Demo 2009 live blog of company presentations

www.ontier.com

CEO Sebastian Rapport.

Ok, this is next gen email that uses voice, video and complex diagrams to communicate. I'd give it an seven out of ten as it aligns well with work at home and remote employees. This falls into the unified communcations market. 

The part I'd be looking for is to see how easy it is to integrate with other messaging systems. 

Transformyx

Claude Bethea

 www.transformyx.com

RallyPoint web-based crisis communication. This is a company based in Baton Rouge, LA that was born out of the crisis following Hurricane Katrina. What RallyPoint has

1. One common communications portal

2. Authenticated media platform to communicate

3. Real time accountability.

Combines inbound and outbound communications systems. Use a remote facility and communications card with web address and phone number. 

Includes a mapping function to see where people have been evacuated. Allows people to communicate with each other.
I'd give this one a seven also. I'm guessing this is one of those products that companies will find they needed after the disaster.

Vokle, Inc.
www.vokle.com
Live video communication designed to "unmute" social networks.  All about social news and is user submitted, establish ranks and allows vocal product discussion. There is no software, only requires flash.
You can create a private chat from a public product chat. Allows you to share content and chat. I'd put this in the neat social network category, but as in lots of these products I wonder if you can really expect people to spend all that time on the network. 

Technicopia
www.qwabbit.com
Plug in for Microsoft Outlook. Priced at around $20. Scans incoming emails and easily moves the contact to outlook. The president is Todd Miller. Scan incoming emails and easily moves them to Outlook address book. This is one of those products where you can't figure why Microsoft hasn't done this years ago. You can move the contact into your address book in about five seconds. This one is worth the $20.

C.C.Betty.
Takes all contents of an email and collates the information. www.ccbetty.com. Parses the information and translates the mail to administrative tasks. Michael Cerda describes it as a super email product.
Makes sense, but not sure about the back end administration.

Citrix Online.
Go View. A screen recording, editing and hosting service. This is an easy way to share, edit and record screens. You can manage all your recordings from a hosted server. This also falls into the neat idea, what wasn't this done earlier. Worth a try. 

Zuora, Inc.
ecommerce for Facebook. Tries to help Facebook developers make money as advertising is not working for Facebook. Offer applications on monthly, quarterly fees or how much application is being used (like $1 for each time the application is used) www.zuora.com Example was Facebook relationship manager where you take the application and move it to a subscription business. Make is easy for the developer to add subscription fees and adds a payment method to the user side of Facebook. You will have to really offer a superior pro (payment) version of the free apps out there.

Document Depository Corp. www.docdep.com  Takes on the boring, but important task of document management. The company describes is as lightweight, cloud based application. Application demoed was corporate governance. I like these types of products as they address real business tasks. They describe themselves as an application, rather than a storage company. Includes email automation for document management. Pricing, corp. governance is under $100 per company or around $10 per user.

Home-Account Inc.   www.home-account.com Product designed to replace your mortgage broker. Mortgage industry is in a world of hurt as CEO Mark Goldstein said. Tries to be a Turbo Tax for mortgage. Four step process. Allows you to build a profile and keep that profile in the tag cloud. Allows an analytics engine and gives you a mortgage workout plan. This is a subscription service ($9.95 a month) and promises to save about $165 a month for typical family. Gives leads to banks at no fee connection with bank. First 10k users get 90 days free. Presently running at 3 mortgage valuations a second. Cool, timely product.

Zipadi Technologies Inc.
www.zipadi.com
Software as a service that takes paper catalogs and turns them to a digital edition with ecommerce. Experience online version same as printed version. The transaction all takes place in the existing publication.
Has a backend content management system that allows you to add, save, change prices, etc. Includes an email contact manager. Also includes an inventory module. Uses Adobe flex.

7 Billion people. Software for online sales. www.7bpeople.com Changes web pages in real time to offer custom shopping experience. Six attributes measure user activity. Personalizes search, product activities and check out page. CEO is Mark Nagatis. This company is in sync with the end of one size fits all web sites and moves to personalized web results even on really big Amazon sized sites.

