Earlier this month I spent several days at the 16th annual Demo conference, where 68 emerging companies and technologies launched and/or presented. Both bloggers and mass media outlets have fuller coverage (see below), but I wanted to point to a few important companies and play out some of their implications. If you want to see a company's pitch for yourself, Demo has videos of all the participants.
1) Distributed infrastructure
One of the trends that's having a significant impact on the global economy is decentralization. Apart from a relatively few activities - mining, manufacturing, and medicine - many aspects of productive infrastructure can migrate to one's laptop or thereabouts: newspaper printing presses, recording studios and CD-pressing factories, video production suites, travel agency ticket printers, call centers (as with Jet Blue), banks, phone companies, and photo labs are just a few examples. In about 10 years, each of these very expensive ventures has been replicated and in some cases undermined by a digital equivalent. Demo had a few more companies in this vein:
*Blurb allows customers to design books with photos and (unlike Ofoto and iPhoto) words. The custom-printed volumes are reasonably priced and handsome to look at. The company is finding a large market in the charity cookbook industry, 400,000 titles of which appeared in 2004; some Junior League "Taste of" cookbooks sell 25,000 copies, which would dent a best-seller list.
*The big media draw of the conference was Moobella, a make-to-order ice cream factory the size of a large soft-drink vending machine. In 4 minutes a customized cup of ice cream appears, and by all accounts tastes great. It's not clear how the economics will work (vs. a vendor cart for example), but the team solved some tough technology problems and prompted a lot of thought.
*iGuitar is a nice-looking electric guitar that's a USB peripheral. It obviates the need for lots of midi and outboard gear on the guitar-to-computer front, but also feeds a whole orchestra of synthesized music, to the extent that guitar-only pros are scoring TV shows formerly serviced by keyboard players.
*Locamoda connects cell phones, IVR systems, the Web, and physical storefronts in a powerful way. One application is in real estate: you're walking down the street and see a condo listed at an agency. You can interact with the 42-inch plasma screen via your cell ("press 9 to see an exterior shot"), send yourself a hyperlink, or leave voicemail for the real estate agent. The other play for this company is social computing - in space. Imagine going to a bar and texting a message to a physical screen where everyone can see the message. thetruth.com, the antismoking outfit, is testing these at skatebard (pun intended) parks to capture "wifiti."
*EQO (say "echo") connects mobile phones to Skype through a very clean interface. The economic implications of this kind of service are staggering if you're a voice-centric international carrier: VoIP is a big enough issue when the user is chained to a PC or home network, but turning the connectivity loose affects still more incumbents.
2) Search
As others have noted, living in a networked world where information is shared via standardized technologies changes how we find information. There's definitely a whiff of "me-too" in the industry right now: every startup dreams of a Googlesque IPO as their exit strategy. (Check out this videoconferencing company's homepage if you doubt my read on the zeitgeist.) At the same time, the presence of search as a pillar of both Microsoft and Apple operating systems, as a key to both on- and off-line shopping, and as a first-impulse information gathering strategy means that there is ample room for innovation, the human capital arms race in the search industry notwithstanding.
*Krugle is a search engine for code - it preserves sourcecode formatting rather than text strings. It also keeps tags of a whole session that you can keep as a trail of breadcrumbs to forward or post. Reuse has been a cherished ideal of software engineers for decades, but this approach makes reuse far more practical than any formal tool I've seen.
*Kosmix was co-founded by Anand Rajaraman and Venky Harinarayan, who came from Amazon after founding Junglee, which we wrote about in 1998. They're building vertical search in consumer areas (starting in health, travel, and politics). It looks like a company that will do well - their target markets are already generating deals.
*Transparensee does structured search: the demo was of real estate databases. Instead of having to requery after retrieving a set of findings, you use slider bars to re-weight categories to refine or expand results. If you want a $300,000 4-BR house in zip code X, let's imagine nothing comes up. The tool allows you to increase the price, decrease the BR count, or expand zip codes. The smooth interface and intuitive refining of the search were pretty appealing.
*Nexidia is building video search (which addresses a screaming-hot market: 20 billion streams were delivered in 2005, and 2006 looks to quadruple that, at least). The company uses phonetic indexing, which runs at 60x real time, and phonetic querying, so it's somewhat language-independent. The speed and accuracy of the search results got very high marks.
*Yet another collaborative filter for music comes from garageband.com, which focuses on "if you like this, try that" for independent bands and genres; it also pushes new music to your playlist as the user community discovers new favorites. Garageband also provides hosting and generally does a wider job of supporting the indie ecosystem than merely generating playlists. (Music Genone Project (pandora.com) is better and farther along on the recommendation front; musicplasma is quicker and dirtier but lighter weight).
