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Over the last 13 years, Chris Shipley has been the primary gatekeeper of the twice-a-year Demo conferences, evaluating more than 20,000 applications from companies wishing to present in front of a roomful of reporters, venture capitalists, and analysts.

Now, with DemoFall 2009 beginning Tuesday morning, Shipley is marking the last of 24 Demos she has overseen as she prepares the formal hand-off of the show to VentureBeat founder Matt Marshall.

For each Demo, Shipley and her team have selected a few dozen companies, giving each a chance to make a name for themselves during a 6-minute presentation in a tiny show floor booth by unveiling something never seen before–or perhaps a great new take on an existing product or service. All told, over the 24 shows, she has given the opportunity to more than 1,500 firms.

Some of them are now household names, and some have long since faded into little more than memories.

As a parting gift to the many Demo alumni, Shipley recently announced the show’s Lifetime Achievement Awards, honors that went to some of its most successful presenters. Among the winners were Palm co-founders Jeff Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky, Six Apart founders Mena and Ben Trott, Salesforce.com founder Marc Benioff, WebEx CEO Subrah Iyar, and others.

Given that list and the fact that Marshall is waiting in the wings to usher in the next generation of Demo–to begin next spring–now seems to be a good time to follow in the footsteps of my colleague Josh Lowensohn, who a week ago took a “Where are they now” look at 10 alumni–five good and five not so good–of the TechCrunch50 shows, examining some of the stars and flops of Demo’s past.

The good

TiVo

One of Demo’s older success stories, it’s still hard to believe that TiVo, the first successful service for digital-video recording, is already 12 years old (it was founded in 1997, though service didn’t debut until 1999). From its humble beginnings on the Demo stage, the company has gone on to become the standard-bearer in the world of DVRs, even as others have tried to ride its coattails.

Today, TiVo has just more than 3 million subscribers and is boosting its presence among cable users. During the last quarter, cable provider RCN became the first to ever use both TiVo’s hardware and software offerings. The company offers three main DVR models, two of which have high-definition capabilities.

Over time, TiVo has become synonymous with DVR technology and, to some extent, has been one of the major thorns in the side of commercial advertisers, who have had to battle against viewers’ preference for skipping through commercials.

Palm

Although Palm as a company has had its share of ups and downs, it has to be considered one of the most important players in the history of handheld computing. Today, it is trying to make one of its biggest comebacks ever with its Pre smartphone, one of the few devices that has the potential to take a bite out of the iPhone’s market share.

With its original Palm Pilot, Palm essentially created the market for personal digital assistants. And while the company lost some of its edge when Microsoft decided to get into the business with its Pocket PC technology, there is little doubt that the PDA market, and the subsequent smartphone market, owe a great deal of debt to Palm. The original Palm OS was used by millions of people around the world.

Founders Jeff Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky, who were recently awarded Demo Lifetime Achievement honors, left Palm to form Handspring, which produced its own line of PDAs using Palm OS. Eventually, Handspring was sold back to Palm, giving the latter a chance to regain its dominance with the Treo.

Salesforce.com

Marc Benioff brought his fledgling company, Salesforce.com, to the Demo stage in 2000. Unknown at the time, the company has since become a household name in customer relationship management, or CRM, services.

Today, Salesforce.com has more than 63,000 corporate customers, and in its most recent quarter, it earned $21 million on record revenues of $316 million.

Six Apart

After debuting at Demo in 2004, Six Apart became a leading provider blogging tools. Its Vox, Movable Type, and TypePad services are used by many of the most popular bloggers in the world, including HuffingtonPost.com, Boing Boing, and Talking Points Memo.

Founded in 2001 by Ben and Mena Trott, the company got its first significant round of funding, a $10 million B round from August Capital, and soon after, purchased Danga Interactive, the makers of LiveJournal.

Blinkx

Launched at Demo 2007, Blinkx has become the world’s-largest video search engine. It has more than 500 media partnerships and currently indexes more than 35 million hours of video content.

