February 2005 Early Indications I: Demo trip report

Demo trip report

The mood in Phoenix was celebratory this year as the Demo conference put on a party to mark 15 years of innovative product launches. The final dinner honored industry deities including Dan Bricklin of Visicalc fame, Donna Dubinsky and Jeff Hawkins of Palm, conference favorite Kai Krause (Kai's Power Tools), and Demo founder Stewart Alsop. Before that, however, the 700 people in attendance got a close look at over 70 new products, many of which were both exciting and substantial, and few of which could be clustered in the same sector.

These two factors made the conference noteworthy in my view: I witnessed little "just out of beta" bugginess, and it was refreshing to see everything from cell phones to explosives detection and video production to haptic interfaces represented. Thus the combination of quality, breadth, and outright cleverness, along with the march of the legends at the final ceremony, made this a Demo that stood apart.

To begin, let me tip my hat to the four products that stood out for me as extraordinarily slick and/or important. In no particular order they were the following:

-MDA is a Canadian aerospace contractor that builds among other things robot arms for the space shuttle. They demonstrated an infrared camera to detect wing icing at airports, as well as a stereo camera that captures a scene and generates a 3-D graphical model of, in the case of their demo, a crime reconstruction or an underground mine. What would have required long renderings on a Silicon Graphics box not that many years ago showed up in seconds off a laptop. Demo crowds are anything but naive and can be pretty hard-boiled, but this was one of the few technologies that has generated an audible gasp from the audience in my years of attendance. The products aren't for sale - the company seeks commercialization partners.
http://www.mdrobotics.ca

-Digital Railroad is attacking the entrenched powers, namely Corbis and Getty, in the stock photography market. In a clear case of disintermediation (remember that?), the company uses RSS as part of a push and pull combination to connect photographers with editors, who can request feeds of low-resolution images for review based on rules, themes, or keywords. Photographers in turn have electronic storefronts where the high-rez images can be purchased. It was invigorating to see such an apt combination of technology and business-model innovation - it's been a while.
http://www.digitalrailroad.net

-Another nice piece of business-model innovation came from Smart Online. Their OneBiz Conductor is a one-stop ASP model for small businesses. One reason they've got a quiet brand despite being around for over a decade is that their software and services power big-name sites: JPMorgan Chase, Union Bank of California, and Inc. magazine under a private-label model. Such key functionality as audit trails, access control, and internal and regulatory reporting is now available to small and medium business who don't want to be distracted from their main mission in life, which is rarely to be a systems integrator.
http://www.smartonline.com

-The one product that for me has the most potential to define a whole new market is Streambase. The company has devised and implemented a feed-based model for data handling: the goal is to react to time-based data, not to store it. To this end, Streambase can handle 100,000 messages per second on commodity hardware, using a model that eschews input/output for sophisticated caching: cheap memory is a boon for this company. In addition to stock ticker feeds, the technology is envisioned for network traffic analysis, manufacturing systems, and credit card fraud monitoring. Lest anyone question the company's pedigree, the CTO is Mike Stonebraker, who merely invented key variations of the relational, object-relational, and federated database.
http://www.streambase.com

An education breakthrough
As a former professor, I get tired of many well-meaning but uninformed discussions of how computers are going to transform education, and have seen few technologies that showed much promise of improving on well-executed classical pedagogy. A stunning exception is an Australian spinout from the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra called In the Chair. It's a video game format for classical musician students that blends a "follow the bouncing ball" score with a video of a conductor and feedback on the musician's performance: timing, pitch, volume can be compared to those of a professional player. Theory, composition, and reading can be taught through layers of information embedded in the score. The original In the Chair was a physical program for music students that's been hugely successful, and the Digital Monkey web design firm has done a nice job creating a software version.
http://www.digitalmonkey.com.au
http://www.inthechair.com

Consumer stuff
Demo producer Chris Shipley noted that this was a particularly expensive Demo in that she wanted to buy many of the technologies. I concur.

