DEMOfall: Lots here for the IT crowd

DEMOfall returned Wednesday morning with demonstrations of products and services focused on security, search and infrastructure. Notes on the Tuesday DEMOfall sessions are here, here and here.

* Trend Micro showed its InterCloud Security Services, an appliance and service for fighting botnet infections. It allows network administrators to spot infected PCs, quarantine them and set policies.

* Data Security Systems Solutions demoed a one-time private key encryption system. The idea is to eliminate the need for archiving PKI signatures in situations where you don't really need encryption, just authentication and confirming that an electronic document is intact. User types in an authentication code, the system generates the key. It also works on websites and smartphones.

* MyPW is trying to cut the cost of hardware-based authentication by turning the verification into a Web service. The hardware device displays a number that changes every 30 seconds; the user types it in, and the system passes the device ID and password to the MyPW Web service, which OKs the authentication. It costs $1 per user per month.

* PrefPass is another Web service, this time trying to eliminate the need for user registration for sites that just want to personalize their sevices. The user registers with PrefPass with just an e-mail address and the URL of one website (to indicate the user's interests). When another website wants to personalize for the user, it can use PrefPass, and the only information that's passed are user interests abstracted from the collection of websites using PrefPass for that user -- there's no disclosure of personal data.

* Retrevo demoed its consumer electronics search service. It finds relevant data including product manuals, reviews and blogs.

* Imaginestics showed 3D-Seek, its "shape search engine," which lets users search for products and parts by sketching a shape on the screen. It also accepts uploaded 3D models.

* Trigence had a system that virtualizes applications by taking a known-good instance of an application, identifying and isolating all the necessary files, then packaging them into an "application capsule." This can than can then be dropped in when an application breaks because of an operating system upgrade or configuration change. They showed it with the Apache web server on SuSE and Red Hat Linux; no indication how well it works with anything else.

* nComputing talked about a "$100 PC" that isn't -- it's really just a return to dumb terminals, but with the goal of a PC-like user experience. The company says a $350 PC can serve seven of these clients. No memory or CPU on the client device. There are already more than 100,000 units installed, 80% in the third world and the rest in U.S. schools.

* PostPath demoed a drop-in replacement for Microsoft Exchange, running on Linux. It claims full protocol compatibility with Exchange, supports direct use of Microsoft tools and Active Directory; in the demonstration, Outlook thought it was talking to Exchange.

* Teneros was at DEMOfall last year with its appliance that keeps e-mail available for Microsoft Exchange users if the server dies (I wrote about it here). This year it's been scaled up to an end-to-end disaster recovery appliance for use on wide-area networks. Still includes mail store replication and plug-and-play installation; it detects Exchange failures, notifies the admin, maintains service after failover. Once the Exchange server has been restored, if necessary, mail can be restored from the appliance.

* BriteSoft Corp. showed BriteWorks, a code-free application environment. Yes, yet another code-free application environment. BriteWorks Studio looks like it has the usual problem: It's easy enough for business users to use, but it still requires that business users care about all the minutia of data sources, interfaces and events. Which, generally, they don't. To its credit, BriteSoft has a collection of canned applications that can be configured using the system.

* Widgetbox demoed a Web service that lets users easily use widgets -- objects with live content -- on websites. The user selects from widgets on the Widgetbox site to create a widget panel, then installs that on a blog or web page. The widget panel is "tag-aware," so if the content changes, some widgets may adjust what visitors see -- for example, what products show up in an eBay widget.

* Headplay showed its Personal Cinema System. Yeah, it's a wrap-around headset that weighs 5 ounces, creates a 52-inch virtual screen and supports 3D content.

More to come...