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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?

Aviary is great at making advanced Web-based artists’ tools that I haven’t a hope of being able to fully use. Case in point, the new audio editor, Myna, that joins the company’s suite of graphics tools like the Phoenix image editor and the Raven vector editor.

I have dabbled a bit in GarageBand and I do some of my own podcast production work, so I get the concept in Myna, although I’m far from skilled at editing audio. The app is a multi-track audio editor, and for a Web-based app it’s freakishly capable. It’s easy and fast to pop clips and loops into tracks, drag them around, apply standard effects and fades, and then mix the whole thing down so you can download it as one file.

Myna comes with a large library of royalty-free riffs from Quantum Tracks and a few sound effects from other sources. You can upload your clips to the service as well, and record directly from your computer. However, Aviary co-founder Michael Galpert warns that there are limits: You can only lay in 10 tracks, and total playing time has to be under five minutes. Galpert says this is due to limitations in Flash, but that Aviary may find ways around them in the future. The technology comes from Digimix, which Aviary acquired earlier this year.

Myna is a “hobbyist’s tool now,” Galpert admits, but he also says there are pro-level features coming in future releases. I found GarageBand more capable, but Myna is more approachable.

I was surprised to see Aviary get into the audio-tool business after creating its first five apps, which are for handling graphics. But Galpert says, “an artist is an artist,” and he wants to make tools that let creative people work across media, or to create remixes.

Myna is a free app. It’s impressive and it’s a ton of fun. It might even be useful.

Aviary won the Webware 100 Technical Achievement award in 2009.

Originally posted at Rafe’s Radar

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Aviary launches impressive audio editor, Myna

Web 2.0 sites that enable people to create content are increasingly used to carry out a wide range of attacks, according to a new security study.

Websense’s State of Internet Security” (PDF), released Tuesday, notes that attackers are focusing their attention on interactive Web 2.0 elements. Some 95 percent of user-generated comments on blogs, message boards, and chat rooms are either spam or contain malicious links, the security vendor warned.

“The very aspects of Web 2.0 sites that have made them so revolutionary–the dynamic nature of content on the sites, the ability for anyone to easily create and post content, and the trust that users have for others in their online networks–are the same characteristics that radically raise the potential for abuse,” Websense said in its report.

Web 2.0 sites, the company added, comprise “many” of the most visited sites on the Internet. The top 100 most visited Web properties, tended to be classified as social-networking or search sites. Nearly half, or over 47 percent, of the top 100 Web sites support user-generated content.

At the same time, sites that allow user-generated content make up the majority of the top 50 most active distributors of malware. Over 60 percent of the top 100 Web properties either hosted malicious content or redirected users to malicious sites without their knowledge.

“With their large user base, good reputations and support of Web 2.0 applications, these sites provide authors of malicious code with abundant opportunity to easily reach a wide number of victims with their attacks,” the report continued.

Meanwhile, efforts to self-police Web 2.0 properties have been “largely ineffective,” Websense noted. The security company said its research during the first six months of 2009 indicated that community-driven security tools, which enable people to report inappropriate content, on sites including YouTube and BlogSpot are 65 percent to 75 percent “ineffective in protecting Web users from objectionable content and security risks.”

According to Websense statistics, the number of malicious sites between January and June grew 233 percent over the second half of 2008, and 671 percent compared with the same period last year.

The security company also found that during the first six months of 2009, 78 percent of new Web pages with objectionable content such as pornography or gambling, contained at least one malicious link. Some 77 percent of Web sites with malicious code were compromised legitimate sites.

Vivian Yeo of ZDNet Asia reported from Singapore.

Originally posted at News – Security

Credit:
Web 2.0 security risks scrutinized

digg_url = ‘http://digg.com/gadgets/Voice_chat_coming_to_Facebook’;

Look out, Facebook users: Here comes voice chat.

Sometime in the next few weeks, the social network’s tens of millions of users will begin to be able to have high-quality voice conversations, even as its third-party developers are able to start including voice in their applications.

The new technology is not being offered by Facebook itself, however. Instead, it’s from Vivox, a Boston-based company that provides the integrated voice service for virtual worlds like Second Life and EVE Online, and which already has more than 15 million users worldwide.

