Though DEMOfall just finished a few weeks ago, the push is already on to get ready for the next Demo in early 2010. And the first step took place in Boston on Oct. 22.
The Boston Demo meeting was the first of a string of Demo Meetups. These meetups, which will be held in cities across the world in coming weeks, bring together Demo alumni companies, VCs, press and new startup companies that could be showing at future Demo shows.
At the Demo Meetup in Boston, eWEEK Chief Technology Analyst Jim Rapoza spoke to Demo Executive Producer Matt Marshall about how the Demo Meetups work.
Calling people on your cell phone can often be a hit or miss proposition. If someone isn't in your address book or contacts and you don't have their number, finding it while out on the street can be a chore.
DEMOfall, which launched this morning 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.
I'm currently working on a review of Google Wave, trying out some of the API and developer oriented features. One of the capabilities is the ability to embed a Wave into another web site. Several of the Waves I attempted to embed failed but this one worked.
In this Wave, I'm also using a Wave robot, which has the ability to provide feedback based on other information in the Wave.
This Wave is a standard Magic 8 Ball, which responds to basic questions. Clearly, it knows its baseball.
Click here to see screenshots When it comes to demoing a new piece of software, training users on a new application or teaching employees how to follow a business process, there's no substitute for showing them how to do these things directly.
But it isn't always feasible to be face to face in all of these situations. So the next best thing is to be able to create a video of how to use an application, Web service or process and make that available to anyone who needs to see it.
There have long been products, such as Adobe Captivate and Camtasia, that can capture a recording of an application session, record voiceovers, and add educational icons and directions to videos that can then be distributed to anyone who needs them. But these products aren't inexpensive and, since they are geared toward high-end training and testing, can be a little too complex for staff just looking to make a quick application recording.
Setting up a video monitoring system in your home, office or business can be a tedious and sometimes expensive task, often involving permanent server systems.
Avvak's Vue attempts to solve this problem through an inexpensive solution that uses small, easily mounted and deployed cameras, a central video router that requires no PC or server, and a Web-based service for video deployment.
At DEMO 09, I had the chance to talk with Avaak CEO and founder Gioia Messinger about the capabilities and features of the Vue video system.
For the upcoming Demo show, the key word is definitely change. The self-styled "launch pad for emerging technology" will see some of the most significant changes in its history.
By far the biggest change is the departure of the show's longtime executive producer, Chris Shipley. During this show, Shipley will be essentially passing the executive producer position to Matt Marshall of VentureBeat.
Given the current "25 things you might not know about me" craze, there are a lot of people out there who have to tell you all kinds of things about themselves. This whole thing seems a bit nuts to me, after all, if there are things about me that people don't know, it's probably because I don't want them to know these things.
While I've tended to ignore these lists as they've ended up in my mail or Facebook updates, the one's I have read tended to be pretty positive and good natured. Again, this seems nuts to me. In my opinion, if you really want to know someone, you should find out the things that they hate, the things that really drive them nuts.
So to put my money where my mouth is, I've done just that. Without further ado, here is my list (in no particular order) of the Twenty Things about Technology that Drive Me Nuts.
This week Google finally enabled offline capabilities for their popular Gmail service. For many of us this has been something we'd been waiting on for quite a while.
While many people rely on Gmail more and more for both their private and work communications, it really couldn't be considered a serious mail option until it could work on airplanes or other situations where an internet connection is unavailable or poor.
So when offline support became an option in Gmail Labs, I quickly enabled it for my Gmail account. And while I was happy with some of the offline functionality of Gmail, in many ways it was a big disappointment.
In fact, while the term beta is somewhat of joke when it comes to Google services (Gmail itself is still called beta), this offline capability should definitely be considered beta, if not alpha. In my tests the offline capability proved to be very flaky, when it worked at all.
