Category: DEMO 2006 (Page 5 of 7)

The clumsy-name-but-that-doesn’t-mean-it’s-not-cool award goes to The Multiverse Network (yes, that’s listed under “T” for “The”….duh). And wait till you hear what market they’re in: MMOG! Yes, it’s true. For those of you feeling really acronym-challenged right now, that’s “massively multiplayer online gaming.” [Oh, right, how silly of me…] Okay, so “branding” and “household-name” are not the first things to flash to mind with this outfit — unless maybe you’re an online gamer — but they do have a great concept to address a monster market. It’s now about $1 billion in the U.S. and probably 2-3x that worldwide thanks to Asia. CEO and co-founder Bill Turpin (ex-Netscape VP-engineering) told me a lot of the play here for Multiverse is subscription revenue, making it a great “longer term business.” It’s a free technology platform that enables independent game developers to compete with the big game companies, which typically spend $10-20 million to develop a single game(!). The kicker is the independents using the Multiverse Platform get to share in the revenues that their games generate. The company plans a public beta of its tools toward the end of this month: a “terrain generator” and a “world editor.” We saw these demoed, and they appeared very easy to use. Close to 2500 developers have signed up already on the company’s site, said Jeff Weinstein, engineer. And marketing director Cory Bridges (also ex-Netscape) told me the key advantage developers see is “rapid prototyping,” a process that can now be completed in as little as half an hour. The company got a nice boost when James Cameron, director of such movies as “Titanic” and “Aliens,” signed on to their advisory board. For more, see this article about him and Mutiverse just out in Business Week (requires free registration).

Other companies I liked yesterday include Blurb, which provides a “personal book publishing” service. In less than an hour, you can produce your very own book for $30 (yes, even one-off) and have it on your doorstep 4-6 days later. Get this bloggers: one option is turning your blog into a book! [Doc’s would be like the War and Peace?] We’re talking really professional-looking, hard cover books here — with shiny dust jackets, friends! Coffee-table quality. I suppose you could even get your buddies to write those oh-so-objective little “blurbs” for the back jacket! Think of the gift ideas. But that and the vanity thing are hardly the whole market; CEO Eileen Gittins says there are some 400,000 fundraising organizations and associations that publish cookbooks. By the way, Eileen gets the best closing line in the pitches so far: “It’s so easy, even our VCs can do it.”

Going quickly down the list (have to get to breakfast): another outfit with a technology that would seem to have big potential is being developed by Digislide, based in Adelaide, Australia, but just setting up a U.S. outpost. Their “Digismart” product is a micro-optical engine that lets you project an 11×17 image from your handheld device: cell phone, PDA, GPS, MP3/4 player, etc, or a laptop. Demo thinks it will do for mobile presentations what camera phones have done for digital photography. They’ve spent north of $4 million developing the technology so far, and are, of course, looking for more VC money. Plenty of those folks here!

Speaking of cell phones, Bones In Motion showed off their service that turns your phone into a performance monitor and coach for your daily run or bike workout, etc. [Too bad it doesn’t have a better name than “BiM Active” — huh?] And they announced yesterday that Sprint will soon be offering the service for $9.99 per month. See more on the comany’s blog.

And yet another cell-phone service was shown by Tiny Pictures, which uses a peer-sharing model to let you publish your cell pix with a single click and “share your experiences as they happen with the people who care most.”

I heard more than one comment that there was a lack of “gadgets” at this Demo — i.e., products. Consumer services seemed the biggest category. But the “Pleo” robotic toy from Ugobe, created by Furby inventor Caleb Chung….what can I say? You’ll be reading tons about this one.

More soon….from the final day’s sessions.

Tag: Demo 2006

Coolest name of the day goes to Gravee, whose AdShare product “changes the economic model for search”(!) How? By giving more clout to the content *owners* [huuuuge cheer!!!], instead of the content distributors, like certain companies whose names start with “G” and “Y”, for example. When an ad is clicked on their site, Gravee shares up to 70% of all ad revenue with Web sites and content owners that appear in their search results. Demo says “Gravee turns the search model on its head, delivering economic benefit to natural search results.” The company also empowers consumers to create a real-time, community-driven search index, letting them vote on relevance and tag results.

Here’s another outfit that Demo thinks has the potential to be “the Skype of video messaging”: Vsee. They do it with half the bandwidth of Skype, using P2P technology, letting companies “reach millions of people with little infrastructure,” they say. You can even zoom and pan on the images of those remote folks you’re conferencing with. The secret sauce is some proprietary stuff they do in “human factors,” improving on traditional videoconferencing that “distorts conversational clues.” Translation: you can pick up a lot more nuances from people’s faces and actions. And the interface is extremely simple.

Kaboodle is changing the online shopping experience from being a lonely effort, where a person visits site after site, one at a time, into an experience that can be combined into a single page, then shared with others, who can also provide their own comments. Say you’ve just gone through a long, one-time experience like doing a complete kitchen remodel, and you’ve done a ton of research to learn about where to buy everything. If you’ve done all that online research and shopping via Kaboodle, you can share your page and save other people a lot of time.
This company just came out of stealth.

The CEO of a social networking company called TagWorld, Fred Krueger, told me this morning at breakfast that his company is a “MySpace killer.” This afternoon, they debuted their latest trick: what they call “TagWorld Social Commerce.” Fred says it enables a typical 14-year old to build his or her own online store in two minutes, with a fully functional payment system. They can sell their stuff — movies, CDs, whatever — to their friends or whoever else finds them by searching the item on the TagWorld site. Ever looked at the amount of spending power these online kids have? TagWorld says they’ve already had 700,000 people sign up for their service over three months.

Tag: Demo 2006

Some shots from the exhibit area, after the morning session…first a somewhat wide shot. Click on any to make them bigger.

The second one is Rafe Needleman of CNet interviewing the CEO of iGuitar.

Krugle’s booth was very busy, with John Mitchell, Steve Larsen, and Don Thorson giving lots of demos, including to Dan Farber of Ziff Davis just before I showed up.

The offbeat kickoff presentation first thing this morning was a big hit: the MooBella customized ice cream vending machine. Very cool (so to speak).

And below is the CEO of GarageBand.com, Ali Partovi,
just before he gave me a demo. (This is the company that existed before Apple starting using the name, and actually licensed it it to them to use! Which has been some of their best advertising, I guess.) They’re doing lots of interesting things related to helping people organize their iPod music, discover new music, and (coming soon) giving them new ways to quickly share it. They have a cool instant podcasting tool, too, called Gcast.

Tag: Demo 2006

Took a couple of RAZR phone pix at the opening reception, which was well attended. Total count appears to be about 650 from the attendee list; the number of press and bloggers, about 75. (The first photo isn’t so great — hey, it was dark by then, as the reception was about to end.)

Taken earlier (when it was still light), here’s Steve Larsen, CEO of Krugle (left), and Mitch Musgrove, VP sales and bus dev at SimpleFeed.

What are some of the interesting things coming at Demo from an IT standpoint? I couldn’t say it better than this piece on Information Week from late yesterday.

Met some interesting folks at the reception, including Bill Tam, the CEO of EQO, based in Vancouver. They’re doing nothing less than bringing Skype to your mobile phone — pretty cool! Also chatted with two guys from Riya,, Azhar Khan, the VP of engineering, and Danny Yang, senior researcher. Their technology lets you do photo search by face recognition — how ’bout that? And it also searches the text within the photo file. Riya will be free when it’s available in a few weeks.

Tag: Demo 2006