The service, which is currently in closed beta, will allow Facebook users to have high-fidelity conversations with anyone on their friends list. Each user, however, will have to download Vivox’s plug-in. But once installed, the service works almost seamlessly with Facebook, and is intended for everything from one-to-one chat to large group discussions.

Further, even non-Facebook users will be able to participate, as Vivox plans to offer free dial-in numbers that will allow anyone to call into an existing conversation, much as is possible today with call-in phone conferences.

Perhaps more importantly, according to Vivox co-founder Monty Sharma, the company is making its technology available to any third-party Facebook application developer, meaning that almost any app, from games to utilities, can have a voice component.

For now, it’s not clear how many of Facebook’s users will choose to adopt Vivox’s technology, and for the time being, at least, Facebook is not involved in any way in promoting the new service. But while some people may decide that they don’t want to use a tool that requires a plug-in, many others may well find that it’s worth the trouble in order to be able to easily start a conversation that rivals, or even betters, phone call quality.

One person who may be an early adopter is Charlene Li, a well-known social media consultant, and the co-author of the book Groundswell.

“I would (use voice service on Facebook),” Li said, “because I see it as a continuum of communications with the people I want to stay in touch with.”

Another social media expert, Gnomedex organizer Chris Pirillo, was even more effusive about the potential for a full-fledged Facebook voice chart system.

“It is about time,” Pirillo said. “I guarantee you this is going to bite into Skype.”

For Pirillo, the Vivox system will provide a valuable incentive for Facebook users to streamline their friends lists since it’s likely that they won’t want to be getting voice chat invites from people they’ve friended but might know only peripherally.

“When these tools come about,” Pirillo said, “it becomes less valuable (to have too many friends) and actually promotes a cleaner ecosystem.”

Great for retailers

To Li, giving third-party Facebook developers the ability to integrate voice chat into their applications may mean a big victory for retailers. She pointed out that a company like Overstock.com may find it extremely valuable to put out a Facebook app with voice built-in–without having to build the voice system themselves–because it would give people a way to quickly and easily chat with their friends about products they see.

“Retailers don’t have to put in chat themselves,” Li said. “They can just put in Facebook chat. That’s where it starts getting very interesting.”

And to Pirillo, the ability for Facebook friends to have a voice chat during, say, a game of Scrabble, is a very “smart” innovation that means users can streamline the number of different tools they’re running simultaneously.

To be sure, Vivox’s offering is not the first to make voice possible for Facebook users, though it may well be the most seamless.

Other options have included Equals’ Party Line, which offers group chat for up to five people, and, of course, a work-around like Skype.

Vivox argues that its technology rises above anything else available today because of its scope and scalability. For one, the Vivox system has been proven on services like Second Life and EVE Online–and is about to be built into a series of online Electronic Arts games, beginning with Command & Conquer 4 Tiberian Twilight–and has been shown to support thousands of simultaneous users on a single channel. Further, the company said that because it already has more than 15 million users, it doesn’t anticipate any problems handling the flood of new users that could come when the Facebook system is rolled out.

But while experts like Li and Pirillo think that voice chat is a natural extension for Facebook, there are some who feel that the technology make take some time to catch on in certain segments of the Facebook ecosystem, particularly one of the most popular, social games.

There are millions of people who play social games from developers like Zynga, Playfish, and others, and together the segment makes up one of the largest on the social network. But because social gaming is largely asynchronous–meaning users don’t have to be online at the same time to enjoy playing games against each other–voice chat may not present as much utility.

“For social games, I don’t see a strong need for (voice chat) yet,” said Siqi Chen, the CEO of Social Business, a leading Facebook social games developer. “I do see a shift for more synchronous game play over time, but it hasn’t really been happening for most games.”

In part, Chen said, that’s because among friends who like to play games together, it’s fairly uncommon to be online at the same time. In addition, social games are built around short play sessions.

But he allowed that over time, as people spend more and more time on Facebook, there may well be an opportunity for social game developers to launch more engaging games that are built around longer session times, and which might work well with voice chat.

At Vivox, no one is expecting that tens of millions of users will immediately start using its voice chat technology. But the company is aware that it will likely see a significant spike in usage, and is ready to handle it when it comes, said co-founder Sharma.

