Today is the last day of DEMOfall 09, and I’ll be live blogging about what I see.  Please refresh your page regularly.

It’s 9:30am, and we’re close to kick off…

First up Nubli – a 90 second alpha pitch…

• Nubli figures out which emails and contacts are the most important to you and presents them in a prioritized view
• Cuts the clutter in your inbox.

Next, another 90 second pitch: traffic talk

• The problem with most traffic iphone apps is that they take your attention off of the road
• This app takes crowdsourcing and makes it audio with a patent-pending voice platform
• Real-time details that get to you when you need them
• traffic talk is from a former company was called “traffic flex”
• They monetize through subscription services as well as a free version with audio ads

We’re on to a new category… “Working Smarter”

First up to bat with Answers.com:

• This is Answers.com’s second time at DEMO. They’ve been around for a while and are re-launching.
• They’re integrating a wiki based community with hundreds of sources – 1 place for all your questions and answers internationally
• “Q&A the wiki way”
• You can follow Answers.com on twitter: @answersdotcom
• They’re demoing the solution now, and it looks useful
• 4 new versions: International, French, Spanish, German

And, now Weels:

• This is a bookmarking/ cut/paste technology that lets you drag and drop videos and more into a box and get information about where to buy it…
• It also lets you share it
• Very cool stuff
• I’m told by the guys next to me that the guy demoing now is 19 years old. He’s presenting like a pro.  The guy next to him is still in high school.
• It makes browsing more intuitive.
• They’re trying to make browsing follow you from one device to the next
• It runs on top of your browsing experience – no downloads or plugins
• They’re opening an API and are looking for talented developers to extend their drag and drop technology

And now, Article One Partners LLC:

• Global community reaching 3 Million technologies that research the validity of patents
• They crowd source the validity of patents
• Beta launched Nov 2008. In less than one year, they claim to have proven their crowd sourcing model
• 2009 Start-up of the year in Silicon Alley Insider Competition
• Today, they’re coming out of Beta
• Article One Advisors earn up to $50,000 per study and share in Article One’s profits.  There are 3 million of them across the world.
• This helps solve patent litigation cases
• In June 2009, The US Patent Office determined that Article One’s crowd sourced solution has raised a question around the patent for MERK’s Singulair drug.

Now, Kryon Systems:

• Leo is the next generation of help and execution tools that will make people power users of any application
• If you open it up while you’re in Excel, it’ll help you with Excel.  It’ll give you the answers you’re looking for, and you can ask it to take over and walk you through how to do something… It’ll actually move your mouse and do the work!
• Very cool
• It even talks to you as it’s taking control of your computer and fixing the problem you’ve identified
• You can teach LEO to work with any application running on Windows without integrating into the software
• It works on Excel, and now they’re showing it to us on SAP!
• They’re launching the Beta of LEO on Outlook at this show

And now, LeapFILE – the end of file sharing for corporations

• Gives end-users direct access to open and update files in the cloud from a desktop explorer – even offline
• It gives IT departments and governance departments the ability to better control file sharing
• File transfer: local to the cloud in real time
• You always have the most up-to-date files that your colleagues have on their desktop on your desktop – in real time!
• IT gets automatic end-to-end data encryption and visibility into what users are doing 24/7. They have full control over what appears on the laptop… You can wipe the machine

Symform, Inc. is up now:

• Re-inventing decentralized cloud computing
• Symform Cooperative Storage Cloud: Now, a small business can get unlimited online storage that is secure and reliable by contributing not so secure and not so reliable storage space of their own
• Pieces of your data are sitting across multiple computers distributed across multiple networks – in case you need them for disaster recovery
• $50/month fee – 10x cheaper than elsewhere
• IMHO: If you’re relying on a bunch of people you don’t know to keep your data safe, you’re in trouble.  What happens if one of the computers where part of your files are stored break down or are destroyed in a fire?

