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Category: Demo 2006
February 10th, 2006
Demo 2006 security roundup, part 2
Demo 2006: Persystent Technology demoed the latest version of it enterprise software, which ensures PC availability by eliminating configuration problems. It maintains a hidden partition—a compressed bit image–with the clean OS, registry and application settings–and at boot time corrects any errors that have been introduced. If you have a virus, spyware or mess with the registry–suffer the usual configuration creep—Persystent brings you back to the clean state. On the back end, Persystent has policy and management tools for managing desktops and allowing configuration changes. The list price for the client is $99 and the server, $2,995.
Tested Technologies demoed Hyperblocking-IPS, which makes enterprise, home and cellular networks networks invisible to hackers. The hyperblocking technology–which company founder and President Matthew Von-Maszewski called a "tiny bit of lethal software"–identifies and blocks transmissions emanating from harmful IP addresses based on IP attributes. When the software is installed on devices, it communicates with a central server that traces the originating IP address, compares it to a local database of IP address attributes, then makes a determination if the machine is a threat, according to the company. If the IP address is a bad actor, the network goes dark to the intruder. Hyperblocking-IPS will be available for Linux, Solaris and Windows, and a version that works with most firewalls is in the works. It sound goods, but it won’t it has the same problem as other security products–staying ahead of the malicious hackers.
IronPort Systems added as set of Web security appliances, leveraging the core technology–such as SenderBase Web Reputation Filters–and high performance characteristics of in its line of email security appliances. The S-Series Web Security Appliances, due this summer, include secure application proxies for HTTP, HTTPS and FTP, and a scanning and vectoring engine. A layer 4 traffic monitor scans all ports and protocols at wire speed,. The company claims a 10x increase in scanning throughput over first generation solutions.
Front Porch showed a unique security application that lets ISPs automatically notify compromised customers of security breaches or if they land on phishing sites. PorchLight Security Messaging Technology integrates with an ISP’s security infrastructure and sends ISP-branded notifications, as well as instructions for removing threats, directly to the browsers of the users with infected machines. The technology could be applied to corporate, campus municipal WiFi networks. Porchlight could also be used to send alerts when university students violate network terms of service, such downloading music from unauthorized sites.
Tivoli founder Bob Fabbio launched Cesura, a managed service for business optimization. He described the service as a "systematic way to provide certainty." Cesura’s appliance monitors the user experience within an enterprise, and when a user is having problems a notification is sent to the IT department and to Cesura’s operations center where the company’s staff deal with the problem. Cesura’s secret sauce is what it calls Business Certainty Analytics that handles disruptions and reports on compliance and prevention strategies. The company claims that its solution results in up to 50 percent fewer disruptions and up to 80 percent faster recovery. Given Fabbio’s track record, it’s worth a look.
Astav showed SignSafe, two-factor authentication servers that dials your phone when you make purchases, and then asks for a password to authentice your identity to conclude the transaction. Don’t leave home without your phone…
February 9th, 2006
Videos from Demo 2006: Blurb, Riya, StreetDeck, Pleo
Cameraman Vincent Tremblay and CNET’s Rafe Needleman got video on some of the hottest products at Demo:
Eileen Gittins, CEO of Blurb, gives CNET’s Rafe Needleman a first look at her blog-to-book application. With several templates to choose from, including travel and poetry, this soon to be released application has support for both Mac and PC.
CNET’s Rafe Needleman gets a demo from Riya CEO and co-founder Munjal Shah, utilizing the face and text search that makes this program unique in the fast growing world of photo searching and sharing.
Watch a movie, browse through your photos, even get an e-mail if your car is stolen. Take a look at both the hardware and software for the StreetDeck with Rafe Needleman, of CNET, and Robert Wray, co-founder and CEO of Mp3car.com.
Furby goes Godzilla, meet Pleo the domestic dinosaur
Rafe Needleman takes a close look at the Pleo dino-bot with Ugobe’s CEO Bob Christopher and inventor Caleb Chung.
