For all of you who, like me, cringe every time you have to look at Craig's List and think, geez, there has to be a better experience — well, listen up: there is. Fred Krueger (at right in the photo, with Joey Harward, cofounder) has been hard at work with his team in LA for some some time building Needly. It's a great-looking site for all your stuff — yes, selling it and acquiring more of it, which we all love to do — but more than that: keeping track of the whole shebang, too (think for insurance valuation purposes, which is a great side benefit). Needly makes it as easy to get all your stuff and needs online as it could possibly be. One key way they let you do that is with a very nicely designed iPhone app. You just shoot a picture, add a price and a quick description, click submit, and it's up on the Needly site in seconds. 
A key part of Needly's offering is an escrow payment service, which protects both buyer and seller. Fred is a three-time presenter at DEMO. He knows how to attract millions of people to sites — and how to raise money. I'm betting we hear a lot more about Needly, and I can't wait to get my hands on the iPhone app as soon as it's approved on iTunes.
Tag: #democon (Page 3 of 6)
DEMO always attracts a good number of non-U.S. based startups to announce on its stage, and this one traveled all the way from the UK to tell us about its tool for enabling retailers to sell their wares on mobile devices — first for the iPhone, with support for other platforms coming soon. The key word here is free, folks. Do you remember the days when creating a mobile app actually cost companies money? On stage, MobiCart touted its first customer, a regional airline in the UK called FlyBe.com, which essentially put its entire in-flight magazine on an app — meaning its advertisers, who used to just sell their products via the print pages of the airline's magazine, now have another way to take orders. 
The CEO and founder, Wladimir Baranoff-Rossine, tells us about it in this little two-part chat, including how the heck he might even make money with this venture.
(sorry for the abrupt cut-off…ran out of battery! click below for the rest)
• Download or listen to Part 2 of Graeme's interview with MobiCart… (MP3)"
Speaking of DEMOgod Award winners, this was another — though we didn't know that till an hour or so after I stopped to interview CEO and founder Walter Bachtiger. (That's him on the left, with Spencer Lord, Chief Voice Officer/CTO.) This was one of my favorite demos on stage earlier in the day, because I could see what a great productivity tool it would be for bloggers, writers, and researchers (just to name a few). I wanted to be sure to find out more, and see a more detailed demo up close. 
VoiceBase transcribes voice files (audio now, video coming soon) that you upload to their site. It then posts those transcripts to the site, and enables you to then search within those files for keywords you specify. It also let you share those files on social sites. I can't wait to use it myself — in fact, I'll start by uploading these DEMOfall audio interviews of mine!
I stopped to chat with Guy Ben-Artzi, CEO and cofounder of ParticleCode, which would later be named one of the DEMOgod Award winners. The "Particle Platform" the company introduced is an open and extendable cross-platform IDE that automates the porting process, allowing developers to create native apps using languages such as Java, ActionScript3, and C#. 
Because it lets developers more efficiently create and maintain their apps through the use of a single code-base, Particle enables teams to focus on more innovative cross-device experiences. The Particle SDK currently includes plug-ins for all popular smart phone and tablet OSs.
I heard last week about a company that was returning to DEMO to introduce something new. I'd seen Primal at DEMO '09 in Palm Desert (they were called Primal Fusion then), so I was interested in getting an update. The company introduced on stage today a product called "Primal Pages for Publishers," based on a very interesting semantic technology they call "Thought Networking." When you're a blogger or a writer, you pay attention to this stuff, a big part of the promise of Web 3.0. 
With Primal, you build a topic, kind of a dynamic outline of sorts, and it essentially fills it in as you go along. As Peter Sweeney, founder & co-president says, "publishing gets easier." Hey, that future can't come too soon for me! With Peter in the photo is Derrick Cho, director of sales & marketing.
• Download or listen to Graeme's interview with Primal about "Thought Network" publishing… (MP3)"
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