At the top of the list is Novint, which is bringing the same touch-based technology used in $15,000 surgical simulators to the gaming market for about $100. Being able to have visual elements push back and possess the elements of mass and velocity through your fingertips is amazing, and the company's demo station was constantly busy. VKB uses Bluetooth and laser projection to put a virtual keyboard anywhere there's a flat surface - and the big news is that it will be available at Radio Shack sometime soon.
http://www.novint.com
http://www.vkb-tech.com/

AutoXRay is the first Demo product I've seen whose channel is Autozone and Pepboys. The OBD II diagnostic port on every car manufactured in the past decade or so can now be read by mere mortals rather than by $100/hr mechanics. The suggested retail for the hand-held device is about $150, which will sell well, I imagine. The other unlikely channel for a Demo technology is Macy's. Intellifit makes a body scanner that derives a clothed person's fit information while they stand in a 6-foot cylinder. The company gave everyone at the conference a free pair of custom-fit (not custom-tailored) Levis, and the response was overwhelming: there was a line all the time for people to get measured. It was fascinating to hear how people trusted or doubted the system: several attendees I polled said that they over-rode the scanner measurements on the website where you place the order, while I took it at its (disappointingly generous) word and will see how well the technology works.
http://www.autoxray.com
http://www.intellifit.com

Photoleap is the best picture-shaping application I've ever seen. Based on an e-mail client metaphor, it compresses big files then unzips them upon receipt through a similar interface on the other end. It's dead easy and so appealing that it's prompting a new digital camera purchase in this household. Mirra isn't a new company, but was showing (as a sponsor) an extremely simple and reassuring network backup server: you just plug it into a Windows environment and it takes case of automatic backup, secure remote file access, and file versioning.
http://www.photoleap.com/
http://www.mirra.com

Motorola seems to be on a tear under new CEO Ed Zander. The Razor cell phone is selling well, and the company showed a somewhat mysterious music service that connects home, car, and walking modes via the cell phone. The presenter smiled but said nothing except "I've seen some amazing things in our labs" when I asked about the iPod agreement Moto signed last year, as well as the prospect of cell phones managing miniature hard drives later this year. iRadio certainly looked appealing: digital Internet radio (whether wired, terrestrial, or satellite wasn't clear) connected by Bluetooth to whatever player you chose, including TiVo-like pause and resume across devices: park the car, walk into the office, and pick up the same song where you had stopped it.
http://www.motorola.com/mediacenter/news/detail/0,,5178_5172_23,00.html

Finally, in the web client enhancement department, Browster pre-loads list results: imagine mousing over the first entry of a Google list, having the page pop up, seeing that it didn't apply, then rolling off the image and having it disappear. Pluck and Onfolio (JJ Allaire's new company) are designed for researchers - supercharged bookmarking, filing, and sharing tools. XFire is a tool for gamers that allows in-game instant messaging as well as managed patch and upgrade deployment: they asserted that gamers download 500 MB a month, so there's a lot of bandwidth consumption to optimize if that's the case.
http://www.browster.com/
http://www.pluck.com/
http://www.onfolio.com/
http://www.xfire.com/

A brief tour of enterprise offerings
Elliott Spitzer was the unspoken presence for several demonstrations: the Enron e-mail evidence is somehow available, and two companies used it to demonstrate products aimed at curtailing messages that could get a company in trouble. Fortiva and Inboxer both had products in the e-mail security neighborhood; Cloudmark demonstrated a community-based approach to identifying phishing attacks. Cenzic and IPLocks test and monitor web-based applications for security, the former from the outside in and the latter from the inside out. Satori Labs has a nice PDA-based handwriting capture system for doctors who resist kiosks and other intrusions on the patient care process. Adomo lets telecom administrators manage voice services with tools like LDAP that are typically more robust and automated than conventional PBX technologies - e-mail and voicemail are integrated (good) within Exchange (questionable from a security standpoint).

Stan Davis has long argued that the currency of the 1980s and 90s -- words and numbers -- would be joined by sounds and images as richer tools for business communications in the new century. Several tools aim to accelerate that process. Infomersion facilitates live graphing within Powerpoint with interactive sliders to allow "what if" assumption testing. Blazent maps enterprise hardware and software assets so CIOs can manage important things (like software licenses or antivirus updates) that are usually poorly measured. Impact Engine and Serious Magic both ramp up Powerpoint's look and feel. NewTek's Tricaster is a $5000 miniature video production truck with stills, fades, B-roll, audio, and many other pro-grade tools that can be easily ported to webcast, projection, or video (hence the name). Similarly, Serious Magic also showed a $99 production suite for video blogging that was fun and easy, using a variety of imported backgrounds and a teleprompter metaphor to synch graphics and audio.

In terms of social software, I continue to have major skepticism about the prospects for mass adoption of enterprise blogging, particularly in industries undergoing Spitzer-like scrutiny. But Jotspot, about which I wrote in October, is getting better every time I see it. The tool uses wikis, e-mail, and very clever scripting to create a lightweight, flexible management platform for many types of projects. While Groove has its place (particularly in high-security distributed projects), my sense is that Jotspot will suffice in most settings.

If you have further questions, don't hesitate to contact me.