DEMOfall: This time it's controversial

...Or anyhow, that's what DEMO producer Chris Shipley is aiming for with some of the 67 products and services at this year's DEMOfall conference in San Diego. And by the end of the morning session, she'd delivered with several products that are going to make some people really, REALLY unhappy at lawsuit time.

For those who've never been to a DEMO conference, it consists of a seemingly endless series of six-minute pitches for IT products. This isn't as bad as it might sound; even the least interesting presentation is blessedly short, and it's rare that they're truly dreadful. (In fact, there were no clunkers in the Tuesday morning session at all.) It's a mix of consumer- and corporate-IT-oriented products, so not everything is for Computerworld's readers.

Here's the summary from the Tuesday morning session:

* Dash Navigation showed an in-car navigation system that combines a GPS receiver, WiFi or cell-phone communication and social networking. As usual, there's turn-by-turn audio directions. But along with traffic information provided by road sensors, Dash also adds in data from Dash users. It's also possible for people to send addresses to Dash uses through a website (and, naturally, directions are generated), and for users to search on the fly for nearby businesses. It's designed for easy use while driving, and could be especially useful once it reaches a critical mass of users.

* Tribeca Labs has $30 photo-correction software that automatically searches your hard drive for new digital photos, corrects the images (adjusts brightness, reduces redeye), and automatically backs up photos to a site in Switzerland. Really. The idea is that your personal pictures will be safe for your great-great-grandchildren to see. What's not clear is whether you'll ever really be able to get rid of that pornography that was, um, accidentally downloaded.

* Pluggd demoed "Hear Here," a Web-based service that uses speech recognition to index audio streams such as podcasts, and then lets users look for content by typing in search terms.

* Presto Services showed a "printing mailbox," pitched as a way for people without computers to receive pictures and e-mail. It's a Hewlett-Packard printer combined with a service that lets people on a whitelist send e-mail or pix -- a little bit like a fax machine that does e-mail, but without the spam. Presto is saying it's for Grandma, but all the Grandmas I know already have PCs and can handle e-mail just fine.

* RingCube has clever virtualization software called Mojopac that lets users carry their complete desktop around on a USB thumb drive or other device. Yeah, the idea isn't new, but this implementation is slick. They claim all applications run at full speed, the thumb-drive-based software leaves no residue on the host PC, and multiple environments can run on the same computer without interfering with each other.

* System One demoed a system that automatically builds Wikis (automatic Wiki-building is big at DEMOfall this year). This one searches local files and the Web for content and then supports collaboration.

* ThinkFree has a Web-based office suite whose big claim to fame is round-trip compatibility with Microsoft Office -- no loss of formatting, spreadsheet formulas, or other data. Documents reside on ThinkFree's servers, which could create compliance headaches for corporate data that's under the control of Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA and other regulations.

* Genius.com showed an "IT free" system that lets sales people chase prospects across e-mail, websites and live online chats. Complicated to explain, but basically it's Web analytics focused on which sales prospects read e-mail and looked at a company's website, combined with the ability for the sales person to do live chatting and website tours. This may sound a little creepy to IT people, but for one-to-one selling it's a sales guy's dream.

* Koral demoed a content-management and collaboration system that lets information be automatically uploaded, indexed and tagged, then supports searching documents based on both relevance and popularity. It also pushes documents to people who otherwise might not go looking for them. Once again, there should be some SarbOx alarms going off about this, but it looks like a nice system.

* MindTouch has an appliance called DekiBox, which they call "software as a service on your network." The company claims 85% of corporate knowledge is stored in e-mail, and this is a Wiki builder in a box that searches for that data, then can output content to things ranging from Microsoft Outlook to smartphones. All the usual appliance characteristics -- plug and play, self-managing.

* Serebrum showed Axon, another Wiki builder, this one trying to break out of the document paradigm. Simple, clean, nice rollback capabilities; the information comes in, then is intended to go out as anything from e-mail to fax to XML data.

* BuzzLogic demoed a system for monitoring and measuring influence in the blogosphere. OK, that sounds inanely hifalutin, but it's really just blog analytics -- a way for marketeers to look for ways to map and track whether bloggers, mainstream news websites and corporate websites are talking about their products and companies, and then examining the links to see how they might influence the influencers.

* Void Communications has a service that will either make lawyers laugh or cry. It's VaporStream, a messaging service that delivers messages immediately (like instant messaging) or when the recipient is available (like e-mail). The twist: on Void's servers, all messages are stored in memory only, and when the message has been read, it's gone. Remember how you had to go through all that pain to implement instant-message logging? This makes that impossible. Will that be something that will be an advantage or a nightmare at lawsuit time? Ask me again after the Supreme Court has its say.

More to come...