DEMO live continued….
dan tynan on Sep 08 2008 at 8:10 am | Filed under: Geekishness, Web 2.0
8:52 am
Adapx
Digital pen application lets you take Excel spreadsheet form, pick the cells you want to enable, print it out with a special watermark on those fields that can be read by a digital pen. Use digital pen to fill out forms on the paper. Connect pen to PC. Info flows into a new copy of Excel form. Invoices, expense reports, time cards, car rental applications, etc. But…. where’s the data? I wanted to see it fill in. Hmmm.
8:58 am
Plastic Logic Reader
Kindle-like reader designed specifically for “business reading.” In other words…. boring? Financial plan, marketing dreck, blah blah blah. Touchscreen device 8 by 11 screen, thin, light, ‘robust’ (a word that really needs to be retired), and easy to use. Form factor looks good, very thin. “Less than a third of the weight of the Macbook Air.” Developed own display tech (not e-ink used by Kindle) using transistors printed on plastic. No glass. You can hit it with a shoe (well, a guy’s shoe, not a stilletto). Own manufacturing facility in Germany. Claims battery life that lasts days, not hours. Can annotate documents, has on screen keyboard. If it really works like that, it will be great. But color me dubious for now.
Tikitag
General Manager of Tikitag speaks like he learned English from listening to one of those computerized voices. Put social Web info onto a business card with RFID tag appled via a sticker. You can upload video to card, run it thru a reader, display it on your computer. Groovy. But…. why? “Tikitag makes the Internet of things a powerful reality.” OK, I admit it, they lost me. More on this later, maybe.
9:12 am
Fusion I/O
Silicon based storage area network. Guy is waving an IC card around on stage with “two thirds of a terabyte” on board! Hybrid RAID controller that distributes data across the network! 1.5 gigabytes transferred per second! 4000 disc drives on one handy dandy card! Lord, keep my heart from exploding with excitement.
9:19 am
Alerts.com
“We don’t live in the dial up age anymore.” Yep. Web site lets you set up alerts for tv shows, auctions, craigs list, etc. delivered via email, text message, or voice. Creates widget on personal page on the site, lists all alerts. Horoscopes, gas prices, etc. Puts targeted ads on site relevant to your alerts. Allow schools to create own alert platform to send alerts to parents, teachers, students. Not clear how much automated searching it will do, or what sources it can use. Intriguing. “It’s what matters, when it matters.” OK.
9:25 am
TelNIC – .tel
“What if you could be found online through your domain name, but without a web site?” TelNIC is a DNS registry meets the White Pages. You sign up for a .tel domain, it pulls all your contact info together in one directory w/o actually publishing it. “A global live directory service at a fraction of the cost of a traditional listing.” Cool, but, how do I keep marketing weasels from accessing this info? And what about all the other Dan Tynans out there? Need to know more about this one.
9:32 am
A-wind MobiShow
MobiShow box about the size of a Palm connects video from iPhone to projector — no wires required. Increase resolution to show at large sizes with “presentation to go” (PTG) software on phone. Transition effects, simple animation. These guys are total geeks (and they know it), the slides are Dork City, but this one looks pretty damned cool. Turns phone into media server. Not clear what wireless technology they’re using. Oops, video demo crashed. But still, impressive.
9:38
Real Networks Real DVD
Legally unlock your DVDs. Really? Apparently. Adam Sandler “Big Daddy” video in demo…. not a good sign. Save DVDs to laptop (they mean titles?). See onscreen by box art. Pulls program and episode info off Web site. Real DVD plays back from hard drive. Takes exact copy of DVD and puts on PC hard drive or external drive. Audio video quality same as original. Play back on any “authorized” PCs. Filter library to just show G rated movies, skip past all the previews. Parental controls so they can’t watch The Sopranos. Insert DVD, Real DVD looks up cover art and other info. How do they get around the DVD copy protection? My guess is they’re paying a license fee with some pretty serious DRM to keep you from making copies of your copies. But worth looking at.
This is where my battery died. So much for live blogging.
While you’re at DEMO, you should check out DocLanding. They are offering a new document management and collaboration tool and it will help small businesses to easily control, organize and share files. They are presenting today at 3:57 p.m. PST. Check them out at http://www.doclanding.com.