10 Technologies that Stood Out at Demo

Social search. Unified Communications. Collaboration. Social networking. Demo 2008 is a hotbed for many new technologies. With 77 presenters in two days, the companies and their products can blur together. Here are 10 products that stood out-

Iterasi has a cool new tool that lets users save a Web page as it is, without taking the user back to the original address. Through a process the company calls notarizing, the Iterasi toolbar captures the page natively, reproducing live content in the Iterasi account and letting users find it by tags, dates or words.

SpeakLike lets users talk to each other via instant messaging, regardless of any language barriers. This is a noble application and bears resemblance to IBM’s Real-time Translation Service, which was introduced at Lotusphere last week. The difference? SpeakLike is here now, and IBM’s RTTS is still in research.

Demonstrations of Skyfire showed the mobile browser running a RockYou slideshow from a Facebook profile that neither Opera Mini running on a Nokia smart phone nor Apple’s iPhone could successfully reproduce. The software will go a long way toward breaking down the major barrier to ubiquitous mobile Internet browsing adoption.

Storage 2.0 in a nutshell: Fabrik’s Joggle is a storage application that is designed to aggregate your photos, videos and music files, no matter where they reside, and catalog them for easy recall online or through the desktop. OK, so we all take storage for granted, but Joggle was built on top of Adobe’s Air platform, which was launched at Demo last year.

Toktumi lets small businesses set up a professional phone service in minutes, using a PC, desk phone and VOIP (voice over IP) software. Using an adapter, users can attach a phone to their PC, and the phone will then ring as if it were attached to a wall jack. Features include an auto attendant, instant conferencing and search dialing.

Video files are too fat for editors and producers to send wholesale. Cozimo, an online image and video collaboration app, employs groups and project management utilities to help visual artists put together videos and films. Cozimo could be big in Los Angeles, where CEO Joshua Rosen toiled as an art director for Hollywood films such “What Dreams May Come,” “AI” and “Peter Pan.”

Movial Social Communicator rolls together Internet calling; media content such as YouTube videos; unified messaging; and Web and video feeds to let people share content through mobile handsets, PCs, IP set-top boxes and Internet tablet devices. A technology of glaring importance in this heady time of social networks? Perhaps, but few companies are attacking this multimedia aggregation challenge.

From Notebookz.com, iLeonardo is a social search tool that lets users collect information, assemble it in an online notebook, and display it to whomever they wish. Why should you care? Social search startups will be snapped up by larger vendors looking to go beyond the current algorithms to let human behavior produce more poignant results.

Despite a loud, jarring and sometimes inaudible demo, Step Labs woke the crowd up with a noise cancellation trick that defies the imagination. Imagine trying to have a mobile phone conversation with music blaring and horns honking. You could with StepWare Auto’s microphone array technology, which tunes out ambient noises to let your voice be heard. Your co-workers, friends and family will thank you.

Who doesn’t enjoy good rich media presentations? But business users have needed Flash programmers to help them deliver their messages in a visually meaningful way. Flypaper is taking the developer out of the equation by providing customizable drag-and-drop software tools that not-so-tech-savvy users can leverage to create presentations.