Posts Tagged ‘DemoBeat’
Five more reasons DEMO Fall 2010 will really jam
Rarely have I been as excited about the huge trends we’re seeing in technology as I am right now. Billion-dollar businesses are being created and destroyed. And the best place to get into the thick of things is , next Monday through Wednesday, September 13-15.
We’re going to see nearly 70 companies launching new products on stage. They’re shaking up industries from dating to healthcare to real estate and consumer electronics. And speakers from industry titans and upstarts will share their views of the battlefield. You’re not going to want to miss this DEMO.
The havoc is being defined by three trends:
- the shifting of our lives to mobile;
- the morphing of the Web to something truly social;
- and the porting of data processing to the cloud.
After a two-day feast of ideas, we’ll wrap it up on Wednesday evening with a wrap party featuring the legendary DEMO Jam Band at , which will go from 8 p.m. to past midnight. We’ll be opening the stage to attendees brave enough to jump in.
Another great reason to be there is the conversation and networking that will take place throughout the show. In the hallways, you’ll run into the nation’s top tech press, the hungriest venture capitalists, the sharpest corporate-development executives, and chief information officers with open pocketbooks.
While informal chatter flows outside the main stage, we’ll be having high-level conversations with some of the industry’s sharpest minds. If the industry’s state of flux is an action movie, these guys are in the director’s chair. They are leading the awesome transformation of our lives by the Web, the creators of both the consumer and back-end technology that is making it all possible. (We mentioned some speakers in an .)
Here are the visionaries who will explain innovation’s big picture next week:
Jeff Weiner, CEO, LinkedIn
Jeff Weiner is CEO of LinkedIn, having previously worked as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Accel Partners and Greylock Partners where he advised the firm on consumer technology investments. Weiner previously served as EVP of Yahoo’s Network Division, a business with roughly $3 billion in annual revenues and more than 3,000 employees.
Weiner will talk about LinkedIn’s efforts to scale the largest professional social networking company, and gleaning insights from its 75 million users to give customers even more intelligence from their network.
Phil McKinney, Vice President and CTO, Personal Systems Group, Hewlett-Packard
HP has become one of the valley’s most voracious companies, gobbling up Palm last year in an effort to become a giant in the mobile industry, and acquiring 3Par, so that it stays on top of the cloud and storage trend we’re seeing sweep the industry.
McKinney has been dubbed “chief seer“ of HP, because he is responsible for long-range strategic planning and research and development (R&D) for all of the company’s PC product lines, including displays, mobile devices, notebooks, desktops and workstations. CIO Insight named his Killer Innovations podcast a “must-listen”.
Dave Girouard, President of Enterprise, Google
Dave Girouard manages Google’s growing enterprise business worldwide. He leads a team responsible for sales, marketing, product development and customer support. Prior to joining Google, Dave was senior vice president of marketing and business development at Virage, a provider of multimedia search and content management software. Dave also founded and developed Virage’s application services business. He came to Virage from the worldwide product marketing organization at Apple, where he spent several years in product management.
Prior to that, Dave was an associate in Booz Allen & Hamilton’s Information Technology practice in San Francisco. He started his career in enterprise systems development and integration in the Boston office of Accenture (formerly Andersen Consulting).
Sean Finnegan, Chief Digital Officer, Starcom MediaVest
A celebrated pioneer in digital media and a member of the Starcom MediaVest Group global leadership team, Sean Finnegan focuses on driving the worldwide agency network’s digital strategy and practice. In addition, he is responsible for forging digital communications products, proprietary tools and technology applications, and social and mobile media for the group.
Before joining SMG, Finnegan was chief marketing officer of Vibrant Media, a worldwide video advertising network. Prior to that, Finnegan was the chief executive officer of OMG Digital, a unit of Omnicom Media Group.
We’re inviting Finnegan to help us debate the biggest issues today around online advertising to fuel much of the Web business we’re seeing today.
Lisa Gansky, Founder, Ofoto, and GNN
Gansky is both an accomplished Silicon Valley entrepreneur and big thinker. She has just written a new book called “The Mesh” about the various ways in which new business models are emerging from the new culture of sharing, and she’ll be talking about how leaders such as Groupon, Twitter, Facebook and Zynga are exploiting this trend to market and test products in brand new ways.
Previously, as CEO, cofounder and chairman of Ofoto, Lisa drew on her entrepreneurial spirit and experience developing global Web services. Gansky and her team worked to develop Ofoto into a world-class consumer services offering, which was acquired by Kodak. She left Kodak once its Kodak Gallery reached more than 45 million customers in 2005.
Prior to her roles at Ofoto and Eastman Kodak, she was a cofounder and CEO of GNN, the Internet’s first commercial website. GNN was acquired in 1995 by AOL. She then directed Internet services for AOL through 1997.
Gansky has been an investor and board member of more than twenty Internet and mobile services companies. Currently, she serves as a board member and investor of Me Please, Squidoo, TasteBook, and Dos Margaritas, an environmental foundation. She is an advisor or investor in several new ventures including New Resource Bank, Slide, Instructables, Nuko toys, Addis Creson, and Greener World Media.
