DEMOfall '08: Back to the (paper-enabled) future

If it's September in San Diego, this must be the DEMOfall conference, where companies large and small get six minutes each to show their new IT products and services. As usual, DEMO producer Chris Shipley has assembled a mix of business- and consumer-oriented items, a total of 72 this time around -- blasted into the audience in four marathon sessions over two days.

For those who've never been to a DEMO conference, it's a seemingly endless series of those six-minute pitches. This isn't as grueling as it might sound; even though many of the presentations aren't of interest to corporate IT, they're almost all entertaining. And even the least interesting presentation is blessedly short -- in six minutes or less, they'll be talking about something else.

A warning for those who've never plowed through my not-quite realtime summary of the DEMOfall sessions: I boil each six-minute product blast down to what's essential for corporate IT. The rest get short shrift, but I've included links so you can still check out any of the more consumer-oriented items that sound interesting.

Here's the summary from the Monday morning session, which was frontloaded with some interesting business stuff, followed by lots of consumery products and services for sharing photos, music and videos. But for some reason, the first few demonstrations were, one way or another, all about paper:

* Adapx showed Capturx Forms for Excel, an add-in for Microsoft Excel that automatically captures structured data that's hand-written into printed forms. Confused? It works like this: Someone designs a form using Excel, then tags the fields that are to be captured. The form can then be printed out on plain paper; Capturx Forms inserts special watermarks into the printed version. Next, the person filling out the form uses a special digital pen that puts ink on the form but also reads the watermarks and stores the input. Finally, the pen can be plugged into a USB port to capture the data.

It sounds great, but as with all DEMO demos, this one was time-constrained; we never saw the uploaded data appear on the form, because it was too slow. (The company showed me the rest of the process later in the day: data uploaded, the handwriting recognized and displayed in a spreadsheet, then the contents of multiple forms aggregated together.) Advantages: People know how to use paper, and this may be more accurate than scanning. Disadvantage: It requires that special digital pen. And you have to learn to pronounce Capturx ("captures").

* Plastic Logic demonstrated a Kindle-like digital-paper device. Well, it's sort of Kindle-like. It doesn't have a name. It doesn't collect content via Wi-Fi. It won't ship until next year. But it's the most tablet-like tablet I've seen: roughly the size and weight of a sheaf of letter-size paper, with a touchscreen and a very sharp screen with great contrast, even in mediocre light.

I saw a hand-built prototype up close, and it suffered from some dead lines of pixels. But the company is opening a factory in Dresden, Germany this month to manufacture the displays in quantity, and quality should rise quickly. The display is reasonably fast for business uses but no color or motion -- forget video or games for now. No word on pricing, but this could finally make digital paper something more than a curiosity. Definitely worth watching.

* Tikitag had a user-friendly approach to making RFID tags anyone can use. The tags are embedded in one-inch circular paper stickers that can go on anything from business cards to toys to public signs. But first the tag is associated with content on the Tikitag website. Scan the tag with an appropriate reader on a phone or PC, and the linked content is displayed from a website. OK, that's sounds pretty much like ordinary RFID, but Tikitag (an Alcatel-Lucent spinoff) will be shipping a try-it-yourself kit on Oct. 1 for $49.99 that's aimed at consumers. If it works, this could finally replace equipment inventory tags that are always on the side of equipment we can't get to.

* Fusion-io was at DEMOfall last year showing a fast solid-state drive (SSD) called ioDrive. This year the company is back with ioSAN, which gangs two SSDs together and adds the ability to hang regular drives off the back, plus the software to make it all work as a SAN. Runs at 1.5 GB per second, crams the equivalent of several cubic yards of disk drives onto a single plug-in card. The usefulness to overcrowded, power-hungry data centers is obvious.

* Awind had something that got these presentation-oriented business users oohing and aahing: MobiShow, a box that lets a Wi-Fi-enabled smartphone display presentations or even video on a full-size screen in full-size resolution. The phone can display its desktop in the usual itty-bitty size, but can do full-size PowerPoint displays. The streaming video was especially impressive, even when a demonstration video of fireworks took a while to download and made the crowd think the demo had crashed. (It started up eventually, and looked very sharp.)

The rest of the morning's demos were focused pretty heavily on consumers (how many TV program-guide services does an IT shop need?). In order of appearance:

* Alerts.com demoed its website for aggregating online alerts -- from Craigslist, CNN, gas prices, horoscopes, traffic, a total of 30 available at the launch today -- and sending them to a user through e-mail, text messaging or voice. Free but ad-supported.

* Telnic showed its live Web-based directory service that uses the recently approved .tel top-level domain to automate collecting lots of information about an entity (a user, a hotel, a business) and present it in a website generated on the fly.

Then it was TV time:

* RealNetworks -- yes, that RealNetworks -- showed RealDVD, a system for saving purchased DVDs to a PC. DVD encryption-cracking software is nothing new, but Real says this one is legal as long as the DVD content is only watched by the owner of the purchased content, which Real enforces with its own DRM system.

* beeTV had a smart electronic program guide for suggesting TV programming based on what a viewer has watched in the past. OK, it's been done, but this one is designed for cable or satellite providers, not home users.

* RemoTV demoed a video-streaming system that converts media on the fly depending on whether it will be viewed PC, cell phone or PDA. There's also a website and social networking, but the on-the-fly conversion is the technology.

* Invision TV showed an online Web video program-guide-cum-social-network that lets users choose among commercial websites (CNN, ESPN) and video sites like YouTube.

* FFWD (pronounced "fast forward") is another video program guide, this one with links to Netflix and other sites.

Finally, there was a clutch of consumer-oriented services. Two were for sharing content on digital photo frames: UGA Digital's YouGotPhoto and Trinity Convergence's Gloop. There was also some clever Mac photo-sharing software from Blue Lava Technologies, as well as consumer-level media-sharing products and services from Kadoo, MixMatchMusic, Photrade, MeDeploy (that one's a pre-packaged system for online film distribution) and The Echo Nest (an online community for remixing music and getting the creators paid in real time).

More to come...