The Bad

Ugobe
Ugobe, which presented at Demo in 2006, looked poised to become a leader in personal robotics. Furby inventor Caleb Chung was one of its founders. And ts Pleo animatronic dinosaur, both friendly and programmable, was the kind of toy that seemed certain to provide enthusiasts and children alike with hours of robot fun.

But the company probably came along at the wrong time. Ugobe found itself in the position of trying to sell a product that cost too much, just as the global recession was kicking in.

While Pleo got positive reviews and had a wide range of fans, it simply couldn’t gain a foothold in the market. Ultimately, Ugobe filed for bankruptcy protection earlier this year, and today, Pleo is sold, albeit with little marketing, by a company called Innvo Labs.

Filmloop

Launched at DemoFall in 2005, FilmLoop was intended to be an online service that presented a tray of moving images that slide from right to left across a user’s screen, showing each picture and then advancing to the next.

The goal was to create a community in which users could invite anyone they wanted to join, and even add photos, to, their loop. There was no limit to the number of people that could be added to a loop, meaning that an entire community could participate.

The company also hoped to become a photo newswire of sorts, and it had relationships with hundreds of professional photographers.

But things didn’t go as planned for the company. By early 2007, it had burned through millions of dollars of venture capital and had laid off most of its staff. In large part, that was because there were other companies providing similar services, and FilmLoop’s service simply never picked up a critical mass of users.

Peerflix

Also launched at DemoFall in 2005, PeerFlix aimed to be something of an open-source Netflix.

The idea was that users would send each other their own DVDs, and would search for and figure out where to send their DVDs through PeerFlix’s servers. The company hoped to take advantage of the collective library of movies of its users, and it thought that members would trust each other enough to send off their own personal property to strangers.

From the get-go, the idea seemed problematic, in part because it required a critical mass of users in order to maintain an attractive collection of films. By early 2008, PeerFlix died. According to my colleague Rafe Needleman, who liked the service at first, “instead of getting more reliable as its user base grew, the service got less and less reliable, most likely as users stopped participating in it.”

WebDiet

It sounded like a good idea when it was announced at DemoFall in 2008: WebDiet, a service designed to help people find healthy restaurant food, regardless of where they are.

The idea was that people would enter–either via a Web interface or through an iPhone app–dietary criteria and then see healthy food options arrived at by combining those criteria with location-based data. WebDiet even planned on partnering with restaurant chains with online menus so that users had a wide range of choices right from the get-go.

But good idea or not, a year later, and WebDiet is still in private beta, not a good sign this late in the game. It’s certainly possible that it will still launch publicly and make an impact on people’s eating habits, but at this point, it seems like the odds are against it.

Ham-It

Announced at Demo 09 last spring, Ham-It was touted as a “mobile-centric single-stop shop to globally connect and match consumers with local providers of day-to-day consumer services with capability to collaborate and schedule.”

At the time, I wasn’t sure what that meant, and I’m still not. And it looks like potential customers never understood either, as the company appears to have all but disappeared.

The DemoFall 2009 roster

Starting Tuesday, these companies will be taking their 6-minute turns on stage at this year’s DemoFall. Stay tuned for full coverage of the show.

80legs
Anaplan
Answers
Armorize Technologies
Article One Partners
Burt
CallSpark
Cazoodle
Cortera
Digitrad Communications
DotSyntax
Emo Labs
Enthusem.com
ePulze
Faculte
Freeddom Tecnologia e Servicos
Fuze Box
Glam Media
Gogrok Technology
Hand Eye Technologies
Hashwork
Hevva
Hewlett-Packard
Indigo
Intelius
Kryon Systems
LeapFile
Liaise
Lunchster
Micello
MicroAssist
MoLo Rewards
MyOwnRealEstate.com
MyVocal Holdings
NativeTung
Piryx
Point of Wealth Systems
Rseven Mobile
RumbaFish Technologies
Scientific Media
Symform
Third Iris
TotalTrainer
Traackr
TravelTrac
TuneWiki
Tungle Corp
Twirl TV
VicMan Software
Waze
Webroot
Weels Corp
WhoDoYouKnowAt
YiqYaq
Zorap
Zuora

