DEMOfall: The wrapup

Wednesday afternoon at DEMOfall was all over the map: telephony, consumer-generated content, social networks, a refrigerator-door emulator. Most of it's not directly aimed at corporate IT shops (with a few exceptions, like the conference-room VoIP phone), but some might be useful.

Notes on this year's previous DEMOfall sessions on Tuesday and Wednesday are here, here, here and here.

* GrandCentral demoed "one phone number for life." It's a free service configured through the Web, including the ability to switch calls among different lines and listen to voicemail messages on the Web, customized ringing sounds for different callers (not ringtones, but the sound the caller hears while the call is ringing), and multiple options on how to take a call including listening in as voicemail is being recorded. Oh, and all voicemails are stored forever -- another lawyer's dream (or nightmare).

* Jajah showed a VoIP service letting users call "free or next-to-free" anywhere, including international calls. The catch: calls must be launched from the company's website or a cell phone.

* uControl demoed its home-security service, a drop-in replacement for alarm companies. Connection is via phone, broadband and cellular, so burglars can't get around the alarm system by cutting the phone line. Also sends alerts via the Web or SMS.

* Be Here had a conference-room VoIP phone with a full-circle-view digital camera. (They've sold the camera before, but it never caught on.) The camera takes a 360-degree image of the conference room, allowing remote users to individually change who they're looking at. Looks like a regular conference phone with a funny-looking periscope. Under $2,000.

* SiteKreator showed an easy-to-use website builder and hosting service with wizards, templates, one-click deployment and a $15/month price tag.

* NanoLearning demoed its "marketplace for small chunks of learning," which combines a Flash authoring tool for building training materials and a website for sharing them with other users.

* Wallop showed its social networking site, which makes its money when users buy chunks of code from other users to dress up their pages. (But calling it a "marketplace for small chunks of narcissism" probably just demonstrates that I'm not the target market.)

* Scrapblog had a free Web-based service to help people create scrapbook-style blogs.

* Simple Star showed Photo Show, a Web-based service for creating slide shows of photos and videos. Users can link the result from a MySpace page, have it burned to a DVD or have it broadcast on TV (currently only one Time Warner cable system in Hawaii).

* iBloks demoed a drag-and-drop online system for creating blocks of content for websites.

* Cuts offered its system for remixing videos and legally sharing the remixes. They mainly pitched it as a way to create family-friendly versions of movies, but also said it could be used for mashups of multiple movies and pop-up-video-type commentary. The only things that are actually shared are editing cues, so users still have to buy their own DVDs.

* HeyLetsGo showed a social-networking site aiming to help participants get together in the real world -- social networking meets event guide.

* Yoriwa demoed LeapTag, which lets users suggest a few websites then goes looking automatically for similar sites and offers them to the user. Based on feedback from the user, LeapTag then refines its searches. The sites tagged by a user can then be shared.

* i-Lighter had software for grabbing and marking up copies of Web pages using a virtual yellow highliter pen. Formatting is preserved, users can add notes and save, e-mail or share the clipped pages with other users.

* eSnips showed its site for sharing and selling user-created content, including poetry, art and research.

* AddMe demoed AddThis.com, a service that lets users bookmark and save Web content with a single click.

* Adaptiveblue had BlueOrganizer, a Firefox extension that searches for websites similar to sites the user has already bookmarked.

* Solid State Networks showed what it calls its commercial-grade BitTorrent network -- fast downloads, but supporting digital-rights management.

* Eluma demoed its "brandable desktop application." The idea is that a sponsor (TV station, newspaper, etc.) creates an on-the-desktop application with news tickers, alerts and other content; the new piece is that users as well as the sponsor can include links to content.

* Cozi had Cozi Central, an online family calendar with scheduler, shopping list, messages and photos. Calendars and shopping lists are accessible from the company's website or a toll-free number. Free to users, paid for by sponsors.

And finally...

* Mercora showed its system for letting users listen to music with high-quality audio in real time over 3G mobile phones.