The winners for this year’s DEMO Fall 09 represented a spectrum of accomplishment. Emo Labs, the winners in the consumer category, aim to revolutionize the audio media experience. Future applications in the mobile sector with high-fidelity sound being emitted from a device’s display were clearly upon the minds of judges and voters. From a consumer perspective, the win by Emo Labs highlights another company at DEMO whose product could find widespread adoption in film and television media: Hand Eye Interactive Technology.
Hand Eye Interactive Technology’s presentation at DEMO was simple but unprecedented: content is effectively integrated into film and television in the same way that Close Captioning is so that a photo by the viewer’s cell phone allows the accessing of features. You can find out what clothes a character is wearing in a particular scene, link to an item in the background and find purchase information, or simply have access to more information about something on screen brought up on your phone–all by taking a photo. What differentiates Hand Eye’s offering is that unlike other photo recognition tagging, it has been developed specifically for plasma and LCD screen technology. Future implementations of the technology could be wide ranging and potentially serve to redefine consumer interaction.
The winner in the Enterprise Software category was Liaise, Inc., which allows the embedding within emails of Key Points such as reminders and calender integration and thereby seeking to gain acceptance among users as a primary Business Interaction Management service. The interest in Liaise arises not only out of the undeniable need to find increasingly efficient modes of email management, but also out of a unique perspective approach that divided many presenters at DEMO. That is, is the company working within the already established platform through which a user accesses data or are they pulling user data out of that platform and taking the user to their own proprietary platform. This is where Liaise looks to make a breakthrough in the email efficiency question: their application works within a user’s current email system instead of pulling the user away from it.
Intelius with their DateCheck “Look Up Before You Hook Up” application, Hevva with the launch of Localdirt.com to bring local farming to the web, Twirl TV with their aggregating of online TV content paired with social media integration, and Zorap with their social network content and media sharing won in the DEMOgods category. Pinyadda and Sharegrove were winners in the Alpha Pitch categories. A highlight from the AlphaPitch entrants was Infochimps.com, which provides a data sharing marketplace allowing collectors of data to find and gathers of data to sell. The company not only provides some impressive data sets but also presents a viable business model: revenue sharing. A similar model applies to TotalTrainer, a web-based fitness solution that first has one of the most comprehensive and highly adaptable web-based nutrition platforms available and second has a structured revenue sharing strategy in place as it looks to expand nationally across all major fitness chains.
Overall, there were a number of emerging trends at DEMO. One of these was social media analytics and the integration of said analytics into advertisement or isolated client services. Companies such as RumbaFish represent the pairing of social media analytics and metrics with advertising; with RumbaFish, the ability to download data showing the reach of a campaign across each social network as well as individualized influencer data will be of increasing value. Traackr provides the summarizing of such data to clients and shows how a company can enter the space with a revenue model in place from the very outset. Ultimately, the social networks being analyzed for such data will continue to realize its value and may themselves start to implement the monetization strategies currently being offered by this group of companies.
Another trend was the redefinition of a service from how it has come to be offered by a market leader on the so-called static web to how it will be offered specifically within a social web. An example of this is online payments. As we move away from static pages with a typical shopping cart structure to an environment in which awareness for brands and causes is being built across dominant social networks, processing payments within those networks presents a new frontier where the primary player in the static market simply is not as effective. It is in the transferring of services from a more static web to a more social web that gives unique opportunities for an industry leader to emerge in any given sector. Where payment processing is concerned, Piryx is that company. With already established clients and a lead in the political contribution market that is increasingly shifting to the social web, Piryx reflects this trend seen at DEMO. Along with other companies such as Glam Media who with Tinker.com are leading the move from basic banner advertising to real-time on-page social streams with integrated advertising, it is clear that redefining services for the social web leads to innovation, market presence, and even revenue.
(Photo by Demo)