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My6sense looks to soften information overload for Android users
There’s a lot of information coming through the tubes of the Internet these days, like RSS feeds, Facebook updates and Twitter posts. Most of them aren’t worth reading for the everyday user. My6sense’s new Android app, launching today, hopes to cut through most of that chaff.
The phenomenon of information overload online has opened up wide a new market for applications to chop out content readers don’t find interesting. My6sense’s app uses an intuition engine to figure out what users are interested in reading and getting rid of the rest of the noise. Its information isn’t ordered chronologically but by relevance as determined by the engine.
The focus for My6sense is on links: The app automatically removes any status update that doesn’t provide some kind of new content. Of the 20,000 updates that someone typically sees each day, the only ones that pop up in the feed are updates that contain some kind of link.
The Android app now integrates the Google Buzz as well, in addition to the usual assortment of media feeds. My6sense is a of DEMO Spring 2010 conference, the product-launch event coproduced by VentureBeat. It started its offerings with an iPhone app.
The Israeli company has raised $2.5 million to date.
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A mobile payments breakout is still a few years away for the U.S.
A breakout hit for real-world mobile payments in the U.S. is still a year or two off, despite the emergence of superphones and rich ecosystems with hundreds of thousands of apps, said panelists at VentureBeat’s MobileBeat2010 conference today.
While there are notable mobile payments startups cornering the virtual goods market, like Zong, a viable phone-based rival to the credit card has yet to emerge. The primary barrier isn’t the technology itself, but rather the level of credit penetration in developed markets. In contrast to the U.S., in Asia and Africa, where the majority of phone owners have virtually no access to credit, sophisticated SMS-based mobile payments systems like Safaricom’s M-Pesa have emerged.
“The value-add has to be clear,” said Tarang Shah, the senior vice president of innovation at Bank of America. “In developing countries, the pain of moving cash is high. That’s not the case in developed countries.”
He added, “We’re still a few years away from real products.”
Still, he did say that finance institutions like his employer recognize that consumers are starting to demand banking solutions on their phones. Competitor JPMorgan Chase & Co. began letting customers deposit their checks via iPhone earlier this month, for example.
Panelists agreed that big brands and small businesses alike stand to benefit from mobile payments. Small businesses could use phones to track loyalty and offer rewards, while big brands could use payments apps as another avenue to market to consumers. Operators might be able to step in but only if they add “real value,” said Mohammad Khan, the founder of Vivotech, a provider of near-field or contact-free payments software.
Mobile payments applications may also raise privacy concerns as banks and credit cards companies like Visa collect even more granular data about consumer habits.
“We have data points about consumer behavior that are unbelievable, but we don’t use it unless we get consent,” Shah said. Indeed, other consumer-based location-apps like that want to predict the performance of retail stocks. (If a store receives more check-ins, that could serve as evidence that its earnings might fare well during a financial quarter.)
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DEMO: Genieo takes automatically generated homepages mobile
Genieo is one of 65 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Spring 2010 event taking place this week. These companies do pay a fee to present, but our coverage of them remains objective.
, a company whose service automatically creates personalized Web start pages, today announced that its service will be accessible via iPhone and Android devices as well as RSS readers.
The company targets those interested in skipping the time and effort it takes to add RSS feeds to traditional homepages. With Genieo, any Internet user can have a homepage filled with relevant content, such as news, Twitter posts, and Facebook updates.
Genieo’s key differentiator is that it . That’s unlike current personalized homepages, such as iGoogle, My Yahoo, and Feedly, which rely on the user to customize the page by manually adding modules. If you’re continuously looking at technology and social media content, for example, then that’s what will populate your homepage.
The Israel-based company, founded in 2008, recently secured $3 million in seed funding and plans to raise another round shortly.
Here’s a simplified diagram of how Genieo feeds in content from various sources and customized the page:
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DEMO: Google still advocating for mobile web sites over apps
Google has been pushing for mobile web sites — rather than downloadable mobile applications — for a while now. For example, Vice President of Engineering Vic Gundotra provocatively (if hyperbolically) to build apps for every smartphone. Google Ventures partner Wesley Chan stuck to this company line when he took the stage at the DEMO Spring 2010 conference today in Palm Desert, Calif.
Chan sat on an expert panel discussing the mobile products selected by VentureBeat Editor in Chief Matt Marshall to launch at DEMO. During the discussion, Matt pointed out that most of the predenting companies were showing off iPhone applications. Is that a bad sign for Google’s Android mobile operating system?
Not surprisingly, Chan was quick to highlight the progress that Android has made, stressing that . Then he encouraged companies to think cross-platform, so that they’re not just building for one phone. That means building apps “that can work on on Android, that can work on iPhone, that can work on BlackBerry, even.”
But it also means reaching any phone with a web browser by building web sites that are designed for mobile phones. It’s “very, very key,” Chan said, that users have an “alternate way” to access companies through their mobile browsers.
