DEMOfall, which launched the morning of Sept. 22 in San Diego, is the final Demo for longtime Executive Producer Chris Shipley. During Shipley’s opening remarks, replacement Matt Marshall jumped in to interrupt a couple of times, seemingly playing Kanye West to Shipley’s Taylor Swift.
This was somewhat amusing but, as always, the most important thing about Demo is the new products that launch there.
The morning session of DEMOfall got off to a pretty good start, interestingly not from a new tiny startup but from Hewlett-Packard. HP was showing off its new product SkyRoom, a Windows desktop video conferencing solution that displayed some impressive capabilities for handling multiple participants and doing high-level collaboration and application sharing during the conferencing session.
In the same collaboration vein, Fuze Box’s Fuze Meeting provided a rich collaboration interface that treats mobile devices (at least those that can run the native app) as full partners in the collaboration.
Rseven is a mobile application that turns your smartphone into a life recorder, saving every call, text message and photo taken with the phone and making them accessible in a Web interface. This was intriguing, but also scary from a privacy standpoint. I wouldn’t want to lose the log-in for that Web interface.
Digsby is a Windows desktop application that provides access to all your IM networks, e-mails and social networks, and reverses Twitter feeds so that you read from oldest to newest. And on a personal note as someone who schedules a lot of lunches with friends and colleagues, I was interested in Lunchster, a service that makes it much easier to coordinate lunch meetings.
But the most interesting product of the morning session was Waze. Waze, which works with multiple smartphones, uses the phone’s GPS to provide driving directions but also uses the community of users to detect traffic problems and route users around them in real time. Waze can operate passively so that users don’t need to be typing on the phone while driving. And the community of users also keeps Waze’s road maps very up-to-date, as users can add any road that they regularly use that doesn’t show up on maps.
Check back later for my impressions of today’s afternoon session at Demo.