption engine, hard drive, VPN, database, and configuration engine. I was really impressed by this device, it allows you to take your data AND application configuration with you on a USB device that turns any computer into YOUR computer securely. It leaves no trace behind and manages a secure connection to your corporate network. I'm going to get one of these.
- Good was demoing their newest version of Good software for Pocket PC, but I wasn't exactly sure of what they were providing vs. what already comes in PocketPC. Some of the integration with telephony was cool, but it appeared to take advantage of PocketPC Phone edition, rather than a PocketPC connected via Bluetooth with a phone, something I am more interested in.
- Vulcan displayed their supersmall full function laptop, about the size of a portable DVD player. A 1ghz processor, 30gb drive, Wifi, and much more, it's quite an accomplishment. The always-on email and the low power display on the exterior of the clamshell is very interesting. However, as one of my venture colleagues at breakfast said, "very cool, but I'll be content to let Paul Allen dump a fortune into it."

The Rise of the Blog Nation:

- Mena Trott related the personal blogging experience, kind of defensively I might add.
- blogging for small business. Blogs are a way to explain your ideas and distribute your technologies. But in my view, this is classic guerilla marketing using a new technology platform, nothing terribly innovative about this. One cool idea was writing a RSS query inside of Feedster to collect and consolidate anything being written about the things you are interested in, in short, it's a cheap newsclipping service that can supercharge your marketing.
- blogging for big companies. Robert Scoble from M$oft talked about blogging in the company. Surprisingly, they have no restrictions on blogs from their employees, but then he talked some of the "Be Smart" rules they have published... so I guess they have rules after all. If I recall correctly, a M$oft employee got himself fired for some things he put on his blog.
- Greg Reinacker of Newsgator offered the most relevant points about managing blog content using RSS. The power of RSS is underappreciated in blog discussions, and this is disappointing as RSS offers a huge productivity lever for enterprise as it is a pub/sub for XML.
- I was surprised to hear very little in the way of new applications being enabled within the enterprise via blogs and RSS. How about product development collaboration, portals, event monitoring?
- how do you impose order in a corporate environment using blogs? You don't, it's classic bottom up that will defy any attempt to coordinate it.
- how do you make money blogging... consensus is that maybe you don't? Personally, I don't really care about this, blogging is a tool that enable stuff, not a market unto itself.
- By the way, IMO, wikis are more interesting than personal blogs.

SixApart:
- heavily focused on individual users, don't see Typepad evolving out of this focus and that's too bad.
- demo'ed moblogging live. Note to future demo presenters, use your time wisely and don't demo stuff that is cumbersome, you lose the rhythm.
- the voice blogging piece was very kewl.

Silkroad
- enterprise blogging, Silkblogs for the enterprise and the "future of how enterprises will communicate". Okay, ambitious but I like it.
- they used a stupid example scenario, a fire has broken out and people need to be notified. This is not a normal business event and a poor example. Also, the screen resolution was so small that I couldn't read anything on the overhead screen, but I'm going to check into this company and report back.

Oddpost
- saw these guys last year, liked it so much I signed up for an account
- they have a RSS aggregator service, called Newsdash, built into the service that is like Tivo for the web. It's good, and I'm use it occasionally, but there are better aggegators out there. The newsdash service is very interestings, but Google Viewer is more like Tivo for the web than this service.
- I use Oddpost and really like the company, if you're not a loser you will sign up for their service.

Waveblog:
- location-based blogging. Pretty fringe technology that is intellectually appealing, but IMO far too cumbersome to use to be mainstream. I just don't think people are wired to work in this fashion.

Feedster:
- massive micro publishing
- launched a new service call FeedPapers. It's a customized search engine that can be used to filter a large number of keywords.
- their demo presentation didn't do the company justice.

A Better Office Suite than M$oft Office?
- couple of companies demo'ing in this series.
- Evermore Software is a Chinese company, a first for Demo. What I don't understand is why companies going head-to-head with M$oft in the office application category bring to market an application that looks like Office? How about coming out with an office suite that is better than Office.
- Why would anyone buy a non-M$oft office suite when you can get OpenOffice for $0 license cost?
- they will probably do very well in Asia, which in itself could make for a very successful company.
- Stata Labs is back with synchronization features on top of their well-noted search technology.
- The inclusion of WebDav and IMAP support is important for synchronization through the firewall, the next big step for these kinds of apps.
- In short, this company has made a much better version of Outlook
- Qnext is launching some new sharing apps for sharing rich media. The question, according to this company, is not creating or editing rich content, but moving it from one place to the next.
- The presentation style was like an infomercial, as the woman sitting next to me observed "are they going to pull out a chicken roaster next"
- Allenport showed a product that was a lot like the first company, xKey, that allows you to move your configuration and data among various computers. Rather than a USB device, their service is a hosted app. I like the USB idea better. They use a biometric sensor (fingerprints) which, IMO, make the service not ready for primetime. But then again, it won't launch for a couple more quarters.