*Riya is a pretty hot company, apparently, and focuses on image searching - very successfully, to the point where it can do facial recognition with scary-accurate results (it convinced me I want no photos of my kids on line, names or no names). It also matches text that's captured in a photograph, even sideways in the background, like on a book spine.
3) Data
Finding ways to manage, secure, and exploit information overload at both the individual and corporate levels is generating some useful technologies. Questions like "who owns the data," "how do I know this information is correct, up-to-date, and/or calculated appropriately," and "compared to what" are getting considerable attention.
*Cnetchannel.com uses C|Net's huge database of technology attributes to do smart up-sell positioning on web pages. The demo showed a laptop on a catalog webpage with upsells of a) memory that wouldn't fit, b) a wireless card for a machine with built-in 802.11, and c) maybe a bluetooth mouse for a PC without that capability (I forget exactly). The "after" matched the peripherals and accessories much more closely and, the company would assert, profitably for the merchant. The company also wants to use the underlying matching and control capabilities (there's a control console for MBA types to use) in other domains.
*Zimini is an attempt to be a next-generation couponing engine, but it's not quite clear how coupon-users will respond to yet another helpful online service asking them to "tell us a little bit about yourself" to drive the customization.
*Kaboodle is a "collaborative shopping" service, where you dump items you find into sharable pages; it's also a handy way to organize web shopping where you're comparing price/features across sites or pages. It's easier to like than to describe.
*Panoratio began as a project within Siemens to manage and move enormous data stores from the sensors at power plants. They have what are called PDIs: Portable Data Images, which are compressed but readily navigable. It isn't highly graphical (it still looks a lot like Excel) but the navigation is still better than what you get from your everyday spreadsheet.
*Bones in Motion collects GPS and time information to create online exercise diaries, which can also be published as blogs. It correlates effort across cities (Denver's altitude vs. Charleston's humidity) so users can compare training programs and share training courses: I could run or cycle for X effort in multiple cities using shared and equalized routes. It's a great example of capturing information as byproduct and organizing it. Look for it on Sprint mobile.
*Vivid Sky's story begins with a UPS-grade ruggedized handheld that you rent at the baseball stadium. From it you can watch video highlights throughout the game, order concessions, participate in online contests and surveys, order tickets, and check statistics, scores, etc. Pilots will be deployed this summer, and word is there will be football action later this year.
*Several companies played the tagging angle, in which users or communities contribute metadata to organize some body of content (Flickr is a great example). Tagworld is a bit like MySpace, but there's a marketplace piece as well. The demonstrator said it was trivial for a 14-year-old to buy things online, some from other members' classifieds, but that begs the question of what a 14-year-old is doing with a credit card online in the first place. Draper Fisher Jurvetson just funded these guys.
*Sproutit uses tags in an email-based tool for small teams of about 10 people. The objective is to make individuals less critical for customer interaction: if I as a co-worker know your context for a given interaction, I can cover for you when you're out of the office. In a similar vein, eeminder gives mobile workers very low-latency access to corporate data.
It's fitting for conference producer, and host, Chris Shipley to have the last word. In her opening remarks she made two salient points about this year's crop of demonstrators. First, the differentiation between enterprise and personal technology gets fuzzier every year. Second, the industry desperately needs to address the complexity issues that prevent more people from using more products and services. As she said in her keynote,
"Who needs more buttons and features and options – on just about any product? Can you seriously say that you've used all the capabilities of any of the software or devices that you already own? Do you really want more?
"Unless, as an industry, we commit ourselves to a better user experience, clearer choices, and greater value, I am afraid that a many people may just sit out the market. Needing no more new features, being unable to sift through any more search results, being overwhelmed by options, these individuals are going to stop, or at least slow down, the acquisition of new technology."
Food for thought, even tastier than the ice cream.
Other coverage:
Information Week
PC Magazine
CNN
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Early Indications is the weblog version of a newsletter I've been publishing since 1997. It focuses on emerging technologies and their social implications.
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About Me
- John M. Jordan
- John Jordan is a professor of practice at the Syracuse University School of Information Studies. He joins the iSchool from the Department of Supply Chain & Information Systems at Penn State, where he taught in the master's and undergraduate business programs. Formerly a principal with Ernst & Young/Capgemini, he directed research at the Center for Business Innovation and the Americas Office of the CTO. John holds a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan as well as a master’s from Yale University, and graduated from Duke University. Prior to entering consulting, he won teaching awards at the University of Michigan and Harvard University; in 2011, 2012, and 2013 he was honored among the best 2nd-year MBA professors at Penn State's business school. A new book on 3D Printing was published by MIT Press in 2019. His book on robotics was published by MIT Press in 2016 and is being translated into six languages. In 2012 he published Information, Technology, and Innovation with John Wiley.