February 8th, 2006
Security gurus report on the state of cybersecurity at Demo 2006
Demo 2006: At the close of Demo, John Patrick led a discussion on the state of security with Partha Dasgupta, an associate professor at Arizona State University specializing in cryptography; Hillarie Orman, chief technology officer & VP of engineering, Shinkuro, Inc., and Charles Palmer of IBM Research.
All of the panelists agreed that security problems aren’t going away any time soon. Dasgupta called cybersecurity a "gloomy business." Not all computer users today can be knowledgeable about computers and security. "Some products and techniques are bringing security downt to the mainstream to protect people who can’t protect themselves. "It’s a cat and mouse game, but we need to bring it to level we can live with it," Dasgupta said.
"The Internet is incredibly vulnerable and incredibly big. We have a tolerable state of security, but it’s not a particularly good state of security in any sense," Orman said.
John Patrick, Partha Dasgupta, Hillarie Orman and Charles Palmer
Palmer contended that because computers weren’t build with security in mind, we are paying for it with "band-aids and patch and pray." In addition, what began as a kind of hacker joyriding has turned into a money game. "The Internet is where the money is," he said. No kidding.
Current technolgies for authentication are based on shared secrets, such as social security numbers and passwords. "The information will leak regardless of how secure banks and commerce site are," Dasgupta noted. He pointed to the use of PKI and smart cards as a way to improve security. "Information never escapes from a smart card–it’s about a trillon times harder to steal."
However, financial institutions are resisting a move to smart cards, in part because they don’t want to admit they made a mistake and due to cost and complexity of deployment, Dasgupta said. Instead corporations spend more time protecting their perimeters with all kinds of tools, but it’s clearly not as effective as it needs to be.
Hardware-based security, such as TPM from the Trusted Computing Platform and Copilot, will have some impact, although the protocol stacks are extremely complicated, which can be a problem, Dasgupta said. Virtual machines can also prevent operating system corruption.
Dasgupta also maintained that teaching programming students how to write safe code isn’t done today, which contributes to the overall problem.
Orman said that computer security started with a trusted operating system and that’s where it will return. "All code is evil. You have to separate data and protect it. Trusted operating systems will come around again for high value applications, but the really interesting thing over my career is to see how much economics influences security. You can have all the research in the world but it won’t come into to being if there isn’t an economic incentive."
One problem is that secure operating systems develop at a slower pace than their mainstream cousins–by the time a secure OS is ready for prime time, it is incompatible with applications. For example, the NSA has a hardened version of Linux, but it doesn’t track with the pace of innovation in the Linux community, Orman said. She added that when device physicists reach a plateau, and hit the wall of Moore’s Law, it will be an opportunity for a secure OS to come into being. Of course, that could be a decade or more in the future. Palmer noted that doing operating systems on a small scale, such as for smart cards, at least helps solve identity fraud problem.
Smart card are not invulnerable, however. Timing and radiation attacks on the physical devices can be used to extract data, which is a concern for high value transactions, the panelists said.
The panelists were also asked if they thought the NSA could crack 128-bit encryption. Dasgupta said that the answer isn’t known, but that the government is upset with technologies like Skype and other services, such as email, that can use encryption. Orman said that using brute force computing for a year to break 128-bit symmetrical key would take all the energy of the Sun that hits the earth in a year. Not practical, in other words. "The management of the keys, not cryptography, is the challenge," she said.
Other forms of security, such as biometrics came up. Fingerprint is the dominant biometric method. Orman joked (maybe she was serious) with the crowd that pineapple juice can remove fingerprints, and to avoid it. One way to improve fingerprint recognition, which can be beaten by taking the minutae of an imprint (measurements) and working backwards to create a fake finger, would be to have different versions of a fingerprint at different places, Palmer said. Another authentication approach is voice recognition–saying phrases that all the time, or using handwriting input in a similar way. Face recognition and even hand vein patterns are also possiblities, but are not yet mature.
Stay tuned for the RSA security conference next week if you really want to dig into the topic…
February 8th, 2006
RSS tools at Demo 2006
Demo 2006: NewsGator introduced a hosted solution that allows publishers to integrate an RSS reader into their Web sites. It’s part of an effort to bring RSS to the masses, similar to efforts by Yahoo and others to make feeds out of everything consummable. The look and feel is customizable, and companies including Newsweek.com and SFGate.com will be launching private labeled NewsGator RSS readers. The NewsGator Hosted Solution includes built-in templates and is hosted by NewsGator.