And Sharma suggested that while it may be too early to know exactly how the company will monetize its Facebook integration, there are some obvious opportunities in microtransactions and audio ads that users would hear before being put into a voice channel.

For now, it’s also too early to tell just how much of a game-changer any new voice chat system will be. But based on Vivox’s track record, it is certainly one of the few companies well-positioned to jump headlong into a community as large as that of Facebook.

And to Pirillo, adding a seamless voice chat system is a natural, and just one step on the path toward where we may well be going in the near future: fully functional video chatting across the entire social network.

“Is it revolutionary? No,” Pirillo said of Vivox’s offering. “Is it evolutionary? Absolutely.”

Originally posted at Geek Gestalt

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Voice chat coming to Facebook

SAN FRANCISCO–At the TechCrunch50 conference (coverage), I’m a little surprised we haven’t seen any dating sites yet. After all, the economy may be in shambles, but the Internet never ceases to come up with new ways to help people meet. Matchmaking is still in the air though–and this time there’s money involved.

Local Bacon, Red Beacon, and Mota Motors, three newly announced start-ups have a very similar aim: doing something better than Craigslist, and making money off it. In Local Bacon’s case, it’s helping job seekers and employees find each other by simplifying data. For Red Beacon, it’s helping people more easily find service providers, then get them to execute a job. And for Mota Motors, it’s about linking up car buyers and sellers while offering some hand-holding to make the process a little easier.

Out of the three, Local Bacon is the most risky. It’s asking employers to work with a uniform format for job listings, so that all submitted jobs look the same and are easier to parse and search in Local Bacon’s job finder. This is great for people trying to find based on certain qualifications, although it requires employers to reformat their listings, which can be a pain if they’re sending it out to several job listing sites at once, or have certain qualifications that may not fit into Local Bacon’s template.

It’s also requiring job applicants to pay 99 cents per job to apply.

Local Bacon hopes that fee will help focus who applies for jobs, as well as keep the company afloat. It also helps provide tools for both applicants and employers to monitor and manage applications. For instance job seekers can get notified when their application has been looked at by the employer. That’s something you don’t usually find out until you get called in for an interview.

The company said it’s got tools on its road map that will help employers sort through applications by skill set, educational background, and more. For now that’s something they have to keep track of on their own.

For people looking for someone to a one-time job and those who want to do it, there’s Red Beacon. It helps people request a local service, then compare prices from local providers. It has a scheduling tool that lets you put out an order for whatever you need; its system then goes out and finds people to do it for you. On the other end, service providers can put out a quote for how much they would do the job for, then you as the service seeker can you get to pick the one you want.

To help users choose providers, companies get ratings and reviews from previous consumers, along with any photos they’ve taken to back up that work. Red Beacon also pulls in the aggregate rating from Yelp’s API.

Companies that want to be included have to manually add their information, something that will later be verified by Red Beacon to weed out any false ones–although that’s not yet available. The service will also be limited to the Bay Area until the company sees how well it does.

The third matchmaking service, Mota Motors, aims to make car buying and selling easier. It asks straightforward questions about your car’s condition, then scans an index on the Web to give you a recommended sale price. It’s hooked up to a number of service providers to help sellers get their car certified or fixed up before a sale. It can also write a description for you, including any selling points, meaning that you don’t need an English degree to write elegant prose about your 1987 Honda.

For buyers, Mota Motors offers tools that offer advice and suggestions on questions to ask, or things to check before making a purchase. This includes a partnership with Pep Boys that has Pep Boys repair technicians doing a standardized inspection that gets posted to the car’s info page to help you make sure it’s not a lemon and warn you on any work that needs to be done.

So which of these three would I use? Considering I’ve got a car that needs selling, Mota Motors doesn’t sound like such a bad idea. And as a soon-to-be buyer of a used car, I really dig the idea of having a system of verifying a used car to let me know what work it needs done. Of course the caveat with Mota Motors, as well as the others is that they’re currently limited by location. For Local Bacon, it’s the greater New York area, while Red Beacon and Mota Motors are limited to Northern and Southern California respectively.

Originally posted at Web Crawler

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TechCrunch50: Businesses that match you up