DEMO '08 - My Top Picks

It's been a couple days since DEMO wrapped up, but I took my time to think over my picks. (Plus I've been busy working on other research.) I haven't even looked on DEMO.com yet to see who won the DEMOgod awards (the site was down when I tried to the day after), and I also haven't read any of the various media stories on the picks they chose (eWeek was one I saw scroll by, and there are many more, I'm sure).  So, these picks of mine are totally unadultered by the opinions of others... :-)

At first I thought for sure I had just five obvious, really top picks. Then I realized, looking over my notes, no, there are too many other good ones -- I'll do ten. Well, darned if I couldn't narrow it down that far, either!  So I finally settled on 15 this morning.  This DEMO seemed to have more great companies, great ideas than others I've attended -- technologies I know we'll be hearing much more about in coming months.  Some are still nascent upstarts, of course, so it may be a while before we hear a lot -- whereas others presenting have already raised significant capital and will likely make a splash sooner. [I noted there were less companies this time that had raised big bucks before they got here, which was interesting...]

It was really hard to limit myself to just the picks I name here, but I thought anything more than 15 would just be too much. It doesn't mean any of the remaining 62 aren't worthy -- I just simply chose the ones that resonated the most with me, in the categories I most relate to.  Someone else with a different perspective would likely choose a completely different list. It's interesting that, of the seven categories DEMO uses, my picks come from four of them: consumer devices (2), consumer software & services (6), enterprise software & services (1), and enabling technology (6). In fact, that latter group was the standout for me: I chose 6 of the 11 companies thus categorized.

So, without further ado, here are my picks, alphabetically, with the few words I Twittered live about each company during the event. I encourage you to click through on each link and find out for yourself why I think they're cool...

• Blist is the world's easiest database for mainstream users - very nice, clean, like simple spreadsheet, but powerful
• GreenPlug is a chip & protocol for real-time communication between devices that lets you charge multiple devices w/one power supply
• HubDub, news-aggregator prediction market (wisdom of the crowd), makes everyone a "news participant"  -- start w/$1k play money
• Iterasi, wow, my own personal wayback machine - do I need this!
• LeapFrog's Tag, portable reading system that fits in child's hand - a pen with a speaker in it, very cool - "brings books to life"
• LiveScribe Smartpen, a computer in a pen that records and links audio, a "new medium for storytelling" - oh, baby, gonna get one!
• Nirvanix, storage delivery network to scale w/o buying all those expensive arrays - affordable, full featured, more than Amazon S3!
• NotchUp is one of my favs for sure - employers pay to interview *me*?  oh, god, am I dreaming? my price comes up at $550 a pop ... [and this one merited a second Tweet:] ... just launched and already is up to 50K members, and 400 cos have signed up - this one just resonates - I smell a DEMOgod
• Notebookz' iLeonardo, first "parallel entrepreneur" presenter at DEMO (also CEO, Cozimo), social utility to connect people doing web research
• Ribbit merges your mobile phone w/your online life (three VCs in it, lotsa buzz) -- see their phone widgets -- oooh
• Semingo's Delver, first socially connected search engine, indexes soc web, imports your social graph, find answers from trusted friends
• Sprout is so cool (SproutBuilder.com), lets anyone build sophisticated Flash-based widgets and other files, drag/drop, effects
• VisibleMeasures, awesome, captures video viewing data, all user clicks, in-stream behavior, easy setup, $5M Series A/Gen Catalyst
• Yoics' univ networking makes remote access simple as IM, any connected device is accessible to anyone, like view web cam on phone
• YouChoose.net, a widget to replace comments sections on most blogs; when comments entered, they appear on all sites hosting widget [note: the whole story appears not yet to be on their web site...just expect to hear more about "distributed comments"]

Why did I do my live coverage of the event on Twitter this time? Because it just seemed so fitting for an event like this, where things move so rapid-fire.  Let me tell you, your brain gets a real overdose of new information at DEMO!  I've done full blog posts in the past, but can only do so many of those at any one event. [Dan Farber of ZDnet was nice enough to ask me if I was going to write my in-depth stuff again so he didn't have to... :-) ] Twitter just seemed to be the thing to do, after I've been getting into it lately and finding it the most fun thing to read on my iPhone when I'm waiting somewhere.  I actually considered some live blogging software from an outfit in Toronto, which CNet's Rafe Needleman uses. [He told me it worked well for him.] I just didn't have time to learn that or set it up.  And I decided I liked the challenge of trying to net out everything for my readers in 140 characters or less per "post."  It's kind of the extreme opposite of my long posts, but I thought worth a try.  And speed does matter. What did you think?  I put up something like 85 or 90 Tweets, and -- not to be just a word guy -- also about 90 pix on Flickr.  It was another great DEMO!  I really enjoyed it.  Learned a ton, and met a bunch more great people.

UPDATE (2/14/08): By the way, the DEMOgod winners are listed here.  Finally got around to looking that up. Looks like four of mine made it. Kinda anti-climactic to bring up at this point, but that's how the awards are -- even when they're first announced, because most people leave before the final night's banquet when the winners are revealed.

UPDATE (2/20/08): And one of my picks gets some dough. Here's the news, just in from Mashable: Fun Spreadsheet Maker Blist Gets $6.5M.