SimpleFeed also demoed new RSS related publishing tools, including a Web import, which brings pages into an RSS feed. Feed templates can be have a unique look and feel. In addition, the company introduced SimpleFeed Secure, which allows companies to publish feeds that require a user name and password.
February 8th, 2006
More coverage from Demo 2006
I’ve been sitting next to Leslie Walker of the Washington Post the last two days. She’s blogging lots of the consumer demos, as is the team from News.com, Rafe Needleman and Daniel Terdiman. Shel Israel, co-author of Naked Conversations, is also busy blogging Demo, as are Mike Arrington (TechCrunch) and Jeff Clavier. John Furrier’s Podtech is doing dozens of podcasts from the event. Also blogging–Renee Blodgett, Fred Wilson, Chris Coulter and others not named here because I need to go to lunch…
February 8th, 2006
Extending the Web to the street
Locamoda showed the latest version of its technology that allows any mobile phone to be used to interact with applications ‘on the street." The phone works as a remote control to communicate with large screens in storefronts, cafes, city streets and other locations. StreetSurfer, for example, creates a scenario in which you walk by a real estate office or kiosk anywhere and use your phone to browse property information and connect directly to a broker or send a message. Other scenarios include retail shops and travel agencies. It’s a cool application of wireless technology and the Web–and another demonstration of how anytime, anywhere connectivity is upon us.
February 8th, 2006
Massive data crunching on a laptop
Demo 2006: Panoratio Database Images CEO Brett Kirkpatrick demoed a unique technology that allows huge databases to run in-memory on standard PCs will full fidelity–no data loss. He showed a 300 megabyte database of every plan and game in the NFL for a century that is transformed into 10 megabytes. The database has 110 different dimensions and 330,000 events. He also showed a 300 gigabyte Oracle database of pharmacy data–consisting of 126 million prescriptions by 10 million pharmacists and 230,000 drugs over 3 years–transformed to 290 megabytes.
The secret sauce is PDI (Portable Database Image), which can reduce database footprints by 10 to 1000 times. The technology involves finding for patterns in the data, taking out repetitious patterns and using mathematics to represent the differences, greatly reducing file sizes. The Panoratio .pdi doesn’t involve any pre-calculations, can integrate with various business intelligence tools in addition to its own Explorer tool. The company has ten production customers in Europe, Kirkpatrick said, and recently signed on Yahoo in the US. The technology came out of the Siemens AG Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning Laboratory.
February 8th, 2006
Demo 2006: Advancing search--Nexidia, Transparansee, Kosmix, Truveo
Demo 2006: On this second day of Demo, some search technology startups took the stage. Nexidia, an established company in search and speech analysis, introduced Nexidia Developer Edition, which lets rich media (video and audio) content creators and sites add phonetic search capablities for desktop and Web search. The software includes Web services for audio indexing and search, which makes it easy to integrate phonetic search with applications. Drew Lanham, senior vice president of media at Nexidia, showed impressive demos–fast and relevant results–of finding speech content in videos and podcast indexes.
Factoids: According to Nexidia’s Web site, phonetic search is based on the notion that the entire world of utterances consists of about 400 phonemes. Most languages have a 40 phoneme range, and the most widely spoken languages an 80 phoneme range.
Cosmix demoed Kosmix Search, which takes an algorithmic approach to categorizing the Web, providing a multi-dimensional view of search results. The company founders, Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman, were also behind Junglee, database technology that was acquired by Amazon in 1998. Kosmix includes Health (beta), Travel (alpha), and Politics (alpha) search Unlike Healthline, which searches a constrained set of sites, Kosmix Health searches the entire Web, Rajaraman told me. Kosmix Health Search technology has a deal to power search on The HealthCentral Network.
