DEMOfall: Phone home

DEMOfall's session early Tuesday afternoon was about products and services for mobile phones. Not a strong hook for corporate IT, but some of this stuff might be useful for some of your users. Notes on Tuesday morning's DEMOfall presentations are here.

* Realeyes3D showed QipIt, a service that lets a camera-equipped cell phone do information capture. Images are sent from the camera phone using multimedia messaging service (MMS), are processed to improve the image, then made available on a website. They did a nice demo with the content of a whiteboard -- quite readable after it was processed. Documents can be e-mailed automatically as soon as processing is finished, or e-mailed later from the website.

* PixSense demoed software that searches a cell phone for photos or videos, categorizes and tags them automatically, then compresses and uploads them to a website in the background.

* ScanR had "ScanR business cards," another camera-phone info capture system -- existing services from ScanR are for whiteboards and documents. No special software required on the phone, and the service both enhances the business card image and also extracts the content on the card as text.

* 4info showed infrastructure for easily converting online content such as blogs into WAP or SMS feeds. Search and alerts are handled by the service.

* Eyespot Corp. demoed an easy-to-use online video editing application. Drag and drop, and the service includes free music for soundtracks. Once it's edited, the video is kept online, and can also go to other video sharing sites, iPods or phones.

* Fonpods showed a system to access podcasts through any phone. Podcasts can be selected from the Fonpods website (it's not clear what you do if the podcast you want isn't listed on the Fonpods site). Users can also organize their own "podcast channels."

* PhotoCrank demoed a service to add graphics and captions to cell-phone pictures. You take the picture, send it as a picture message to the service along with the text and template to use, and you receive back the doctored picture.

* SportStat showed a system for sending realtime play-by-play video from local kids' sports to cell phones. It's designed for local amateur sports, but they didn't explain where the video comes from.

* 3jam had "reply-all text messaging" for cell phones. No special software required on the phone, and users don't have to prepare the list of receipients in advance.

* MobileSphere demoed "Joopz," which is basically an SMS version of instant messaging that also works with PCs. Web-to-mobile messaging and back. PCs access the service through a website, which also stores the conversation; phones receive messages as SMS. It also works with groups of up to 20 and includes a reply-all function.

* Pinger showed a store-and-forward voice-mail system that can receive voice messages on phone or as e-mail attachments. Includes forwarding to multiple recipients, and messages can also be forwarded to become MySpace comments.

* Flurry demoed a service to turn an ordinary cell phone into a smartphone, so you can receive e-mail and news on your phone. Service includes e-mail filtering and customization.

More to come...