Liquid Media
www.liquidmediasw.com
"social marketing" community under the loyal2me service. Gives user control over types and volume of messages. Consumers invite favorites. Businesses can send voice messages to consumers. Personalized, just in time discounts. This company is taking a whack at trying to stop useless, undirected advertising into real time advertising opportunities.Good integration with cell phone voice messaging.

eformic, Ltd.
Green company aimed at managing carbon credits. www.CO2code.info   This product divides up carbon usage into a certifcate-based product where codes can be included on the product label. Users can track the amount of emissions used in the production of the product and how those emissions were counterbalanced. Existing bar codes can incorporate CO2 changes and allows users to decide where the offset will take place. CO2 code will work on any product but first target is high end products. Among the first companies trying to bring climate change concerns to a product action.

Coveroo, www.coveroo.com  Uses a laser to etch your favorite artwork on the phone. You go to the website and browse in phone models. The cell phone has moved from just being a communicator to a fashion and personality statement. Same for iPod. You don't send in your phone, you get a new cover. The company expects to be profitable in Q3. All this only works for people with money to spare.

Promptu Systems Corp. www.promptu.com   Voice powered mobile applications. The product being introduced is ShoutOUT, a voice to text SMS application for the iPhone. You get a talk screen press, hold the button and talk. The handset preprocesses the voice command and then transmits to the Promptu server. The test message missed Demo and produced the word dental. Can be used to send Twitter messages. OK, good product. No more constrained tiny typing.

HAM-IT. www.ham-it.com   The idea is for users to be able to broadcast their needs and get back results from nearby merchants. Reverses the idea of instead of merchants looking for consumers, you have consumers looking for merchants. The service uses a services database crawled from the web. Providers pay HAM-IT a $1 for the contact. The service can work via a mobile handset for developing countries. I'm thinking the service needs a lot of users to gain traction.

Asurion Mobile Applications, Inc. www.asurion.com  A mobile address book with applications for third party developers. You can add social feeds like facebook and messaging applications. They are calling the additions "mix-ins." The user will get a broader profile of the person than can usually be found in the contact view. Smart contacts will allow you to find nearby locations, of say a Starbucks, with one touch. I'd call this a programmable contact program. Again, they need to attract developers.

bluBuzz www.blubuzz.net      Location technology. Uses a hive unit and worker unit. OK, this one demo is not working. Uses bluetooth to identify location.

Skout. Mobile dating. You can browse for singles close to where you are. Uses mobile chat to interact with people in bars, etc. This includes a big Skout out billboard sized product which are supposed to be in 10k locations. Combines online dating world with physical world. I'm so far removed from this scene that I can't judge the product.  The developers are Swedes which is a plus for me.

Venture Capital in a post recession panel
Eric Tilenius, found and managing partner, Tilenius Investments. This is an angel investor. New investment money has dropped nearly 70 percent. He claims we have passed the bubble and bubble mentality. apple started with $250k. He has not made any investments since October.

Bottom line is that there are a lot fewer investments, but those investments being made have a much longer timeframe.
They need to make good investments in long term companies. Sounds only sensible.

This is the worst venture funding environment anyone has seen.

Avaak Inc
Qualcomm MEMS Technologies

Hardware segment.
Always Innovating Inc. www.alwaysinnovating.com Fits between iPhone and laptop.   Weighs two pounds. Can do whatever a netbook can do. Powered by an ARM processor. Instant on system. Runs on Linux. The battery can last between ten and fifteen hours. Screen pulls off to become a one pound tablet. You can reverse the screen and as a magnet you can attach it to the fridge. Also a 3D games device. Has a built in accelerators. Uses a version of Firefox. Has internal USB connectors allows you to put USB dongle inside the device. Open source netbook on sterioids. Will sell for $299. This one looks really nice.

Avaak Inc. www.avaak.com   Combines low power camera and video streaming. Vue is a personal video network. Uses a network of battery operated cameras. Invented a mesh networking technology originally used for Darpa. No wires, tools or installer. Package with video network includes two cameras.  Uses a gateway that plugs into the home router. This is one really interesting camera product. Very simple to install and use.

Qualcomm MEMS Technologies
www.mirasoliddisplays.com  Reflective technology desinged for low power consumption and high reflectivity. Nature based technology, Mirasol display takes one milliwatt of power compared to 220 for led screen. 
Seems to have potential.

Silverstone Solutions Inc. www.silverstonesolutions.com  Designed for matching kidney donors.  83k people on deceased donor wait list. Lead times are increasing. Kidney pair donation had been few because of the complexity. Very interesting solution to a complex problem.