Transparansee Systems showed the latest version of its Discovery Search Engine, which focuses on searching structured data. For example, in searching a real estate database, you set criteria in a database query and get the exact matches. Transparansee provides more flexibility in searching by including close matches and sliders that allow users to weight various parameters, such as number of bedrooms, price or zip codes. The end result is a more dynamic interactive search experience, which is a step forward compared to most searching today.
Truveo, part of AOL since January, showed its video crawler, which will be part of AOL Video Search in the next few weeks, according to Tim Tuttle, co-founder of the company. Visual crawling technology finds and indexes video that isn’t found in other search engines, Tuttle said. For example, Truveo collects metadata associated with video content. He added that video search is just at the beginning and teased a new AOL product–AOL Video shown on a TV though Intel Viiv technology (introduced at CES in January). Not much new, but Tim Tuttle is no longer captain of a little startup.
February 7th, 2006
RawSugar's hierarchical navigation
RawSugar is one those social media services that takes a few run throughs to figure out. Tagging and social networking services are the current hot category, with many variations on a theme. Check out TechCrunch if you want to keep up with all the new tag/social startups. RawSugar differentiates itself from del.li.cious and other services in that it applies manual, human tagging to organize directory entries by multiple topics–hierarchically. Companies like Endeca provide hierarchical navigation, but not for free or as social media.
Users can provide their own taxonomy, but in the background RawSugar takes all the information and applies hueristics to provide the best classification, according to company CEO and founder Ofer Ben-Shachar, who previously founded NetDynamics (an early Java application server). RawSugar that can organize their personal directories using tag hierarchies, and share them with other users. The free, ad supported service is aimed at Web publishers and bloggers who can benefit from improving their site with guided navigation via hieararchies. Users can give each Web page multiple tags, annotate pages and create hierarchies for more guided search experiences.
RawSugar has been available in beta and so far has over 2,000 directories. Part of the business model is sharing revenue with publishers, similar to what Google is doing with AdSense, Ben-Shachar said.
February 7th, 2006
Demo 2006 security roundup, part 1
Demo 2006: On the security front, several companies showed off simple and useful tools for interacting more safely on the Internet. StrikeForce Technologies demoed WebSecure, anti-keylogging software that encrypts keystrokes as they are typed, and reroutes them to the browser via a separate channel that bypasses the places in Windows where keyloggers lurk. The download is available in Q2 for $25 per client.
Shimon Systems introduced Bio-NetGuard, a fingerprint-based access control device that provides multifactor security for Wi-Fi LANs. When logging into a Wi-Fi network, a users’ fingerprint is required, which is routed to the Bio-NetGuard device which stores and matches fingerprints and authenticate with the router. The retail price for the device and software is $499, which supports up to 500 users.
Fortify Software introduced Application Defense, a companion to its Source Code Analysis Suite. The new product analyzes and protects existing J2EE application (as opposed to applications in development), using the same knowledge base, and detection algorithms as source code analysis product. "Guards" are inserted in the codetha can watch for hacker probes, such as SQL injections, cross-site tampering, click fraud, privacy violations and request tampering, according to Mike Armistead, vice president of marketing. For example, Application Defense detects anomalies and can then request user input from the user as a security countermeasure. Pricing starts at $6,500 per instance of an application.
Mi5 demoed a new appliance for eradicating spyware. CEO Doug Camplejohn describe the Enterprise Spygate product as the "first purpose built appliance for spyware." The appliance sits on the gateway, and has a real-time inspection engine for scanning traffic and blocks incoming and outgoing spyware. It also provides auditing of spyware on the network and identifies affected systems and types of spyware. Enterprise Spygate ranges in price from $3,000 for a model that supports 250 users to $50,000 for a unit that covers 10,000 users.
February 7th, 2006
Demo 2006: TagWorld, VSee, Plum
Demo 2006: CNET’s Rafe Needleman blogs about on TagWorld, VSee and Plum:
TagWorld — now with commerce
Who knew that a world of young people would propel MySpace into the phenom it has become? The site’s success has left the rest of the world scrambling to catch up, but the game isn’t over yet. A new entry into the personal site space is TagWorld. It’s based on tagging: users can tag other users, sites, media, and so on. Designing pages is highly interactive. Users can just drag items around on the page to create their own designs.
