DEMOfall '08: Web something-point-0

Tuesday afternoon at DEMOfall was devoted to Web 2.0 -- or maybe 3.0, or possibly even 4.0. For corporate IT people, there are software-as-a-service (SaaS) tools for project management, tuning database applications and sales processes, and letting non-database-gurus navigate multiple corporate databases. For everyone else, there's language learning, video clipping, search tweaking and spin hunting.

One last time: For those who've never been to a DEMO conference, it's a seemingly endless series of six-minute pitches for IT products and services. Most of them are new, all of them are innovative, but not everything is aimed at Computerworld's IT-shop readers. I boil them down to what's likely to matter to corporate IT shops. Want to know more? Click on the link.

Here's the summary from the final DEMOfall session on Tuesday afternoon:

* Quantivo demoed a SaaS toolset for retailers to analyze how their customers buy by finding trends in how one purchase usually leads to another (for example, people who buy plumbing items may tend to follow up by buying bathroom and kitchen fixtures). It's like traditional customer analytics, but on-demand, cheaper and with faster results.

* PlanDone showed its SaaS project management system. All the usual tools are there -- messaging, chat, Gantt charts, wikis -- but the main focus is on prioritizing tasks to make sure the project gets done. Support for browsers and smartphones, pricing starts at $149 per month for five users.

* Qtask offered its "unified collaboration environment" -- yeah, it's project management SaaS again, this time for focused on accountability and compliance (what we used to call "nagware"). It seems to be more oriented to ongoing processes than to one-off projects. Pricing is $50 per user per month, but the first five users are free for a year if you sign up by December.

* SitScape demoed its Situational Web Remixer, which lets users grab live pieces of Web pages, online applications and SaaS services, and then mash them together into a dashboard that can then be redistributed to other users or websites. Very slick click-and-drag instant development tool, though where the collection and processing gets done (on the SitScape website?) isn't clear.

* TetraBase showed TetraBase SDT, its tool for improving performance of relational database apps. The idea is to identify when predictable heavy loads hit the database -- say, when the help-desk staffers arrive in the morning and collect their trouble tickets -- so that data can be preprocessed and cached to reduce bottlenecks and lockups. But forget about clicking on the link; right now the website is just a "coming soon" page.

* Radiant Logic demoed its Virtual Context Server, a tool that turns structured data from multiple databases into human-readable sentences and links them together. That lets a business user do a Google-style search for a particular customer, product or order, then navigate the transaction with data that comes from different places within the business.

In other presentations with a less corporate-IT bent:

* BizEquity demoed its website that lets small-business owners calculate the value of their businesses.

* Momindum showed K-base 2.0, its system for building rich-media presentations that includes the ability to tag just the amount of a video clip that you want an audience to see.

* SpinSpotter demoed its browser plug-in that's designed to help Web surfers look for questionable journalism.

* iWidgets offered its drag-and-drop tool for video providers to bundle content to put on social-network sites, which will then drive traffic back to the content-owner's website.

* Infovell showed its search engine that's focused on professional journals and expert sources and allows queries up to 25,000 characters long.

* Intelius demoed iSearch, its people-search website that lets users search by name, city, phone number or social networks.

* Rebus Technology showed Recollect Desktop, which lets users track receipts and other paperwork by scanning them, then automatically uses optical character recognition to index them for later search.

* Semanti offered SemantiFind, a browser plug-in that lets a user choose the semantics of search terms for search engines (for example, it lets Google search for "mileage" meaning "fuel efficiency" rather than "miles traveled").

* And finally, Cerego demoed iKnow, its online learning system that currently teaches English to Japanese speakers and Japanese to English speakers.

And that's it for DEMOfall 2008!