Blogging

On Monday, September 8, two major product launch shows kick off: DemoFall in San Diego, and TechCrunch50 in San Francisco. There will be more than 100 products officially announced at these conferences, and we’ll be covering the best of them on CNET blogs and on our Launch Week page.

For the full rundown of everything that’s happening at the show, see the Twitter feed at the right of our roundup page, or go to the standalone Launchweek Twitter page.

We’ll have video crews at both shows. Natali Del Conte at DemoFall, and Kara Tsuboi at TechCrunch50 will be interviewing the most interesting entrepreneurs. Those videos will also appear on the roundup page.

What to expect
Launches at the TechCrunch show will all be Web 2.0 companies. Demo’s presenters likely will be mostly Web 2.0 launches, with a few traditional software and hardware companies in the mix. So what’s the real difference between the shows?

Demo, a show that’s been running since the late 1980s, attracts a regular group of venture capitalists and journalists who come to see what they know will be a highly-produced showcase of closely vetted companies. Demo charges companies to present to the crowd (the fee is now more than $18,000), and this has historically had the effect of filtering out poorly-funded companies from even applying to present. While Demo’s presenting companies are not always scintillating, the majority of them have solid business models. There have been notably cool demos at Demo, like the Palm Pilot, the Pleo, and the Moobella ice cream machine I mocked previously.

TechCrunch, in its second year, is the scrappier conference. Timed this year to run at the same time as Demo, it also has a tough approval process, but it doesn’t charge companies to present on-stage. Companies for which $18,000 makes a big difference are drawn to TechCrunch, as are those that believe that the new TechCrunch conference will get better press coverage than Demo. I expect that a much larger proportion of the companies at TechCrunch will have unformed business models and be further away from being ready for customer adoption, but there will still be many with solid, creative plans. TechCrunch last year brought us some really good Web 2.0 start-ups, such as Mint and TripIt.

This year, stories written about TechCrunch presenters will likely be less insightful than those about Demo companies, for two reasons. First, TechCrunch management has scared presenters into not pre-briefing the press. A few companies have wisely ignored this directive, but for the most part the writers and bloggers covering TechCrunch don’t know what they are going to get when they go to the show. Demo presenters have been pre-briefing journalists for weeks.

Second, there is no post-presentation showcase for TechCrunch companies. People who want to interview TechCrunch CEOs have to buttonhole the presenters immediately after the presentation in a special room set aside for interviews, or find them later in the hallways. There will be a demo hall for TechCrunch companies, but this “demo pit” is for companies that did not make the cut to present on-stage. Demo, in contrast, puts all its presenting companies in one big pavilion where people can wander between the companies and chat up the execs as they want, either before or after they see their presentations on the main stage. It’s a better environment for learning about the companies.

Based on my experience with previous product launch conferences, it’s a safe bet that no more than a dozen of the companies presenting during the combined Demo/TechCrunch launchfest will be truly memorable. But there are plenty of opportunities still to seize market share on the Web, and we will try to find those dozen companies that have identified good ways to do it. CNET writers and video crews will be on-site at both events and will uncover the new products worth your attention.

See the original post:
A user guide to following DemoFall and TechCrunch50

Google’s Chrome browser has as Spartan a user interface as possible, but the browser’s Omnibox also turns out to be a window into a much more elaborate view of the browser.

That’s because Chrome users can type several commands into the browser’s address box to uncovers a wealth of nitty-gritty detail and an amusing Easter egg.

Google Chrome can display lots of detailed information, such as which plug-ins are running. (Click to enlarge.)

(Credit: CNET News)

Firefox can be fine-tuned by typing “about:config” into its address bar, and other about: commands shed light on many details. Google followed suit.

Most folks won’t care a whit, but the feature is notable for programmers–both those creating Web pages and those who might want to toy with Chromium itself, the open-source project behind Chrome. Programmers are a key audience for Chrome, which Google hopes will advance the state of the art in particular for Web applications.

One Firefox tool popular with Web developers is the Firebug extension, which permits detailed analysis of a Web site. Although Chrome lacks an extensions ability for now, though, right-clicking on Web page elements offers an “inspect element” option that reproduces some of Firebug’s abilities.

Happy Easter
For you non-programmers, there’s an Easter egg, too: type “about:internets” into the Omnibox. I’m not going to be a spoilsport by revealing what happens, but here’s a hint: Ted Stevens.

Because I’m interested in browser user interface limits, though, I’m very curious what rendering technology is used to produce the Easter egg output. Feel free to offer your theories in the comments field below.

Among the “about” features:

•

Google’s Chrome browser has as Spartan a user interface as possible, but the browser’s Omnibox also turns out to be a window into a much more elaborate view of the browser.

That’s because Chrome users can type several commands into the browser’s address box to uncovers a wealth of nitty-gritty detail and an amusing Easter egg.

Google Chrome can display lots of detailed information, such as which plug-ins are running. (Click to enlarge.)

(Credit: CNET News)

Firefox can be fine-tuned by typing “about:config” into its address bar, and other about: commands shed light on many details. Google followed suit.

Most folks won’t care a whit, but the feature is notable for programmers–both those creating Web pages and those who might want to toy with Chromium itself, the open-source project behind Chrome. Programmers are a key audience for Chrome, which Google hopes will advance the state of the art in particular for Web applications.