I wrote a column on TagWorld for Release 1.0. New for Demo is the tag-based classified service. It handles payments, too, via PayPal, so users will be able to quickly sell goods — assuming the network gets big enough. TagWorld now has 700,000 users.
Slow video = slow minds
With videoconferencing, quality matters. Lag on a video connection makes conversations stilted. We perceive people as mentally slow when they respond to us slowly. As Milton Chen, the CEO of VSee Lab says, quite rightly, "Our brains blame the person for technology deficiencies."
VSee Lab makes Vsee, a videoconferencing product that is supposed to require just half the bandwidth of Skype. It’s peer-to-peer and requires no servers. The demo here was compelling - the people on the other end of the videoconference appeared much more lifelike than other, sluggish, videoconference systems.
Also, the system allows users to pan and zoom around the video images coming in. Users can drill into small portions of a whiteboard, for example.
Chen says most of the people working at his company work from home — using their own technology.
Yet another social bookmark site?
During the hands-on sessions at Demo, I checked out Plum (still in closed beta). This service lets you collect things you like–bookmarks, photos, documents, etc.–and then use those collections in several useful ways. The service acts like a social network of knowledge: If there’s an item in your collection, the system can tell you what other people who have the same item also have in their collections. In some ways it’s like Del.icio.us, but the user experience is more mainstream (i.e. easier) with Plum.
In Plum, you can tag items, just as you do in other bookmarking systems. But the founders of Plum recognize that many users may not tag their content, so Plum also performs a contextual analysis of your items, and groups them based on that. Plum can display its items on a Web page (in several different formats) and also send you items in e-mail or RSS feeds.
Plum lets you collect items from your own computer, and intermingle them with your bookmarks. I saw a demo of saving a photo on a local machine to a Plum account, and it was much easier than any of the online-only bookmarking systems I’ve seen. It’s also easy to publish and share a collection (or just a narrow slice of a collection) with other users, so Plum may end up competing with photo-sharing services.
February 7th, 2006
Riya going public beta in two weeks...
Demo 2006: Riya was one of the hottest products shown demo. It’s been in development for over two years, and was the talk of Silicon Valley when Google was rumored to be acquiring the company. I saw it a few months ago, and it has come a long way since then. The software does one thing well–use face and text recognition to search through photos. The demo given by CEO Munjal Shah today shows that the alogrithms are improving as well as the user interface. Munjal said the product will be availabe for public beta in two weeks. Don’t miss it.
Munjal Shah, CEO and co-founder of Riya
February 7th, 2006
Krugle--Google for programmers
I got a close look at Krugle (rhymes with Google), the forthcoming (March 8) vertical search engine for programmers. The search engine finds content from a constrained set of domains, starting with the main Web sites that programmers use and rippling out to sites that are associated by strong interlinking. Krugle also analyzes site content linguistically–based on about 500 technology words–determining the relevance of the content based on a ratio of the keywords to all the words on the page or site, according to Steve Larsen, CEO and co-founder of the company.
In addition, Krugle searches for chunks of code on pages. The company is also indexing code from a variety of sources, including from Sun, O’Reilly, IEEE and the ACM. For sites that require registration, Krugle is working with those companies to integrate with their registration systems. If the user is not a registered Sun developer, for example, and clicks on some Sun data behind the firewall, Sun’s developer log-in/new user screen will pop up. The source code rendered by the search engine is parsed and retains the code structure and formatting appropriate to the language. The metadata of code projects, such as licenses, operating systems and size of the bug database, is also available as well as API reports on code. You can also view where a project exists within the universe of code.
Steve Larsen, CEO, and John Mitchell, chief architect, of Krugle
Krugle also allows registered users to comment and annotate code in layer that floats above the search results. Users can also tag and download projects as well as bookmark lines, pages and projects.
The search engine will be free and ad supported. A paid version will be available as well that allows developers to plug Krugle into IDEs like Eclipse and index code and technical information behind corporate firewalls. Larsen told me that Krugle will have an enterprise version next year that will allow companies to index to all their code using Krugle’s platform.
