This week in Huntington Beach, Calif., 65 start-ups are anxiously waiting to debut their wares in front of an audience of venture capitalists, market analysts, industry veterans and journalists (including a few from Network World). The venue is DemoFall, the autumn version of Network World Events' influential Demo conferences, which in previous years hosted the launch of the Palm handheld, Java and TiVo.

Security and systems management are two areas that have captured the interest of many of the entrepreneurs showing off their products at this week's show. As you'll see in Sandra Gittlen's story in this week's Network World magazine, developers have homed in on vulnerability protection, patch management and policy management.

Getting a spot on the Demo stage is no easy task. Hundreds of technologies are rigorously screened by Demo Executive Producer Chris Shipley, who chooses which she believes are the products that most likely will have a major impact in the market in the near future.

Some of the products to debut at DemoFall include:

* Sana Security's Active Malware Defense Technology - This software uses generic detection to uncover malware such as Trojans, backdoors and spyware. It looks at the behavior of running programs and determines whether code is being hidden from the user. It then removes the malware without human involvement.

* Workshare's Hygiene - Scheduled for beta later this year, the Hygiene client and software tool uses policies to spot infractions in hidden and visible text. It can filter or fix information held in "track changes" that could compromise corporate security, and helps to ensure compliance mandates are being followed by using identity-based routing and auditing.

* Barracuda Networks' IM Firewall - Barracuda already sells an anti-spam tool and its latest development targets instant messaging in organizations. It enables IT managers to encrypt, filter and log instant messages from public clients such as Yahoo, AOL and MSN. The software also lets organizations set policies around identity management, keyword notification and compliance breaches.

* IntelliReach's mx2020 console - IntelliReach aims to ease the burden that IT managers have of reporting and monitoring for spam and viruses, and managing archiving and storage for compliance. Mx2020 is a central console where IT managers can dictate how to handle virus-laden messages and what messages should be encrypted.

Jon Brodkin is senior writer at Network World.