SCOTTSDALE, Arizona – At the Demo conference here, where 75 technology companies are on hand to show off their latest products and services in succinct, six-minute demonstrations, those that incorporate a little color are the ones that get the best audience reaction.
Unfortunately, the audience of several hundred journalists, investors and technologists may not always be able to distinguish between cheesy presentations and hot technology. Thus, three of the best-received demonstrations of the conference all used frantic humor as a lure. Openwave Systems boasted "Phoneman," a spokesman with a superhero costume and a large P on his forehead. Homestead Technologies had two executives singing about the company's product to the tune of "American Pie," and Serious Magic's CEO flaunted the show's no PowerPoint rule in a comedy sketch promoting its PowerPoint competitor. In each case, the audience ate it up.
Still, Demo is about hot technology, not comedy, and this year's edition, its 15th, had no shortage of cutting-edge offerings.
One of the most viscerally interesting is Novint Technologies' Falcon, a sort of joystick on steroids. Based on technology developed at Sandia National Laboratories and licensed by Novint, the Falcon gives users tangible, three-dimensional touch feedback when they interact with digital objects.
That means, for example, if a user is pointing a digital stick through a ball of molasses on screen, the joystick feeds back a distinctly thick and syrupy feeling. Similarly, running a stick across the surface of a bumpy ball feels bumpy. Pulling back the drawstring on a bow and shooting an arrow feels realistic. And so forth.
"It's the first time you can be the character in the video game," said Novint CEO Tom Anderson, who originally helped develop the technology at Sandia. "You can do what the character does and feel what the character feels."
Anderson said that the company imagines its customers will be video-game publishers, as well as firms doing oil and gas modeling, automotive design, architectural layout and medical simulations, among other things. Novint plans to release its own, consumer version of the Falcon in the first quarter of 2006.
Openwave's mobile device manager may be the future answer to the prayers of those who lose their mobile phones (and the contacts, photos and other data stored in the gadgets). The device manager, which Openwave hopes to license to its carrier partners, would allow users to regularly synchronize their data with carriers' servers. Then, in the event of a lost or damaged phone, users would be able to restore the data quickly.
Consumers should see the device manager as a service offered by carriers later this year, said Openwave spokeswoman Candace Locklear.
Many of the companies on Tuesday's schedule were unveiling products and services aimed at bloggers and photographers.
One notable release was Five Across' Bubbler. This service provides a novel way to post blog entries instantly. In fact, the software allows entries to be posted each time "return" is hit.
More interesting, though, is that Bubbler allows for easily posting any kind of content into a blog, including audio, video, spreadsheets and PDFs. The company says its software is more advanced than blogging tools from Blogger, TypePad and others because it allows for quick formatting changes and website linking without requiring any HTML coding.
Another service aimed at power web users is Pluck, which is designed to bring together persistent searching, RSS feeds, web publishing and more in a single native or web-based application.
For example, users can set up persistent searches, known as "perches," that automatically update several times a day until deleted. Perches could regularly look for eBay auctions for specific items, or search for specific news. In either case, RSS feeds can be set up to alert the user when perch criteria are met.
Further, Pluck has a built-in RSS search engine, which frequently scours the internet for new feeds. It also allows users to publish any set of links or RSS feeds onto a link blog which can be made publicly available and for which an RSS feed can be offered. Any links in a saved folder can be published into a link blog.
Another company that received an enthusiastic response was Photoleap. Its software allows anyone to send large amounts of digital photos to friends or family without running up against e-mail storage limits. It does so using an e-mail-client-like interface and employing unique compression technology.
In the end, Demo is about giving companies a comfortable way to get exposure for new products and services while not overloading the audience with lengthy and cumbersome presentations. The six-minute demonstration format forces companies to boil down their messages to their pure essences, and lets the conference highlight dozens of companies in the time it takes most shows to handle only a few.
"The high shmoozability factor, combined with the very relaxed setting," said Locklear, "really helps people showcase their technology in the best way."
