Day 2 at DEMOfall 2009

 
 
Jim Rapoza, Chief Technology Analyst, eWEEK.For nearly fifteen years, Jim Rapoza has evaluated products and technologies in almost every technology category for eWEEK. Mr Rapoza's current technology focus is on all categories of emerging information technology though he continues to focus on core technology areas that include: content management systems, portal applications, Web publishing tools and security. Mr. Rapoza has coordinated several evaluations at enterprise organizations, including USA Today and The Prudential, to measure the capability of products and services under real-world conditions and against real-world criteria. Jim Rapoza's award-winning weekly column, Tech Directions, delves into all areas of technologies and the challenges of managing and deploying technology today.
By Jim Rapoza  |  Posted 2009-09-23 Email Print this article Print
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

It's day two of DEMOfall and the somewhat strange back-and-forth mix of enterprise, consumer and unusual tech products continues.

The morning session kicked off with a group of young kids (including at least one who is still at Milton High School in Massachusetts) showing off Web on Weels (not Wheels), an application that makes it possible to share any part of your Web browsing experience. This product was followed by a very serious service called AOP Patent Services that uses crowdsourcing to check the validity of patents.

One of the cooler products of the morning session was Liaise, a tool that currently works with Outlook and analyzes every e-mail message you write to dynamically detect action items with other people and develop a kind of person-to-person product management system that helps users make sure important things actually get done. Also of interest during this session was Anaplan, an online service with a highly modular design that makes it possible to build dynamic and collaborative business applications.

The second session of the day was focused on integration and again bounced between serious enterprise products and more consumer-oriented tools. I was intrigued by 80legs, a service that essentially uses grid technology to gain high levels of processing power to quickly crawl Websites and return data that can be used for analysis or for whole classes of Web-based data applications.

Anyone who has had the experience of not having a colleague's or contact's number on his or her mobile phone right when it's needed might appreciate CallSpark, a mobile application that makes it possible to enter a name and have multiple sources scanned for the person's number, from social networks to e-mail to enterprise systems such as Salesforce.com. CallSpark also displays the information from these systems while the call is in session, so a user can for example see a contact's Salesforce info during the call.

With an early end to the day's session, we are now waiting for the Demo awards ceremony where they will choose the best products of this DEMOfall. Check back later to get my take on the products that I found the most interesting at this year's DEMOfall.

 
 
 
 
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