In addition, these 14 companies are part of Demo’s AlphaPitch program, in which presenters get 90 seconds to make their case:

Cardagin Networks
Diditz
Dubzer
Enroute Systems
Gelato Dating
Infochimps
Keen Systems
Melior Technologies
Nubli
Pinyadda
Ringful
Sarithi LocalMart
ShareGrove
TrafficTalk

Originally posted at Geek Gestalt

Originally posted here:
10 Demo grads: Where are they now?

loadUniversalPlayer({playerType: ’small’,lumiereQueryType: ‘id’,lumiereQueryValue: ‘50077165′,useCurrentPageUrl: true,relatedVideo: false,preRollAd: true,hideLeftTab:true,wrapperFloat:’right’});Last time we did top Google search terms half of Hollywood died before we could publish. Well this time, we only missed the passing of Mr. Swayze and Kanye West’s antics. And of the folks that passed last time, only one showed up in the rising search terms for the past three months.

So what that all means is that I think you can reliably say these are the hottest search terms. And one of them is Turkish. Be sure to post your answer to the trivia question below for a chance to win the football beads. And really, only answer the question if you have a valid email address and will respond. Sound good?

Originally posted at CNET TV

More:
Top 5 Google Search terms of the summer

Keyboard cat is a full-fledged phenomenon. Even my mom knows about it, and I wasn’t the one to tell her (Stephen Colbert was).

The meme stems from a lovable costumed feline whose owner gets it to play a keyboard. By cutting it into any video, it provides a humorous effect, a cross between the “wrap up your acceptance speech” music at the Academy Awards, and the large hooks they used to use to drag off actors in vaudeville shows.

If you’ve been itching to create your own Keyboard Cat video, but don’t have the software to do it, fear not. There’s Webware for that. Bobsworth Industries, which makes some other fun Web tools, has put together the Auto Keyboard Cat.

You just drop in any YouTube URL, and pick when the cat should come on. It then streams the two clips together. You can then pass that URL on to a friend who sees both clips together.

It’s missing a few things I’d love to see, such as the option to take that video and embed it elsewhere. You also can’t play any more of the source video once the Keyboard Cat starts playing. Some of the most masterful works on YouTube use this technique and it’s quite funny–although again, this tool simply combines the two clips together.

See the rest here:
Weekend Webware: DIY keyboard cat videos

LOS ANGELES–Ross Levinsohn, former president of Fox Interactive Media and now partner at media venture firm Velocity Interactive, spoke to the execs at the OnHollywood conference here Tuesday to deliver a warning to the entertainment industry: “Take action now or be replaced.”

The nut of his argument (and hardly news, to be fair) is that media consumption is changing dramatically. The old ways are dying: Newspapers are drying up. Magazine publishing is off. Music revenues are down. Even DVD sales are slowing. And the areas that are growing–content downloading and subscriptions–run at lower margins than the media they’re replacing. So it’s time for fundamental change.

The good news, he says, is that there are areas of growth: Google searching is up (56 percent year over year), video streams are up (45 percent) and new platforms like Twitter are way up (2,565 percent yearly growth, he said). Three-quarters of Internet users watch online videos every month. Also, three-quarters of the top iPhone apps are games. There is a robust new entertainment economy. It’s just not the old entertainment economy.

Levinsohn’s favorite numbers: “29 vs. 8,” which is the percentage of media consumption time consumers spend online vs. the percentage of ad spending there. Dollars follow eyeballs, he says, and this indicates a huge money-making opportunity for online content. But the old regime in Hollywood will miss the money boat if it doesn’t change fast.

He cautions that “If Hollywood chooses not to act now, there will be a whole new set of owners.” Those owners: Google, Apple, Cisco, and the like. But do these tech companies want to own Hollywood?

During Levinsohn’s talk, I twittered his warning and got a pretty fast @ reply back from Dan Scheinman, SVP of the Media Solutions Group at Cisco. He said, “Cisco does not want to own H’wood! We want to make it $$$.” I followed up with him after the conference.