Anaplan is up now:

• Anaplan is like building a lego model – it allows you to connect a variety of cloud-computing applications together
• You can create complex models that use things like income statements, employee costs, cash flow, budget, balance sheet and more.
• You can create a sales forecasting system, for example and see the impact on profit and loss
• $49 for 3 users

Liaise is presenting now. I saw these guys yesterday, and this is one of the most interesting things I’ve seen at DEMO so far

• It intelligently captures the text that matters within the emails in your MS Outlook and helps you create a to-do list and action lists for yourself and others
• It’s like workflow management that works in conjunction with your email.
• It learns the terms that you use to ask people to do things and the terms they use to ask you to do things and it intelligently creates a to-do list.

Now up, I.ndigo, LLC with their new product, dekks:

• It’s a collaboration tool for companies
• dekks is focused on what you need, and dekks tells you who to send it to… So, if you don’t have connections to the right people in your company, dekks will connect you with them.
• dekks learns from your behavior and who you send things to and vice versa
• It creates relationship maps to show you how people are connected within an organization

#Hashwork brings social media to business users…

• “Cure anti-social business disorder”
• This gives people a way to get to know the social profiles of people who work at their company, partner companies, or client companies.
• Employees go to the hashwork website and enter their work email address, which authenticates them as a real employee of their company.  They enter their social profile information for things like Twitter, Facebook, etc. and the Hashwork system automatically tracks what everyone in a given company is doing on external social networks
• The URL that is created for your account is associated with your company, and you can use it in your email signature and more to let people know what you’re doing at your company.
• You can also communicate privately from within your company – so you can leverage public social networks to use them in a private way.  If for example,  you send a direct message to hashwork on Twitter, it will post it as a private message to your company’s group on hashwork.
• It’s free but for a monthly fee, companies can pay to have extra features like approval rights, etc.
• Special offer to free lifetime upgrade to standard community plan. Go to the management console to upgrade use DEMOfall 09, which will be useful until the end of the month.

Gogrok

• screensharing and real-time collaboration suite
• annotate on live content like video
• You can envoke Gogrok from within your existing applications
• It looks interesting, but it’s a bit of a confusing preso

Zorap, Inc.

• Look at videos and listen to music on the internet with your friends
• Announcing Zorap for Facebook. Chat and share stuff on Facebook
• Pretty cool stuff- live video chat with drag and drop sharing of photos, music, etc…. Looks awesome
• IM chat is integrated as well
• This guy and his kids who he’s chatting with online live are cracking everyone up… The kids are sharing music and dancing.
• This might be the coolest thing I’ve seen at DEMO so far…

Faculte is up now:

• Its a useful way to produce and publish online videos – as easily as creating online presentations
• They offer a suite of creative tools to make producing videos easier

Now the judges are here to evaluate the “working smarter” companies…

• Larry from SugarCRM likes the enthusiasm of the Zorap presentation, and I agree.  He thought the presentation was more unique.  He also liked the using of community and crowd sourcing to look for patent
• One of the judges is recommending that all start-ups should look to get some percentage of people to pay for their service from the start – rather than giving everything away for free.  Another judge agrees.  Worry about making money up front. Most of the time, companies that worry about making users and not worry about money up front fail.

30 minute break in between sessions… be back soon…

And… I’m back…

Now on stage – former Palm peeps!- Donna Dubinsky of Numenta, Rob Haitani, of Vitamin D and also Dick Lyon from Google.

Numenta:

• Very early stage company in research phase
• They make a learning system that finds systems in very large data sets
• It’s a platform company – not an application company
• It’s generic to any sensory domain, but the first system is vision systems
• It’s not specific to any application domain. They’ve worked with all sorts of companies from financial companies to web companies
• Demo #1: Numenta Vision Toolkit
  • It can do things like recognize objects –  chairs or people
  • You can train the system to recognize objects without any programming or understanding on algorithms and send it up to Numenta’s web server and use the image recognition technology in your web, mobile or desktop application
• Demo #2: Numenta Search and Sort
  • You can train the network to sort your photos by indoor and outdoor photos
  • You can train the network to determine whether your parking spot is free or not (if you’ve got a camera on it), and set up a script to SMS you when it’s free
  • You can train it to recognize people and name them when you upload new photos of them
  • Cool stuff
• Rob Haitani, of Vitamin D is up now:
  • Showing a video surveillance tape
  • In surveillance streams, it can recognize moving objects, and know whether they’re walking upright or crawling
  • With object recognition, you can distill hours of video into minutes of useful clips
  • He’s showing a cool technology where you can search video by drawing an overlay over areas you’re filming to only yield results of clips that show people go in/out of specific areas, save that clip for profiling.
  • Public beta of Vitamin D is coming out this fall.

Dick Lyon from Google is up now

• Pattern matching everywhere:
  • in universal search and specialized applications
  • Why not search sounds to improve contextual understanding of what’s happening inside of videos?!
• Strategy for “machine hearing”
  • “Leverage machine vision and machine learning techniques
  • base the analysis and features on a good model of human hearing
  • train on LOTS of data”
• So, for example if you’re looking for videos that show roosters, it might be helpful to search for the rooster sound, as that video may not be tagged with the word “rooster”
• “stabilized auditory image”: for speech, music, sound in general… turns a sound into a visual map or video that can be searched.  Sort of like looking at a finger print of the sound.

Great demos/ interesting stuff in this last segment.  An audience member has just asked about how synesthesia (where your senses cross over  – you hear colors and taste sounds) plays into the research Neumenta and Google are doing.  The answer is that it doesn’t really play into it, but it’s a fascinating issue.

And, onto the next topic: 90 second alpha pitches:

Melior Technologies is talking about gurustorms.com

• It’s a crowd sourcing platform that allows you to pay people for their ideas and help in answering questions

ShareGrove is up next:

• real friends meeting for real conversations on the web
• have real-time real conversations with your real friends over the web
• seamless inline sharing of personal and media content
• They make money by getting commission off of word of mouth transactions that happen from the platform

Next up – “APIs, Platforms and Services”

80legs is up first…

• $1.1 Billion dollars each year spent on web crawling, and many others are prevented from crawling the web because doing so is expensive
• Web scale crawling will be come a necessity for companies who can’t do it right now
• They’ve got a “better way to crawl and process the web”
• Puts the power of 50,000 computers to use for you
• Stitches computers together to deliver improved performance at reduced cost
• It has sentiment tracking so that you can determine what people thing about specific topics across the web
• You can write your own application and run it over 50,000 computers and billions of pages of content
• The guy likens the performance to what only Google has been able to achieve so far.
• in 2 months, they’ll be launching an app store where users can purchase apps that were created using 80 legs.

Scientific Media introduces Dotgo, “the internet for text messaging”:

• Many companies have shortcodes:
  • Fandango: FNDGO
  • Starbucks: MYSBUX
  • Google: GOOGLE
  • etc
• fundamental flaw with shortcode phone numbers is that they’re hard to remember and hard to find
• Dotgo makes it easy to remember shortcodes. All you need to do is name the company in the first word of your text message and send it to:
  • DOTCOM -338226
  • So, for example,
    • Fandango: Instead of texting “FNDGO,” Text “Fandango” plus whatever you were going to text to “FNDGO” to DOTCOM -338226
    • Starbucks: Instead of texting “MYSBUX,” Text “Starbucks” plus whatever you were going to text to “MYSBUX”to DOTCOM -338226
• You can set up text messaging sites very easily – if you have a dotcom domain – without getting your own shortcode.
• Launching Dotgo in the US only today, but hope to launch to more countries later.

