DEMO 09: Getting weird with mobile

Monday afternoon at DEMO 09 was about mobile phones and hardware -- including a six-foot-tall phone designed for flirting singles. No, I couldn't make this stuff up if I tried.

Once again, for those who've never been to a DEMO conference, it's a seemingly endless series of six-minute pitches for (mostly new) IT products and services. I boil them down with a focus on what's likely to matter to corporate IT shops, though there's less for us this year, thanks to a recession that has cut the number of DEMOers almost in half. Every demo gets a link here; click through if something looks interesting.

Remember, if you're reading this on Monday or Tuesday, March 2nd or 3rd, you can still watch the remaining presentations live online at demo.com/live on Tuesday from 8:30 to 10:30 a.m. and 2 to 4:30 p.m. Pacific time. In addition, Computerworld blogger Eric Lundquist is blogging live here at the show. The video is about five seconds delayed; the live blogging is updated demo-by-demo; I get an extra few minutes to check spelling and add information. And you get them all.

Here's the summary from the Tuesday afternoon session, beginning a half-dozen increasingly, um, unusual applications for mobile phones:

* Coveroo demoed its system for putting artwork on cell phone covers. No, really. You go to the website, choose your phone from among 75 models, pick canned artwork or upload your own, and the company burns the design on a cover with a 1200 dpi laser and mails it to you. Prices start at $9.95, more for silver and gold metallic images. No, it doesn't sound like something for corporate IT -- until your marketing department finds out about it.

* Promptu Systems showed ShoutOut, a service that uses speech recognition to convert voice messages to SMS text messages on an iPhone. Yeah, it's just like it sounds: Start the iPhone app and speak your message; the phone app preprocesses the audio, ships it to Promptu's back-end servers for conversion, and is returned as text for any necessary editing. It'll be made available as a service by cellular carriers, available in the U.S. in midyear. I understand the potential value for thumb-limited users but...well, doesn't this cry out for a second app that reads SMS messages aloud? And then maybe we could cut out the middle man and just make phone calls again...

* HAM-IT offered its service for letting customers search for doctors, accountants and other service providers. It's something like a focused Google that takes location into account. The user is provided with a list of providers, and chooses one; the provider is notified of a potential customer, and pays for the lead. Free to the user. In beta now; launching in Boston and New York first, more cities later.

* Asurion showed Asurion Mobile AddressBook, a service that extends a cell phone's address book to let a user see more contact information -- including contents of Facebook pages, Twitter feeds and other social-networking systems. In beta soon for Android-based phones such as the T-Mobile G1; pricing not set, but it will eventually be sold directly by the company, as well as through wireless carriers.

* bluBuzz demoed bluBuzz, a platform for "proximity marketing" using Bluetooth. Yeah, it's as bad as you feared: You upload your marketing message or picture to the service, which then downloads it to a special Bluetooth-broadcasting device in, say, your restaurant. Then everyone who walks past with a Bluetooth-enabled device will be offered the message, which they have the option to accept or reject. At last, Bluetooth spam simplified. No word on availability or price, and even the company's website just said "Coming soon" when this blog was posted.

* Skout already offers an iPhone app for flirting (it uses location to identify nearby singles who also have the same app running). Now the company is introducing SkoutOut, a standalone display that does the same sort of thing in bars and other singles hangouts. Yes, it really does look like a six-foot-tall phone, complete with touchscreen, which displays pictures of singles along with time, temperature and drink specials. The company says it will be in 10,000 locations. Oh yeah -- to use it for flirting, you feed it cash in order to buy a drink or play a tune -- remotely -- for a potential date. Did I mention that I couldn't possibly make this stuff up?

* Always Innovating showed the Touch Book, a $299 netbook with a touchscreen. Weighs 2 lbs., but the keyboard can come off and the remainer can be used as a tablet computer. Runs a version of Linux, instant on, uses an ARM processor that gets three times the battery life of a typical netbook (Touch Book gets 10-15 hours of use per charge). There's an iPhone-like accelerometer, so the tablet can tell which side is up and react to movement. In addition, the inside of the tablet is easily accessible for installing USB devices -- no more dangling dongles. First machines will be available by June 2009; the hardware will be complete, but the software will still be beta and subject to change.

* Avaak demoed a really, really easy to set up webcam system. How easy? Connect the gateway to a network hub. Push the sync button. It's running. Comes with two camers and the gateway for $299, available in early summer. Whether or not your corporate IT shop is interested in using this, it could easily become the next rogue network device. Watch out for it.

* Qualcomm MEMS Technologies showed prototypes of a Mirasol display, a new electromechanical color display technology. Yes, electromechanical, but the pixel sizes are small -- in the 10- to 100-micron size. I won't try to describe the way the tech works; follow the link to see. It's reflective, so it should be especially good in direct sunlight, but the only samples on the stage were the size of cell-phone screens. No word on how fast the display is, but it uses an average of 1/200th the power of an LCD screen. This is a long way from commercial availability, but interesting stuff.

[UPDATE: Qualcomm informs me that the monochrome Mirasol display is already in a few commercial products, and products incorporating the color version will be available soon -- and Qualcomm just announced a deal with LG to use the next generation of the color displays in future cell phone. I've now seen it up close: It's fast and sharp, and I just wish they'd hurry up with it already.]

* Finally, Silverstone Solutions talked about Matchmaker, a system for matching live kidney donors with potential recipients. It seems that it's often easy to find donors willing to donate a kidney for a friend or relative, but they're usually not compatible, and they're not willing to donate unless they know their friend/relative will get a kidney from somewhere. Matchmaker sets up donor swaps. It's been in use at California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco has been using it for two years, and has improved its kidney-donor-matching rate by 20%. The developer -- who waited three and a half years for a kidney -- wants to spread the word to other potential donors and donees. Nope, no corporate IT hook here, but it's nice to see some people doing well by doing good.

More to come...

Eric Lundquist: Lundquist's Five Demo 2009 Business Awards
Frank Hayes: DEMO 09: Getting smart
Mark Everett Hall: Without social networks products will wither and die
IT Blogwatch: Demonstrators demo at DEMO 09
Frank Hayes: DEMO 09: Getting weird with mobile
Frank Hayes: DEMO 09: It's the economy, stupid...
Eric Lundquist: Demo 2009 live blog of company presentations
Eric Lundquist: Five reasons why Demo 2009 still matters.
     ... more ...