DEMOfall: Let's get vertical

The last session at this year's DEMOfall conference on Wednesday afternoon was mainly devoted to products aimed at specific markets. Well, except that one of the "verticals" was security, which fits squarely into corporate IT's sphere of interest.

My summaries of the previous DEMOfall pitch sessions are here, here, here. and here. And here's the Wednesday PM summary:

* FatLens showed its new apparel shopping search site. What's new? It's supposed to match product concepts instead of literally keywords, so when you search for "dress shirt" you don't get dresses.

* Simply Hired has a job search engine that aggregates results from other job search sites, then lets the user slice and dice the results, research companies and salaries (with data from PayScale) and network with acquintances already working at a target company.

* Local Matters demoed its Destination Search system, which lets users search for local merchants. OK, that's not new, but the CEO comes from MapQuest and Yellow Pages-printer R.R. Donnelley, so the data being searched comes from the local Yellow Pages and once the user decides on what stores to visit, an itinerary is plotted on a map.

* Smarter Agent showed its wireless location-aware real estate search system, which lets users use mobile phones to find nearby properties that are for sale. It's for consumers, but there's also also an enterprise version for real estate agents.

Then came the security stuff:

* Barracuda has an instant-messaging appliance that includes server, gateway and firewall. Supports internal IMing, plus AOL, Yahoo and MSN. Everything's logged and reports are generated, but it's designed for enforcing policies -- for example, you can automatically inject disclaimer messages into the first message any user sends to another user on an outside IM service. Built-in HIPAA and SarbOx rules.

* Kenai Systems showed eXamine Enterprise, which is designed to let security types set and test policies for web services. Basically, the security people set specific policies, which this product turns into requirements; once programmers have created the web-services code, this product generates and runs tests to make sure the code meets the security requirements.

* Sana Security demoed an anti-malware system that doesn't look for virus signatures, but watches for machine misbehavior. Yeah, that does sound a lot like what Determina showed on Tuesday afternoon. Maybe that's why they're on different days.  It's a good idea, though, and I'd like to see even more companies pursuing it.

* ConSentry  Networks has a dashboard for monitoring networks that's designed for enforcing policies and to be a lot less expensive than Cisco. Prevents intellectual property theft, supports regulatory compliance, blocks security threats in real time, they say -- oh, and what costs $4.5 million from Cisco is $450K from these guys.

* Eptascape demoed a security camera that only shows silhouettes of people. Facial details are encrypted by the camera, but can be extracted if necessary. Worries about invasion-of-privacy complaints will probably drive sales, but there's an interesting side effect of showing people as highlighted outlines; when one subject walked away from a piece of luggage, it was much easier to spot the luggage in the encrypted version of the video.

* YackPack showed easy-to-use web-based voice messaging  for consumers. Users pick who they want to send a voice message to by clicking one or more pictures.

* ezboard demoed Yuku "community blogging." Big new idea here is that the company sets a user up with a website, then the user builds content and the company sells advertising, and ad revenue is shared with the user. Ezboard figures a successful site could earn a user $3K-$5K per month, which gets paid through a PalPay account.

* Six Apart talked about the next version of its blogging software, which is supposed to let shy users limit who will see their blogs.

* SquareTrade has a "safe shopping" sidebar that tracks what a user does during online shopping, then suggests comparable products and stores. Also warns of phishing scams.

* Jingle Networks demoed 1-800-FREE411, a telephone directory assistance service with a nasty gimmick: When the user asks for the phone number for a business, the service starts by offering the phone number of a competitor plus a special offer. Then the company does telemarketing to the original business to get the business to buy its own "switch pitch" ad. Sure, it's like  search engines selling brand-name keywords to competitors, and that might mean legal trouble, but it's also a 411 service that's free to consumers. When was the last time you saw that?

* VirComZone showed Joy2Shop, a system for building customized virtual-reality shopping websites. Very pretty to look at, but is this how people want to do web shopping?

* Glam Media demoed Glam.com, a personalized shopping website for women that starts by using magazine-style quizzes to figure out what the user is looking for and feeling like, then generates glossy magazine-style pages. Very slick -- the web has never looked so much like a fashion magazine.

* Picture Marketing showed a sales-lead generation system called Campaign Manager. Here's how it works: Marketing department takes pictures of potential customers at a trade show or other event. Then the mark...er, potential customer goes to website that collects a little contact information and lets the customer send copies of the picture (framed with a marketing pitch) to friends. The contact info is then used to generate junk...um, direct mail. It's pretty labor intensive, but a clever way of using a digital picture as a come-on.

* VideoEgg demoed its system for making it easy to post digital video on blogs, complete with automatic conversion of video proprietary formats to widely used formats like Flash.

That's the lot.