“We’re here to build value for Hollywood,” Scheinman told me. “We can bring the assets together in a way that helps media companies make money.”

“Digitization and broadband are changing forever the consumer usage patterns. The consumer is far more in control,” Scheinman said. Some in Hollywood are “trying to preserve existing business models while transitioning to the new world.” He said that Cisco, “wants to work with these guys to work them through this,” and by “work through this” I think he meant “help them to see the light and change course.” But it was clear that Cisco is content to provide infrastructure technology to the entertainment industry. Scheinman doesn’t want to see the Silicon Valley switch and router manufacturer in the middle of the content business.

Both Levinsohn and Scheinman quote Jeff Zucker of NBC Universal, who has famously said that in entertainment, analog dollars become digital dimes. Scheinman wants to help turn the tide on the lowering margins of entertainment content, and turn the digital content back into dollars. His prescription to reverse the course of declining margins has three steps:

1. Know the customers–something that’s easier with metered and measured online delivery than it is with broadcast.

2. Technology needs to be an enabler, not a burden and not a threat. It’s too expensive right now. Running Web sites, paying for bandwidth, and in some cases even paying the utility bills for new media technologies costs too much. Companies need to get aggressive about pushing the cost down.

3. Entertainment companies need to own their own data, which means opening a channel directly to consumers, even if there are middlemen distributors in the value chain.

At the beginning of his OnHollywood keynote, Levinsohn said that it “wouldn’t be hard” to chart the correct course for the entertainment industry in the 15 minutes he was allotted to talk. Rather, in 15 minutes he very clearly laid out why the content industries need a financial reinvention. He was very precise about where Hollywood is leaking. Users are consuming content differently. But the important subtext was this: They’re still consuming, and they’ll still pay, either directly or through vehicles that monetize their attention, for quality entertainment and information.

Original post:
Ross Levinsohn: Hollywood, as you know it, is dead

On Wednesday evening five of Hollywood’s content producers gathered at the TechCrunch50 conference to chat about what the entertainment industry is doing to adapt in the ever-changing landscape of content consumption.

The underlying theme of the panel was the “balancing act” that Hollywood has to manage to make sure its response to pirating and user-generated content does not keep legitimate users from bring down the entire system. That said, there was very little discussion of digital rights management.

Of the panelists, Joss Wheton, the creator of the popular TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Internet series Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along, said frankly that the studios are “trying to re-create the model of creating a successful television show where you pour in millions and get many more millions back,” but that the problem was really about rethinking an “antiquated” system that’s worked so well for so long.

TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington, who was moderating the panel, asked if it was simply an issue of ownership. Producer and director Stan Rogow said simply that it was no longer an allegiance game. Viewers were simply going to the content they liked, however they could get it, and that Hulu was the first real acknowledgment of that. “When two of the biggest brands in the network got together they didn’t all it FOX/NBC,” he said. “They called it Hulu because there are clearly negative connotations.”

Part of overcoming those negative connotations requires changing how content is delivered, including the restrictions that keep users from being able to get at it. Wheton’s Dr. Horrible series was another test of that, with a paid option through iTunes, alongside an ad-supported, limited time viewing window on Hulu. Hulu’s limited run of Dr. Horrible wasn’t an instance of restriction as much as trying to entice people to come and get it, or as Wheton put it “a place where you can have a time-specific event in an old fashioned way.”

Besides Hollywood’s latest creations hitting the Web legally, another interesting topic was celebrities making use of the Web for self promotion. More and more we’ve seen recording artists put more effort into things like personal blogs and short-form videos without any kind of official production. Wheton noted that this tends to work better for Internet video stars because that’s how they started, but when celebrities do it, it can backfire and remove some of the “mystique” that makes them celebrities in the first place.

Ultimately it’s just a game of getting some very large companies up to speed with a set of consumers who have a new device and way to access it every few years. “It’s control of money, control of product, control of what comes out after,” Henchy said. “People are still talking about DVDs and what extra content goes on that. It’s just a matter of time before (it goes) back to (what happened with) music. We’ve gotta figure it out.”

More here:
Getting Hollywood’s Web business model up to speed