Now, VicMan Software:

• Launching Pho.to today at DEMO: Edit photos to create funny photos – manipulate expressions, put makeup on, create animated gifs
• Audience laughing a lot because their demo is hilarious.  Looks like they’ve got some great editing options
• They white label their solution as well.
• You can automatically add photo enhancements facilities to your own website.
• This looks pretty cool!
• They’re launching a Facebook app today called “Funny Pho.to”  (though after a quick search on Facebook, I don’t see it)

Zuora is back for their second DEMO:

• Free is killing the media industry
• Newspapers and other media are looking for ways to monetize
• Zcommerce For Media can help media companies monetize
• This solution targets newspapers and magazines who are struggling to make money offline and need to move to online subscriptions

NativeTung is up now… I met these guys yesterday – great stuff:

• NativeTung is a global management platform that will allow any website to create multi-language content channels.
• It leverages Google and Microsoft tools to translate websites into other languages on the fly
• The publisher can now support customers in multiple regions in real time
• It has the added benefit of enabling websites to be in local languages and support local ads in multiple languages, increasing revenue
• Real-time translation increases engagement of foreign audiences

Digitrad Communications presents Organip:

• With so many ways to connect via social networks, it’s hard to find people’s latest phone numbers
• Organip is the “easiest way to make a phone call” – no phone numbers, no missed calls.
• 1 name, 1 click, 1 call – all you need to know is the person’s name
• If you know someone on any social network and you can send them a message, Organip can initiate a phone call with them by sending them a link to start the call
• They’re now demoing a mobile address book application on an HTC phone (not sure which OS- possibly Android?) which looks awesome.  It will initiate a call with someone on any social network.
• This is one of the coolest things I’ve seen so far at DEMOfall 09.
• Launching a public trial.

CallSpark!, Inc. has taken the stage

• “CallSpark! does for phone calls what Google did for search”
• Instead of calling 411, you use CallSpark! and it gives you the result you need
• They have a salesforce.com integration with data on latest scheduled events and contract information
• This looks cool – it searches across your various networks and email address.
• Facebook integration
• Twitter integration
• More
• Sweet!
• You can create something called a “Ringpage” and customize it so that when someone with CallSpark! calls you, they see your customized Ringpage (especially useful if you’re a merchant).
• They’re about to announce their first large scale carrier deals, and they’re looking for additional carriers
• They are launching an app
• They have a developer program

And, now “Smarter, More Social Marketing”…

First up, Burt AB with its new product “Rich”:

• “First campaign statistics tool agencies like and use” is called “Rich”
• It highlights: view-thru, engagement, visibility, and click-thru
• It tells you whether people paid attention to your ad or not.
• It highlights a dimension of online advertising that’s been ignored – brand advertising
• They’re in closed beta right now… They’ve run a 3 month test so far. They’re opening up for 10-15 more beta testers for October. You can sign up for an invite on their website.

ePulze is taking the stage…

• It consolidates opinions, comment, and sentiment from across multiple websites
• compare sentiment for 2 or more subjects
• I’m curious how many sources they crawl to get this information
• Company from Malasia – they want to create a platform to create customer recommendations

Glam Media, Inc. is now presenting their spin off product, Tinker.com:

• Live today – version 1.0, Tinker allows you to search the top conversations on social networks and make it friendly for advertisers
• ad supported platform
• embeddable by any website
• I’m just trying Tinker right now, and it’s not working…Site is super slow  – So slow that I couldn’t get to work. Though Matt Marshall says it’s interesting

RumbaFish Technologies, Inc.

• RumbaFish is an engagement platform that gives users incentives for spreading information virally
• They provide real time analytics on how viral campaigns are running
• Seems spammy to me… less about conversations and more about pushing out ads

Alpha pitches up…

Dubzer:

• This looks a lot like NativeTung – it’s focused on making your website readable in multiple languages
• Private beta is up and running

EnRoute Systems Corp:

• SAAS service that helps companies ship more effiiently
• Launching “Shipit” today at DEMO:
  • portal
  • platform: web services apis

Demo judges recap… I’m taking a break from the live tweeting…Lunch is next – see you back here at 3pm.
And, now, for the lifetime achievement awards… I won’t be live blogging all of this, except if anything interesting happens…