This Demo 2006 news comes from AOL, of all companies. (Conference presenters aren’t necessarily limited to startups. There were actually four public companies this year.) This post, however, is really about a hot company called Truveo, which AOL acquired last year. Founder Tim Tuttle told us that there are now some 20 billion video streams on the web. AOL launched its video search capability in June 2005 with 2.5 million searchable assets. In the fall of 2005, the company introduced DVD quality video search. But now, in about three weeks…[drum roll]…what you’ll be getting with AOL’s service is Truveo’s technology. It’s based on what’s called “visual crawling” and has been in development in a quiet corner of Silicon Valley for more than two years. Tuttle promised you’ll now be able to “find a lot more video.” He also said that, through an AOL partnership with Intel, you’ll even be able to watch it on your TV, not just your computer. “Great things are just around the corner,” he said. “We’re finally delivering on the promise of video search becoming as ubiquitous as web search.”

Tag: Demo 2006

A new Yahoo Photos beta was announced today at Demo. Presenter Will Aldrich said that, to date, this popular service has 3 million unique users — two times its closest competitor — with some two billion photos stored. So, said Aldrich, “What better time to blow up the product and start from scratch?” What the new beta is about is making the UI better, as well as bringing tagging and metadata to the mass audience. Read: building on the success of Flickr, which Yahoo acquired last year. Features mentioned by Aldrich include the introduction of a “smart album” feature, and using photos to initiate IM.

Tag: Demo 2006

Oh, wow, as a guy who’s just getting into shooting cell phone pix (I’m a little slow…), with my new Moto RAZR along for this trip, I can’t help but get excited about Vizrea and SmileBox. In my book, the former gets the best skit award (based on “24”), and the latter the best logo and interface award, very appropriate for the consumer mass-audience. Both are really cool services.

Tag: Demo 2006