DEMOfall: IT for the rest of us

Tuesday afternoon at DEMOfall meant a lot more products and services of interest to corporate IT than the morning session, including cheap high-performance storage, desktop-level virtualization and bandwidth management, and help for help desks that have to deal with smartphones. That was mixed in with plenty of new social-networking sites aimed at creative types, self-helpers and do-it-yourselfers.

Once again, for those who've never been to a DEMO conference, it's a seemingly endless series of six-minute pitches for (mostly new) IT products and services. I boil them down to what's likely to matter to corporate IT shops, but not everything at DEMO is intended for Computerworld's readers.

Here's the summary from the Tuesday afternoon session:

* Jasper Wireless talked about its system for providing GSM mobile-phone service to machines. Yeah, that sounds silly, but Jasper is really selling wireless networking for devices such as point-of-sale systems and special-purpose devices in delivery trucks. Single provider in 35 countries, Web-based account management, and they've adjusted the billing model so that there's no customer activation required and devices can be tested but don't start running up charges while they're waiting to be sold. Wait, aren't these machines getting a better cell-phone deal than we humans are?

* Talari Networks demoed its system for using cheap cable and DSL networking to replace expensive private WANs based on Frame Relay, MPLS and ATM. The idea is to aggregate the cheap nets, then layer on management capabilities to improve performance -- sort of like what RAID does for storage. Talari claims to cut monthly WAN networking bills by 40% to 90% and get between 30 and 100 times more bandwidth per dollar spent.

* Propel showed PBM (for Personal Bandwidth Management), an application to let individual PC users manage their bandwidth usage. That way, VoIP packets can get a higher priority than, say, Windows Update downloads. Everything with lower priority still runs, just more slowly. Users can also monitor all traffic in and out of their PCs, so they can spot malware. User interface for mere mortals, or so they say.

* Fusion-io had another cheap performance play, this time pitching a silicon "disk" on a PCI card called ioDrive, that's supposed to have the I/O performance of a 1,000-hard-disk storage array. Not the capacity -- the PCI card they showed only holds 640 GB -- but they can be ganged. By focusing on performance, Fusion-io may finally be able to break through the longstanding lack of success of silicon mass storage, especially at a time when big, hot, power-hungry disk arrays are increasingly a problem in data centers.

* Qumranet demoed Solid ICE, a desktop virtualization system that's intended to make it easy for users to do their own self-provisioning. Treats the desktop PC as a thin client, with all the virtual PCs in a central server farm. Serves up Windows and Linux desktops. The competitors are Citrix and VMware; the hook here is that users can set it up themselves and add their own additional capacity as needed. Fortunately, there's also a sysadmin interface.

* Phreesia showed a nifty wireless touchscreen for doctors' offices. The PhreesiaPad lets patients fill in and update their own information electronically instead of on the usual clipboard. Doctors then get more legible versions of the patients' complaints, and it's all designed to be privacy and HIPAA compliant. The plan is for the tablet PCs to be free to doctors and paid for with advertising by pharmaceutical companies. No word on what happens when two-year-olds start playing with them. (And oh, they will...)

* LogMeIn demoed Rescue + Mobile, a software-as-a-service service that lets help desks remote into users' smartphones. Yeah, they said a lot more, but that's what they're trying to do -- and if they've got it right, every help desk with responsibility for phones is going to want this.

* CornerWorld talked about its social-networking site that aims to help creative artists collect audiences and make money from their work. Think YouTube with a cash register at the end of the business plan.

* SceneCaster showed its virtual world for "creating interactive 3-D scenes." Once you've furnished your virtual living room, the money moves when you decide to buy the real products with a few clicks.

* PeopleJam demoed its social networking site that's heavy with motivational speakers and advice.

* LiveMocha showed its website for language learning. It's a pretty conventional interactive immersion approach, but the real draw is the fact that learners can converse -- talking or writing -- with native speakers of the language being learned. Teaches six languages: English, French, German, Spanish, Mandarin Chinese and Hindi.

* Graspr demoed its "how to"-oriented video site -- think YouTube meets all those DIY shows on TV.

* Earthmine showed its street-level answer to Google Maps. It's not a mashup, but a completely new set of 3-D images of actual streets in actual cities. They actually send trucks out to gather the data and pictures. That's extremely cost-intensive, and there are an awful lot of places to send those trucks to. On the other hand, if you want geospatial data, street-level makes a good complement to satellite images. Due out in early 2008; no word on what cities will be in the system by then.

* Myxer had a system that automatically converts content from any website into both a webstore and a phone-based store -- audio into ringtones, images into wallpaper, as well as full-track songs and video clips.

More to come...