“The web is powerful,” he said. “Google has brought that out on the PC. Why can’t we do that on the mobile phone?”
Accel Partners’ Rich Wong, who was also on the panel, offered a different take on the situation. As he argued , Wong said progress in mobile web technology doesn’t change the fact that the mobile landscape is fragmented, and will probably stay that way. Rather than resisting that fact, companies need to figure out the few smartphone platforms that are most important to them, and to focus on those.
“They need to deal with the reality and the realpolitik that fragmentation is going to exist,” Wong said.
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DEMO: AppWhirl lets anybody create their own iPhone app
AppWhirl is one of 65 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Spring 2010 event taking place this week. These companies do pay a fee to present, but our coverage of them remains objective.
Everybody should have their own app. That’s the basic idea behind , which allows anyone to create an app for the iPhone to broadcast a stream of news and other information in real time.
Mountain View, Calif.-based AppWhirl is announcing a new app-creation tool at the conference. The tool lets just about anyone build personalized iPhone apps for communicating to your fans, followers, or friends and family. Right now, programmers will charge thousands of dollars to create apps for people. That’s affordable for a large publisher, but not for an individual who might want to distribute a personal podcast along with all of the Twitter or blog chatter related to it. AppWhirl hopes to make developing an app virtually free for ordinary folks.
Richard Jordan, co-founder of AppWhirl, says the strategy resembles that of companies that made it cheaper and cheaper to create websites. At first, in the mid-1990s, web consultants charged thousands of dollars to create websites for companies. Then tools emerged that made it much easier to create sites; no one needed to know HTML code anymore. Eventually, the tools became free, the priesthood of HTML slingers broke up, and the masses were able to create their own websites using tools that made the task easy.
Jordan hopes to do the same with customized iPhone apps that tie together a personal Twitter feed, RSS feed, podcast feed, Facebook status update, YouTube channel, Flickr feed, or just about any other social feed. You drag and drop feeds into a template and check out the resulting app in a simulator. Then AppWhirl creates the code for the app and submits it to Apple’s App Store. For free apps, there is no charge. For paid apps, AppWhirl will take a cut of the proceeds.
Jordan, who started the firm with Anurag Misra, a software developer who previously worked on mobile projects for Yahoo, said he got the idea over the Fourth of July weekend last year as he heard his Twitter-obsessed wife talk about how there should be personal apps for people. Jordan figured that plenty of people would subscribe to these personal apps and use them frequently; a mother-in-law, for instance, could subscribe to her daughter-in-law’s feed to watch the progress of grandkids.
“We are going after the mass market,” Jordan said.
One of the company’s first users are the producers of the , about the TV show Heroes. The podcasters got lots of followers for their feed, which costs $3 as an app. Jordan said, “If you package something that is ordinarily free in a beautiful way, people don’t mind paying for it.”
Another customer is Starkville, a social network built around the fans of the TV show Smallville. So far, a hundred apps have been built since October, but AppWhirl has made no public announcements about the platform until today.
Over time, Jordan said AppWhirl will add platforms beyond the iPhone, such as Google’s Android. The company has three employees and is considering raising capital. Rivals include Mobile Roadie and Appmakr. Those rivals are charging more for their app creation services. Another rival, , also says it does what AppWhirl does.
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DEMO: Visiarc’s Mobile Documents aim to redefine mobile e-mail attachments
Visiarc is one of 65 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Spring 2010 event taking place this week. These companies do pay a fee to present, but our coverage of them remains objective.
Mobile developer says current mobile e-mail solutions stink at giving users access to large attachments. Its application aims to solve that problem by streaming large attachments to your phone, instead of waiting for them to download.
Since so many of us use our e-mail accounts as file repositories, Mobile Documents would allow us to have far more access to our files than ever before. In a recent video demonstration of the software (check it out below, via ), Visiarc founder and chief executive Peter Lindgren shows off the software easily digesting large images, and PDFs. The software is fairly intelligent about the data it streams — for example, it increases the resolution of a picture that you’re viewing the more you zoom in. It also has a built-in PDF reader, and support for Microsoft Office files like Word and Powerpoint.
Not only can you easily read large e-mail attachments, you can also send them almost instantly. Lindgren demonstrated adding several large files to a new e-mail message, and sending it out over a cellular connection without problems. Visiarc also claims that Mobile Documents is more secure than typical mobile e-mail solutions since you never actually download the files to your phone, and all of the file streaming occurs over a heavily encrypted connection.
There’s currently nothing else trying to redefine mobile e-mail attachment handling like Mobile Documents. The software currently only works on phones running the Symbian S60 operating system — which includes many Nokia, Samsung, and Sony Ericsson smartphones. Given just how useful it appears to be, I’m sure Visiarc has plans for iPhone and Android versions eventually.
Based in Stockholm, Sweden, Visiarc is funded by its founders and management team, as well as a Swedish government investment of $210,000. The company has also taken out a soft loan for $270,000.
from on .
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