A select group of attendees has descended on Scottsdale, Arizona this week for the annual DEMO conference, which almost always features splashy new product introductions. PC Magazine got an advance peek at a number of the products and services. Heres a selection.
Teleo, a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) service provider based in San Francisco, will show new software and services for placing calls over the Internet on a mobile basis. The company will make a free 30-day trial available for download at www.teleo.com. Pricing will be as little as $4.95 per month. With Teleo, users of e-mail—enabled devices can click on a message or a number on a Web site to call the sender. Teleo is SIP-compliant, so it works with enterprise VoIP systems and other VoIP networks. Prepaid minutes for outbound calls to regular phones will cost 2 cents.
Five Across, Inc. will show new blogging software and services. While free services such as Microsofts Spaces make building your own blog easy, they place tight restrictions on the capacity youre allowed for photos and multimedia, and often wont let you upgrade. Bubbler, a new Five Across service, lets you build your blog using templates and themes, then the company hosts the blog, with monthly rates tiered according to the capacity you want. For 500 MB of storage, for example, you would pay $10 a month.
/zimages/2/98217.jpgUsing Bubblers templates and forms feels a little like using a database. The authoring application has a group-based architecture, so you can share your blog with other contributors. You can also make your blog public or available to a limited number of visitors, such as family members. Forms let you create Web sites on the fly.
“You dont go buy a domain and buy Dreamweaver if you want to do a simple Web site for a pizza party youre throwing.” says Five Across VP David Aune. “Our term for how you build that site in Bubbler is flash blogging.”
Do you spend a lot of time sifting through terse, cryptic Web search results? Many have tried to solve the problem, but a new solution to be shown at DEMO, Browster, takes a different tack. Beneath result links, you get a rolling window of displayed sites, which can keep you from wasting time opening and then closing pages that arent right. Browster is a free download and supported by relevant ads.
/zimages/2/28571.gifRead the full story on PC Magazine:DEMO 2005: A Sneak Peek