Demo Fall 09 San Diego presents some innovative technology companies all debuting their products for about six minutes in front of an eager conference room of industry peers and potential investors. The conference splits the companies into categories based on similarity of purpose; this coverage highlights the companies from each group in a post. First up: Virtual Spaces.
The virtual spaces category highlights products focused on redefining how users interact with each other in everything from HD teleconferencing to real-time surveillance. HP’s Skyroom is a Windows only HD video conferencing platform that has been adapted for the non-corporate or small to mid-size business consumer. You hook up your HD web camera, link up to four participants and start chatting with an interface that is among the best PC-based video chat interfaces currently available.
Skyroom requires at least a 2.3 GHz dual core processor and what you receive for the required processing power is high-quality HD clarity that, for example, instantly adjusts without a blip as you shift screen sizes. Instead of aiming for the average home-end user, HP has gone for quality and added features such as real-time screen sharing with a definable sharing region that can be extended into a full screen mode. Pair this with a pair of wide screens across the room as they did at their DEMO booth and Skyroom is definitely a potential leader in small-enterprise conferencing.
One of the demonstrating companies to raise a significant level of interesting in both the audiences and the judges was Micello. As the founder described it, Micello is “Google Maps inside.” Micello takes your basic Google Maps interface and adds a tab at the top right for “inside”: and this is literally what it does–take you inside a location to gain a blueprint like overlay of the stores or rooms inside it. The example used at their display booth was an overlay of the Stanford Shopping Mall in Palo Alto, CA. You can literally see where every store is, know where to optimally park if you are there to purchase a specific item, and even use the Micello mobile app to navigate your way around the mall.
Micello gathers its data through the aggregation of publicly available blueprints and has a tiered strategy of “indoor-mapping” retail and public interests locations that are highly trafficked as a start. The company’s goal is to become the primary provider of this type of overlay and their early start is aided by the fact that they accurately scale the publicly available blueprints to match the Google Maps data. As one of the judges pointed out, what happens when Google simply adds their own “inside” tab to Google Maps itself? Well, Micello hopes to be the provider of all that data to Google and sees a future in which they release an API to allow other developers to utilize and integrate their data freely.
Third Iris presents a product called VIAAS. Think of surveillance made more effective and you have VIAAS. Third Iris offers a camera linked to a web-based portal that clients can access for a reasonable monthly fee. Unlike a standard surveillance set up, VIAAS provides users with the ability to view only the segments of the footage that contain action. Sensitivity levels can be set as well as areas in which the camera should or should not look for action within its view. All of this is paired with the ability to download both video and jpeg files locally as well as in-camera encryption of all footage, making everything collected by VIAAS admissible. Fuze Box, whose app already has an audience as a desktop client with excellent synchronization with its mobile clients, was also present at DEMO. The emphasis here was on mobile synchronization and the ability to use Fuze “with any IP enabled device”. The social media integration in the desktop Fuze app allows you to easily link your Fuze discussion with members of your social network while HD video can now be easily shared between conference members. Their display booth at DEMO showed Fuze’s focus on integrating their desktop application with their mobile application in real time: the utilization of this in both personal and corporate settings is definitely foreseeable.
And finally in this category is TravelTrac, a company that provides detailed travel information on a series of “travel genre” specific sites. Take their SailTrac website: this allows sailors to track their nautical adventures, upload photos, and even chart their on-land hotel stays. All of this information is linked to a user profile that can be shared on social networks and made accessible to friends with varying levels of privacy. Where this company has potential is in providing niche demographics with an online social web portal–for example, people who sail and are looking to share their adventures with friends. With about forty genre specific travel domains registered, TravelTrac looks to provide a demographically focused integration of the travel market with social platforms.
(Photo by DEMO)
