An interesting online technology conference called
DEMO is taking place in San Diego at the moment. Here are my picks of the coolest stuff being shown off:
- Presto is an attempt to keep older people in the loop when families start pinging photos around the world by email. It'll let you buy your grandmother a printer that connects to her phone line. Then, when you send photos to a special email address, it'll automatically print her out a hard copy. I think it's quite a clever idea. And it's important to remember not everyone embraces technology quickly.
- AdLirix plans to inserts adverts between streamed songs based on their lyrics - a kind of adwords for music. It's not clear how the system recognises words - I think it must be from the tracklisting rather than voice recognition. Otherwise death metal fans may get some weird adverts.
- BuzzLogic hopes to cash in on ongoing trend. It plans to let companies find blogs that could opinion influence the opion of their customers. Graphics show the importance of different sources and whether they love or hate you. I've written before about research that could be used to develop similar, but even more sophisticated, systems.
- Eyespot is video editing for the YouTube generation and, hopefully, it could dramatically improve the quality of online user-created video. You can upload clips to their site, edit them, add effects and have anyone view the result. This is something YouTube or Google Video could well look into developing or buying for themselves soon.
- Last of all, VaporStream is an antidote to the traceability of electronic communications. Once a message is sent and read, it's gone forever. Here's a full explanation.
For more DEMO coverage check out all the
videos of the presentations and the
official blog.