February 7th, 2006
Extending PowerPoint with Freepath
Demo 2006: Grass Roots Software demoed a new presentation application, Freepath (the site is still not live at this writing) that lets you build a playlist by dragging and dropping elements into a composer. The software leverages PowerPoint content and also supports audio, video, PDF, Word and other data types. Freepath is available for $249 ($149 for the next 90 days). CNET’s Rafe Needleman concludes:
This could be priceless for professional presenters and for people who are good at jumping around in their presentations, but it’s likely overkill for the occasional or linear-thinking PowerPoint jockey.
February 7th, 2006
Meet Pleo, descendent of Furby
Demo 2006: Ugobe founder and chief inventor Caleb Chung shows off his latest offspring, Pleo (see photo below). Chung also co-invented Furby, which was a great annoyance in my house a few years ago. His latest invention is much more lifellike and natural. According to the company Pleo is modeled after a one-week old Camarsaurus:
Pleo has been specifically engineered to mimic life with organic movement and behaviors that allow him to relate to humanity on a personal level. Pleo is able to use simultaneous sensory inputs along with a sophisticated behavioral platform to act independently and express himself through motion and sound. Pleo can convey emotions, is aware of himself and his surroundings, and evolves in behavior over time.
Furby co-inventor Caleb Chung talks to his latest creation, Pleo
Features include:
-
14 servo joints (torso, head, tail, neck, legs) with force feedback
-
38-touch, sound, light and tilt sensors including nine touch sensors (mouth, chest, head,
shoulders, back, feet) and 8 feet and toe sensors -
Fluid quadruped motion
-
Ability to avoid obstacles and not walk off edges
-
Sound output, stereo sound sensors and music beat detection
-
Autonomous interaction with owner and environment including coughing, blinking eyes,
chomping, twitching, sighing, sneezing, sniffing, growling stomach, tail drift, and yawning -
Distinct moods including anger, boredom, playfulness, hunting, cautious, cuddling,
disgust, disorientation, distress, fear, curiosity, joy, sorrow, surprise, fatigue, hunger, and
a desire for social interaction -
Upgradeable, Life Form OS and Personality System
-
SD card memory expansion
-
Ability to communicate with other UGOBE Life Forms
-
Rechargeable battery
Naked Pleo
Pleo is expected to be available for adoption in Q3 2006 and will retail for a modest $199.
More coverage of Demo 2006 from news.com here.
February 7th, 2006
Digismart mini projector
Demo 2006: Digismart, from Digislide Holdings, is a minature projection system that can display an 11-inch by 17-inch image from a distance of 3 feet. The micro-optical device can be integrated into cell phones, PDAs, GPS units, MP3 and MP4 players, handheld games and laptops. The company said that the projector could be used for displaying emails, technical drawings, site plans, movies, and maps. The company is seeking about $10 million to get the product to market for licensing by OEMs. It sounds like a must have feature for any handheld device…
February 7th, 2006
Demo 2006: Simplify and ice cream
Demo host Chris Shipley called upon the tech industry to simplify, simplify, echoing Henry David Thoreau. 
"Personal computing has become much too complex…individuals are becoming overwhelmed…which has moved personal tech to point of diminishing returns." Chris contends that many people may just sit out the market, and that the complexity and overload may stop or slow down acquisition of new technology until applications, devices and services don’t have a steep learning curve or require a permission slip from an IT department. Simplify–this is the challenge, how to make computer more simple for individual." She doesn’t suggest dumbing down technology, but to simply bring it back from the "brink of diminishing returns."
She also noted that for many products, the line is blurred between professional and personal use. "The difference between business and consumer is fading…we have to smarten up technology to make sure the products we buy as individuals meet our needs as business executives," Chris said.
The first demo was a vending machine–MooBella–that makes ice cream. The machine creates the flavors (96 combinations) and flash freezes the ingredients (with a Linux-based software system), delivering scoops within 45 seconds. The vending machine can communicate sales data, track inventory and receive machine alerts. "It takes ice cream where no ice cream gone before," said company president Bruce Ginsberg. The company hopes that Starbucks will add MooBella machines to its stores, but for now the company is in test mode and looking for funding–beyond the $36 million already invested.
