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