B2B Takes Hold At Demo

At Demo, the annual shindig for new and potentially noteworthy companies and technologies, most vendors were more concerned about simply getting their products to work than about announcing themselves.

For the most part, they succeeded. Slam Dunk Networks Inc., for example, demonstrated its new business-to-business transaction software. The 3-year-old company wants to be the FedEx of electronic B2B transactions and ensure that every transaction that absolutely has to be there, gets there. Founded in 1998, the company is funded by such big names as American Express Co., Oracle Corp. and VeriSign Inc.

Slam Dunk, of Redwood City, Calif., wants to replace those VANs with its own network of connectors, which monitor each stage of a transaction and ensure that it is delivered securely and quickly.

Two other companies launched here last week showed the power of distributed computing. United Devices Inc., of Austin, Texas, rolled out its MetaProcessor Platform, a service that applies the idle CPU cycle-sharing technology from SETI at Home to more down-to-earth computing projects. The second company, Israel-based eMikolo Networks Inc., with U.S. headquarters in New York, launched its Demand Drive Access software. Working like a client-side version of Inktomi Corp.s Content Delivery Suite, eMikolos technology can cache and distribute content across a networks nodes. This is especially useful for companies launching media-rich presentations across an enterprise.

On the client side, Microsoft Corp., of Redmond, Wash., calling itself a “wireless startup,” launched MOMM (Microsoft Outlook Mobile Manager). The product, now in beta, can connect Outlook to many wireless and handheld devices. But MOMM goes further by keeping track of how users interact with these devices and automating how Outlook connects to them.