February 6th, 2006
Demo 2006 preview, Part 2
Continuing the preview of Demo 2006, 12 hours before the opening demo, here are some of the other new or improved products from among the 68 that will be getting their first public viewing.
On the consumer side, Vizrea Snap allows users to automatically move pictures between your PC, camera phone, and the Web. Sharpcast’s platform synchronizes media, such as photos, and email file across a variety of devices. You can take a picture on a camera phone and it instantaneously shows up on the Web and a PC, for example.
RawSugar is demoing a sharable directory service focused on human input.
The EQO Mobile Internet Phone Service lets Skype users make and take phone calls to and from their buddy lists on regular handsets. The EQO platform is extensible to other services.
Iotum is showing a platform that filters, ranks and prioritizes phone calls based on relevance. A ‘Contextualizer’ indexes and categorizes information (email, calendar, IM, business processes, etc.), providing specific context to a rules Processor, which determines call routing.
Sprout Systems is introducing an email management system for small businesses, with 10 or fewer employees. Spoutit Mailroom is a hosted service starting at $19 per month. The software sorts and prioritizes correspondence, suggests responses, tracks threads, and hotlists critical emails. The 10 person company is scattered around the US and in Prague. Three of the top executives in the startup moved from Southern California to Prague because the cost of living is 40 percent less. Beer is only 75 cents in Prague, Charles Jolly, one of the 27-year-old cofounders told me.
Nexidia’s software applies algorithms for phonetic search that renders spoken word content (audio and video) searchable via a text query across 28 languages, according to the company.
Interprise Solutions is introducing a new version of its integrated ERP/CRM suite based on .Net technology.
NetworkStreaming is rolling out a specialized appliance–Support Desk–for managing remote support operations.
More to come from the event tomorrow and Wednesday. I’ll be taking a closer look at some of the enterprise, security and consumer products mentioned and unmentioned….
February 6th, 2006
Demo 2006 preview, part 1
I arrived in Phoenix at the site of Demo 2006, which will showcase 68 new and improved products, ranging across consumer and enterprise hardware and software. Some of the companies launching products (mostly beta) won’t have much info on their Web sites until the event officially begins on Tuesday. Here’s a sample of what’s to come:
On the search engine front, BiggerBoat is launching an entertainment specific search engine, Kosmix categorization technology for vertical search, and Krugle a vertical search engine that gives programmers access to open source code and technical information (project information, documentation, license information, tips & hints, user reviews, legal information). Users will be able to add commentary to specific results.
Blurb is showing off its platform for creating and marketing bookstore-quality books. Kaboodle is demoing its social shopping search engine, which has been in beta for three weeks.
Plum is introducing a free internet service for collecting and sharing pages, text, photos, feeds, email and sharing it as a blog, list, album or live feed.
ID Vault from GuardID Systems will demo a consumer-focused product to improve online security by buying a two-factor security token.
iGuitar turns the guitar into a plug and play computer peripheral. "The strategy is to ship iGuitar, iAcoustics (a line of acoustic guitars coming later this year. The company also plans to license technology to other instrument makers, said company president Patrick Cummings (see photo below). The fully digital iGuitar for the Mac and PC ships in the second of this year.
On the enterprise front, Accomplice Software is introducing a peer-to-peer based, collaborative task manager that integrates with Outlook and PDAs. Avokia’s apLive data virtualization software supports transaction replication and load balancing across multiple identical active databases. The company is also announcing what it claims is the first virtualized database spanning a distance of over 1,700 miles with Telus.
Cesura’s Business Certainly Solution measures continuously the health of a system and generates alerts and identifies possible problem causes. Jitterbit is introducing Open Edition, and open source integration tool that allows design, configuration, testing and deployment of integrated solutions on Linux or Windows.
Fortify has a new security product that monitors and protects business applications from misuse, regardless of whether the source of attack is inside or outside an enterprise.
LogLogic captures transactional data in the form of logs from applications, devices, servers and operating systems, and provides real-time alerting, reporting and search.
Dan Farber, editor-in-chief of CNET News.com, has more than 20 years of experience as an editor and journalist covering technology. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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