DEMOfall '08: More cool stuff

Tuesday morning at DEMOfall was heavy on consumer products and services, with only a handful of presentations of much interest to at corporate IT. Those are the ones I focus on for Computerworld's readers; the rest get brief descriptions and links. If something looks interesting, click for more information.

For those who've never been to a DEMO conference, it's a seemingly endless series of six-minute pitches for technology products and services -- most of them new, all of them innovative.

Here's the summary from the Tuesday morning session's slim pickings for IT people:

* Accordia Group showed Accordia RM, an application for searching and navigating data in customer relationship management (CRM) systems and social networks. The idea is to automatically glean new information about relationships that will let sales guys do their jobs better. The tool also generates visual maps of relationships from existing CRM systems. If that doesn't sound exciting, ask your sales people.

* Paidinterviews had an online recruitment marketplace that automatically matches job candidates with potential jobs. The new idea: replace the fee that recruiting companies usually charge with a pre-specified fee that a job-seeker will get for doing the job interview. Sound too good to be true? Maybe, but it could still be cheaper than those recruiters.

* Arsenal Interactive demoed HeyCosmo, a service to set up robotic phone calls for scheduling meetings, trips or other social activities. It functions something like a shared calendar, but once the list of participants and options are set up on a website, the service calls everyone and subjects them to a synthesized voice offering "press 1 for 7 p.m."-style robocalls. It might be usable for business; then again, your users may want to kill whoever introduced it.

* And Microstaq showed the Ventilum. No, it's not another Pentium clone CPU; it's a silicon-based replacement for an expansion valve in a cooling system. The company says it can cut air-conditioning energy costs by 20% to 30% by increasing efficiency. It's just coming into mass production this year; no word on how cost-effective it will be for upgrading data center air conditioning. (Hey, I promised cool stuff, didn't I?)

In the consumer group:

* Familybuilder showed its genealogy social network, which is more focused on finding and interacting with living relatives rather than long-deceased ancestors. The company also announced a $59.95 DNA testing kit, which FamilyBuilder will use to look for shared genetic markers among its members.

* TravelMuse demoed TravelMuse Social Trip Planning, a social-network travel site for planning vacations.

* TurnTo Networks offered a social-network site for shopping.

* Best Buy -- yes, that Best Buy -- showed Giftag, an open-source Web browser add-in that functions as a universal gift registry (it's not limited to use for purchases at Best Buy). Currently Firefox-only, will be ported to Internet Explorer soon.

* Koollage demoed an application for bundling website content into a "pod" that can be posted on a social-networking site.

* Mapflow showed Avego, a service and iPhone application that allows drivers to share rides, doing the matching based on real-time location. Then the driver and rider can rate the experience -- think eBay for hitchhikers.

* Rudder demoed a personal money management system that adapts to a user's behavior to project expected future spending and income.

* Green Sherpa had a similar future-oriented personal financial management system, this one focused on expected cash flow.

* And Zazengo showed a social network for tracking charitable giving and volunteer work.

More to come...