The Agile Enterprise:

the afternoon sessions began with a focus on enterprise IT, managing, delivering value, and measuring results.

- the first company to demo is mValent, a provider of IT management apps that help companies reduce the amount of time required to take apps from development to deployment. This strikes me as a workflow system that includes the necessary data packages for configuration.
- the company also provides a set of features for managing offshore development, ensuring that code stays in sync.
- I know this stuff is important, and delivers high value, but I just can't get myself wrapped around what they are doing. It just doesn't strike me as the kind of business that you can build a really large business around, even though the stats all say I'm wrong (Kintana?). Maybe it's just the prospect of selling apps to IT for IT use that scares me off.
- Symbol is out with a new Wifi switch that bundles a lot of stuff into one box. I'm a software guy so I kind of tuned out, sorry.
- In the "hotseat", a 60 second pitch, is Consera. They do automation of scripting, and most recently were acquired by HP. She nailed it, full pitch in 57 seconds.
- also in the hotseat is Foursticks, a pretty interesting company that prioritizes work processes to the network, e.g. sync your email without killing your webex session. This one is definitely interesting, I'll get a deeper dive in the demo pavilion.
- Above All Software is developing a composite application tool that tackles complex integration tasks, in the demo'ed case it was Salesforce.com integration in a custom app. It appears that the company is focusing on assembly and delivery of apps, not the atomic components. In my view, getting reliable and usable components is a pretty big order on it's own and most vendors have simply put SOAP wrappers on APIs.
- IMLogic demo'ed instant messaging integration with applications. They demonstrated a financial services trading application, and what was cool is that they didn't build their own IM client, they actually leveraged AOL IM within an app by feeding it fixed text to facilitate the transaction. This was very neat.
- Mainsoft was in the hotseat... obviously they didn't address the real issue they are in the hotseat for...
- Memento pitched a set of measuring applications that helps IT determine how applications are actually being used and what value they are creating. Could help but think about the movie titled Memento that features the lead character with an inability to have short term memories thus always reliving experiences as if they were new... which is many ways is probably an apt metaphor for enterprise IT, yet probably not the best name for a company! Nonetheless, interesting solution that matches use scenarios to actual measurable sequences, thereby supporting actual realized value versus theoretical ROI. I liked it.
- Pantero demoed their shared data service for complex data integration that focuses on data content vs. data schema. This is actually a huge problem in IT because most integration products focus on the schema not the actual content, for example, simple address fields have kind-of-similar structures but the data contained in them can be wildly different, and all accurate, and this can wreak havoc on things like shipping apps and sales tax apps. This company kind of reminds me of Contivo... but more data centric.
- Metapa is in the hotseat pitching database clustering apps for Linux. This company is recalibrating the bar in terms of unit economics in the datacenter, they can setup terabyte sized databases for less than $100k, and increase the performance of all database-reliant apps by introducing clustering technology at a new, low price point.
- WholeSecurity is next up, but the demo didn't seem to work very smoothly... and I was trying to figure out why the Wifi connection wasn't working... so I don't have much to say.
- MagniFire is tackling security by putting a firewall around every application service. This is a clever concept, TrafficShield will validate each request to an application service ensuring that it is appropriate for that user at that time.
- That's it, I'm done with demos from security companies...
- okay, one more security company. Forum Systems is a firewall for web services, much like MagniFire, but the demo was a lot meatier. Chris Shipley also said the company just won a huge deal with Amazon to protect their web services. Pricing begins at only $2,500.
- Adobe is presenting at Demo? I guess they get the award for Best Costumes.

The Aruba Networks people said that someone went "ad-hoc" mode and are preventing everyone from using the network. I'm using an 802.11a connection so I'm still online. It's amazing to me that the vendors have not plugged these glaring holes in the deployed products.

Comments

[Buzz Bruggeman]

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