Image by shelisrael1 via Flickr

Looks like this week is going to be spent on (un)conferences. After my post on CloudCamp Seattle yesterday, I am going to do a post on day 1 of Demo Conference today. It is not a complete coverage of the conference but a list of some of my favorite products launched on Day 1. Just for clarification, I want to highlight the fact that I am not attending Demo Conference in person. Rather, I am participating virtually by watching their live video stream and by joining their facebook conference back channel.

This year’s Demo conference started off with Chris Shipley’s announcement about passing over the mantle to Matt Marshall of Venture Beat. This was followed with product launch where many products were launched. Then, there were panel discussions on topics like venture funding and social entrepreneurship.

Some of the products were really old fashioned. Who wants a plugin for Outlook in this Cloud based era? I do agree that the features in that product may be useful to many Outlook users. But, I feel that such products have limited shelf life when people are moving to Cloud based email providers. Many of these functionalities can be implemented by the Cloud based email vendors or through browser plugins easily. I was, in fact, disappointed with some of the products launched yesterday. However, there were also some really cool products that caught my imagination. In this post, I will briefly discuss them.

Props to:

• BitGravity for the release of HD based web broadcasting. It is called BG Live and it offers HD streams in 720p, and 1080p at 30 frames per second. Though it is not path breaking in terms of a new idea, their technology is really intriguing and the HD videos were streamed live without any observable lag. Now businesses can offer HD videos at the cost of half of the existing industry rate.
• 7 Billion People for the release of Web Legend software. Again, there is nothing path breaking here but I love the idea of how every retail site can be personalized on the fly based on the user’s browsing habits and interests. It uses AJAX injection techniques and Neural Networks algorithms to offer a deep personalization for each and every user. It appears their customers are seeing a 50% increase in the conversion rates.
• eFormic Ltd. for their CO2 Code Initiative. I liked their idea the most because it uses innovative market based solutions to combat global warming. They enable companies to buy CO2 certificates which can be used to finance organizations that create renewable energy sources or participate in planting trees to combat global warming. Consumers who buy the products from these companies can find unique CO2 codes which they can redeem at their website and select the project they want to support. Well, human beings are usually lazy and many don’t redeem their CO2 codes. For such people, their system automatically selects a project after a certain period of time and the contribution is offered to them. The best part of this whole initiative is that it is extremely cheap for companies to neutralize their CO2 usage.
• Asurion Mobile Applications for the release of their new product called Asurion Mobile Addressbook. After CO2 Code Initiative, this is the application that impressed me the most. They convert the telephone addressbook into a platform based on Open Formats. They allow third party developers to build applications on top of this addressbook platform. You can add social network and other information to your addressbook contacts. You could IM or play games with your contacts from within the addressbook itself. It also integrates third party services as Smart Contacts so that they are much more relevant to users and are easy to use. For example, a smart contact like starbucks will find the nearest locations from where you are and offer an easy way to contact them or show a map giving directions to that location.

Well, there were also some useful but not so great apps launched on the first day. Ontier Inc. launched Pixetell, an interesting collaboration software but I didn’t like the back and forth nature of the communication workflow. A sophisticated clone of I Love Sandy, called CCBetty, was launched. It is an useful app but nothing new or imaginative. Citrix Online launched a screen capture app called Goview. It may end up decimating Jing Project but nothing new here too. One aspect of this app, which I liked, is the near instantaneous processing and upload to their servers and the immediate availability of the screencast for viewing. There were many other apps including Mortgage Account apps and Iphone apps. They were all good apps but nothing of interest to me. I will be following Day 2 of Demo ‘09 too. I will offer my picks tomorrow.