Second Morning at DEMOfall

The rapid-fire presentations continue here on Wednesday morning. Here are some of the highlights:

PrefPass (which gets the award for most tongue-tying name to pronounce) frees you from having to fill out online registration forms (!!). These things aren't just a hassle, said CEO Adam Marsh, they're a security problem. His company's solution means "personalization without registration." Once you enable the service at the company's site (very quick), it's a simple, one-click process to indicate your interest in a site without identifying who you are. PrefPass is essentially a portable, user-managed identity.

A company called Imaginestics had a pretty amazing demo of their visual-search site, 3D-seek.com (note: only works in IE currently). It lets you doodle to find, say, a part like a bracket. It's a shaped-based search engine, which has obvious applications in finding manufactured parts. As Demo says, "If a picture is worth a thousand words, a doodle may well be worth that many keywords." This search technology could be applied to many other industries as well, and who knows what possibilities in the consumer world.

Heard of virtualization? Most likely that would be server virtualization, which was championed by a Demo alum by the name of VMware, which has done pretty well for itself. Well, now get ready for application virtualization, from a company named Trigence, recently funded with $8 million from three VC firms. Its gig is taking virtualization up a layer, separating it from the OS and allowing it to run in a new operating environment. The firm's technology involves what they call an "application capsule," which isolates an app into a known good state, said CEO David Roth. Their software essentially encapsulates the app from its underlying operating system and infrastructure. "And we get amazing performance," said Roth, "typically less than 2% difference." Demo says of Trigence: "Expect this company to follow a trajectory that maps to the meteroric rise of VMware, and to take that trip faster."

PostPath demoed a Linux-based email and collaboration server that's a drop-in alternative to Microsoft Exchange. It's fully compatible. "Anything that works with Exchange will work with it," said CEO Duncan Greatwood. And because it's an open source system, it allows use of such technologies as Zimbra open source messaging and collaboration. "It lets Web 2.0 become a business reality," said Greatwood. The most impressive part of this live demo, though, was seeing Greatwood take down his PostPath server, then do a restore in a minute or so, which would have taken hours with an Exchange server.

The last cool thing this morning was Widgetbox. Bloggers take note! Now you have an online directory of free web widgets for your blogs or other web pages, and they work with TypePad, WordPress, Blogger, MySpace, and most any other blog, sidebar, or website. No plugins needed. Widgets -- which are live, dynamic content -- used to be hard to find and hard to use, said CEO Ed Anuff. Now the process is easy, since Widgetbox organizes them into a marketplace, where you can quickly find what you need and grab it. What's more, developers (there were 5000 in the beta) now have a way to get their widgets out to a large and growing market.

Tags: DEMOfall 2006, PrefPass, 3D-seek.com, Trigence, PostPath, Widgetbox