Social entrepreneur panel

Suneet Bhatt, Dream Village, in beta launch on March 20. Use children's picture books in conjuction with web portal. Children direct donations. For profit social enterprise.

Efe Osagie, Lead Now Fellows, education in Nigeria.

Xander Page, director, BeRewarding.com  director of sales. Incentive based quiz site on global issues. Also generates revenue for nonprofit. Combine education and outreach. Wants to be able to push 90 percent of revs to the non profits.

Ami Kassar, chief inovation officer , Advanta and President of ideablob Corp. Social entrepreneurship is a growing field.

Ensembli, LTd.
www.ensembli.com
Tries to build relevance into the Internet. This is a U.K. company. You build a personal account page. The system makes a judgement on your interests. This is one of many personalization products around the web. Feedreaders, etc seems never to have made it to the mainstream. Again, this is one of those products that need lots of users to make an interesting service into a company.

Evri  www.evri.com   Again, a relevancy engine. These folks are out of Seattle. Makes content recommendations on pages. Profile pages goes into collections about topics. This falls into the category of services that try to make sense out of the web morass. They include an api for developers to include the product on their sites.

Purewire. www.purewire.com  Web security service. Sits between the user and the web for security. User generated content has increased the security risks. Now, users need to establish trust among themselves. Purewire trust is a reputation system. Monitors behaviour, detects patterns and builds a reputation score. This is a product worth checking out. Some company is going to become the trust engine for the web.

Xmarks www.xmarks.com This was Foxmarks for synchronizing bookmarks. This service judges best sites best on bookmarking. Generate topics and similar sites based on bookmarking actions. How to get consumers to change behaviour? Xmarks highlights best results based on bookmark categories. Discovery, uses shared knowledge and smarter search. They will make money by advertising.

Gagapost www.qubes.cc  Blogging software. A very simple and robust blogging product. Allows posts to be shared among blogs. Co-own and co-edit posts. Extends to mobile devices. You can do all these activities with plug-ins for Wordpress, etc. but it is more of a hassle.

Gazaro   www.gazaro.com Uses AI to find products you want. Alerts you to when sales of products start. They describe it as a personalized electronic sales flyer. There are an endless number of products being layered on to Google searches and web information. The product rates sales and highlights the prices. Worth a look if you are buying lots of stuff on the web.

HowSimple Inc. www.howsimple.com Desktop application to create, access, manage and share content. Gives you a panel view of your sites. They don't want you to call it a browser, but if you think of a browser with high powered tabs, you get the idea. You can get a thumbnail view of 35 sites at a time. Allows merger of offline and online activities.

Primal fusion www.primalfusion.com  Thought networking. Acts like a research assitant. You start with an idea and the system returns tags related. Once again, a service that tries to make sense of all the information on the web. Platform for bringing your thoughts online.

Kutano corp.
www.kutano.com  
Allows commenting on web sites. Lets you post along any website. This would work best if there were lots of kutano users. Uses page subject recognition technology. Advertisers can run an ad in the kutano page.

Xandros Instant On
www.xandros.com   Allows laptops  and desktops to boot in seconds. Interesting product. It does what Windows should have been doing all along..

Symantec  www.symantec.com Prototype product called Project Guru. Allows tech savvy  users to provide remote support for family and friends. This is a service site, you can sign in and bring in other users.
Corporate level remote desktop service for home users. You can hand off difficult problems to the Symantec live system.

Jadoos
www.jadoos.com   Manage all your social networks. They try to give you a web remote control for all your networks. Gives you a single sign in for the network. Someone is going to be a success with this type of product.  Think of it as a social web operating system.

deskNet SA
www.sobees.com  Online companion to social networks. This is a buggy demo. You can bring your social networks into a plage you can manage. Makes it easy to share content.

AppZero
www.appzero.com  move enterprise applications into the cloud. This is the best demo of an enterprise application. Moves the data center from local to cloud. Provides instant application provisioning. Enterprise applications like websphere, oracle, etc. For backup and recovery, you provision into the cloud instead of buying a backup center. This is worth a look by any enterprise thinking about cloud computing.

SmartyCard
www.smartycard.com Online game  for kids that can earn points to do other activities.

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