DEMO, the “premier launchpad for emerging technologies” in Phoenix, Arizona, just ended, and here are four of the highlights most discussed in the throng of DEMO blogs:
Iotum (http://www.iotum.com) won a DEMO God award, and I like their tag line: “Simply relevant.” The company offers a service to enhance the relevance of phone communications by basically linking Outlook with phone calls. Iotum’s platform understands who is calling and knows what to do with the call based on the user’s preferences, priorities, behaviors, and other contextual information. One nice special feature they showed is a self-initiated conference call.
Kosmix (http://www.kosmix.com) won a DEMO God award, too, and proves the explosion of vertical search engines. Kosmix specializes in health, politics, and travel (for now).
Riya (http://www.riya.com) launched with a groundbreaking technology: Their pattern matching/face recognition technology spots patterns in photos - be they faces, words, objects or something else - and then sort through databases of photos looking for the same patterns across your photo collection. For example, you can have Riya collect all the pics of your kid. Down the road, other users will be able to tag elements in your photos thus creating a new folksonomy or Micro-Flickr. Needless to say: The potential applications of this technology are endless.
Ugobe (http://www.ugobe.com) introduced Pleo, the sensor-wired robot dinosaur toy. Ugobe designers and engineers studied the long extinct Camarasaurus, a dinosaur from the Jurassic period. Pleo is the authentic recreation born from that study. I bet this will be the one thing every child and many adults will want to have this Christmas.
By the way, one sure recipe to win an award at DEMO is to hire Shel Israel for scripting the presentation. All three companies he worked with won an award.