One Firefox tool popular with Web developers is the Firebug extension, which permits detailed analysis of a Web site. Although Chrome lacks an extensions ability for now, right-clicking on Web page elements offers an “inspect element” option that reproduces some of Firebug’s abilities.

Happy Easter
For you non-programmers, there’s an Easter egg, too: type “about:internets” into the Omnibox. I’m not going to be a spoilsport by revealing what happens, but here’s a hint: Ted Stevens.

Because I’m interested in browser user interface limits, though, I’m very curious what rendering technology is used to produce the Easter egg output. Feel free to offer your theories in the comments field below.

Among the “about” features:

•

Since so few people are at work this week (physically in many cases, mentally in many more), it’s a great time to go off topic and ponder just how much better life has become over the last three and a half decades. (How’s that for a random figure?)

I’m not sure exactly what sparked it, but I got to thinking one recent rainy day as I watching my kids bounce between watching the flat screen TV to listening to their iPods to chatting with friends online to playing video games, how much better life has become since I was their age in the early 1970s. It’s not just that we have more stuff (though we certainly do; the size of the world economy has more than tripled since 1970), but that the stuff we have has improved so much—it’s smaller (in the case of electronics) or bigger (meals, houses), faster, higher quality and more functional.

Consider music for example (no, not the music itself, which was of course way better in the 1970s—Styx, Van Halen, Boston, REO Speedwagon, Aerosmith, c’mon!—but rather the way we listen to it). Albums provided high fidelity, but were fragile and definitely not portable. 8-track tapes were a disaster; cassettes were smaller and songs didn’t break in the middle, but the audio quality was so-so and they had a tendency to wear out and eventually get “eaten” by a player. Now we have MP3s; decent quality, ultimate portability, and you don’t have to go to record store to buy them.

Or movies. In the early 1970s, if you missed seeing a movie during its theatre run, you had to wait two to three years. Then one of the networks would finally show it—chopped up by commercials and “reformatted to fit your television screen,” which at that time was smallish and so convex you had to sit almost directly in front of it to get a non-distorted view. And they didn’t even have remotes! Now we have Netflix and pay-per-view and video stores and cable; we can watch movies, in widescreen high-def format, shortly after they leave theatres, commercial-free, on big flat panel TVs.

Or communications. In the early 1970s, sending a note meant sending a note. On paper, in an envelope, through postal mail which took days to deliver (much longer if overseas). There was one phone company. Unless you were rich, you had only one phone (a black one, rented from the phone company), and it was stationary. Long-distance calls cost a fortune (I remember calling a friend in Spain cost me $1.27 per minute, in mid-1970s dollars; can you even imagine paying the inflated equivalent, which would be about $6.00 per minute today, to make a call to another country now?) and the sound quality was awful. Freedom of the press belonged to those to owned one, and many big city newspapers had a virtual monopoly over local distribution of the written word.

Yuck! But today we have email, IM, Skype, Vonage, Twitter, blogs, cell phones, texting and more. Communication is democratic, cheap, instantaneous and portable.

Not everything has improved with time of course: due to a lack of true choice, our educational system in the U.S. has failed to keep up; progress against cancer has been painfully slow; lawyers have sucked a lot of the fun out of life; and the downfall of communism was unfortunately followed by the rise of a competing ideology even more ruthless, sinister and absolute. But, on the whole, life is a whole lot better, and everything has changed.

Why, back in the early 1970s, we had a presidential election that pitted a veteran politician from the western U.S., who was viewed as too liberal by many of his fellow Republicans, squaring off against a senator from a midwestern state, with no executive experience, who was viewed as too liberal even by many Democrats. Among the most pressing issues of the day were energy policy, relations with China, and an unpopular war halfway around the world.

Hmm, perhaps not everything has changed either. Oh well, Happy Independence Day!

*****

Contact Tom Pick: tomATwebmarketcentralDOTcom

Read more:
Off Topic: Have the Best 4th of July Ever!

The primary season hasn’t ended, but Democrats have already begun the online battle against Republican presidential nominee John McCain with the launch of McCainpedia. The site is a wiki about McCain, but it’s funded by the Democratic National Committee. The goal? To “centralize research material, allowing the general public to use it as they see fit,” according to the site’s “about” page. In other words, the McCainpedia is a one-stop shop for talking points that can be used to argue against the Republican candidate.

While its name is partly inspired by Wikipedia, the community-written encyclopedia, the McCainpedia is read-only for members of the public, prompting technologists to criticize the site for violating the community-driven ethos of Web 2.0. Given the polarizing nature of elections, the DNC says it is keeping editing in-house to “fully validate all of the information that appears, ensuring accuracy and reliability.”

Based on just the headlines, I thought the McCainpedia was destined to become a case study for media literacy classes. But the top of every page clearly reads “A project of the Democratic Party,” leaving no confusion about where the information on the wiki is coming from. It seems the biggest issue with the site is that it’s not the forum for debate that its name implies, but rather a highly controlled source for opposition research on the Republican candidate.

What do you think: is it fair to call the McCainpedia a wiki if the public can’t edit its content? And what are some of the sites you’ll be relying on during election season?

See the rest here:
Democrats launch McCainpedia