DEMOfall: Push comes to shove

Wednesday afternoon was the last session at DEMOfall, and it was a very mixed bag for corporate IT people: push, search, security, 3-D desktops, musical Russians, and ads that listen to your VoIP calls. (Yes, really.)

One final time: For those who've never been to a DEMO conference, it's a seemingly endless series of six-minute pitches for IT products and services. Most of them are new, all of them are innovative, but not everything is aimed at Computerworld's readers. I boil them down to what's likely to matter to corporate IT shops. Want to know more? Click on the links.

Here's the summary from the final session on Wednesday afternoon:

* Exalead showed Baagz, its combination search engine and social network. The idea is that you put your interests into a bag called a Baag (yeah, welcome to Web 2.0), and can then automatically search for other people whose Baagz have similar contents. Baagz also sends alerts to users based on their interests. It's true: Push is back, with a vengeance.

* Trovix talked about its job search and recruitment system. The system scans resumes to extract information on experience, adds in the kind of position the job hunter is looking for, then matches those up anonymously with available job openings and sends the leads to the job hunter as they become available. As usual, it's free to job hunters, paid for by recruiting companies. Trovix is hoping the anonymity, analysis and push capabilities will give it a leg up against Monster.

* SpaceTime demoed its very slick 3-D Web-browsing environment. Each Web page shows up in its own window that can be rotated, stacked or moved out of the way. Search results show up as a stack of windows instead of a page of URLs. Browsing history is mapped onto a timeline. Yes, it sounds very busy, and it's not clear how much hardware or bandwidth it requires. But visually, it's a knockout.

* Check Point showed ZoneAlarm ForceField, a Web-browser security system that uses virtualization to block viruses, worms, phishing and -- they say -- just about everything else. The demo was light on technical specifics, but if it works it could be a great way of handling all those users who never saw a Web link they didn't like.

* EncryptaKey had a virtual desktop on a USB fob. OK, that's not new. But the fob has biometric authentication. Still not new. OK, it has five-level biometric authentication. And it completely unloads the host PC's operating system, to replace it with an OS from the fob's read-only memory. And then it loads its own device drivers. And lets users connect to their home or office PCs over a VPN it generates by itself. This may not be the finally breakthrough that pushes desktop-on-a-fob into the mainstream, but it certainly moves it closer.

* CodaSystem France (note: the site's in French) demoed Shoot & Proof, a system that prevents photos taken with a mobile phone from being altered. A little applet on the phone time-stamps and encrypts each digital picture as it's taken, and it can then be downloaded through the vendor's website. If the photo is digitally altered, the changes will be detected. CodaSystem pitched this as a way for employees to prove they were on the job when and where they said they were.

* iForem talked about another not-new concept: It offers digital archiving in perpetuity. The new angle: It's supported by a legal trust, so you won't wake up one morning to discover you lost your documents because iForem went out of business. Targeted initially at law firms and banks; billed as a subscription-free service, which presumably means you pay for a document once and they store it forever.

* FastCall411 demoed its system for customers to search for local businesses. The hook: Once FastCall411 finds a list of, say, plumbers, it starts calling them. All of them. The first one that accepts the call and presses "1" gets the job, or at least gets a chance to talk to the customer, who then rates the results. Between calls that never connect and customer ratings, FastCall411 ranks or deletes the businesses. Nice idea, but most businesses I know wouldn't accept a call from a robot voice that certainly sounds like it wants to connect to a telemarketer.

* Sway showed Shoutlet, a tool for distributing marketing campaigns using RSS feeds, SMS text messages, podcasts, widgets and HTML e-mail, all through a single interface. The usual easy-to-use interface, the usual reporting capabilities. What might make this one different is that Sway started life as an online marketing agency, so its people know what the software is supposed to accomplish.

* Pudding Media demoed ThePudding.com, which offers free VoIP phone calls through the Web -- and as with other such services, the calls are free because they're ad-supported. The twist here: a speech-recognition system that listens in on the calls and identifies topics of conversation, then flashes up ads that are appropriate. The company insists the system is completely automated, no records are being kept and the CIA has nothing to do with this.

* 360desktop showed a panoramic, 360-degree Windows desktop -- scroll go far enough left or right and you end up back where you started. The panoramic view is user selectable and sharable, and it's that much more space to fill with open application windows, Web pages, widgets, photos. It looks like fun and it's nice not to have to stack windows, but will constant scrolling to find the right window be any better?

* Myndnet talked about its Information Marketplace, which is intended to let people buy high-quality, well-targeted sales or recruitment leads. And there's no big search engine behind it. A customer goes to the website and specifies what kind of leads he's looking for and how many. Myndnet then publishes the query to its members; they come up with the leads if they have them and get paid a chunk of the fee Myndnet collects for delivering the leads. The downside: no instant response -- and no guarantee that anyone will respond.

* Kannuu demoed its new input system for search with mobile phones. The keyboard is replaced by an onscreen circle with four possible selections at the top, left, right and bottom. If one of the four is the letter you're looking for, you select it; otherwise, you hit the center button for new choices. It's based on word-completion algorithms and topic-specific databases, and it looks a lot slicker than it sounds.

* Truphone showed a beta of its system for free-or-low-cost VoIP calls from mobile phones. This time the trick is that calls are routed via Wi-Fi instead of the mobile network whenever possible.

* RedSquare Ventures (guess what country they're from) demoed MixGet, a "mobile music entertainment service," it says here. The idea is that instead of listening to a fully mixed song on a mobile phone, a group of friends can each have a different instrumental or vocal line coming out of his phone. Mobile phone companies would sell the lines the way they sell ringtones now. The demo appeared to have some synchronization glitches, and it seems like a really, really strange way for a crowd of kids to use their phones. But then, I never thought Tetris would be popular either.

* Mig33 already has 6 million users and is in beta in more than 200 countries, but this was the U.S. launch for this mobile-phone-based social network. Works over Java-enabled phones, offers cheap VoIP calls, IM, chat rooms, e-mail, photo sharing.

* Vitarati showed its search-engine-plus-social-network technology in the form of Seenr, a search engine plus social network for mobile phones. The hook: It's real-time, location-aware personalization using collaborative filtering. Users rate bars, clubs, restaurants and stores using text messages; the system uses that to rank them when other users search.

* Finally, Global Mobile Technologies demoed Push-It Alert, a system that pushes Internet content to mobile phones. No WAP reformatting; a small app on the phone and more software on the server make it look right -- text, graphics, audio, video, e-mail and IM. But the real hook is that Global Mobile seems to have worked around the notorious NTP patents that looked like they might force Research in Motion to stop service for U.S. BlackBerry users last year.

And that's it for DEMOfall 2007!