No lack of cool at Demo@15

Demo is one of the few shows where you look at some of the products and say, "Wow, I can't wait to try that." Over the past 15 years the show has produced several "gotta-have" devices and software, and this year is no different. Here's a quick peek at what we'll yearn for during 2005:

Personal broadcasting production

When corporate communications officials want to broadcast a live message from the CEO to the company, they usually have to hire a Webcasting company or full production company to produce such an event. Newtek says it wants to change that with its TriCaster box, which debuts at the Demo show. The TriCaster is a portable live production video switcher and Web streaming appliance. For $5,000, users will be able to produce a live event, including switching multiple cameras, graphics and pre-recorded material (known as B-roll footage), and stream the output to the Web in real time.

With comparable systems costing between $15,000 and $20,000 (and higher), Newtek says it hopes to create a new market for video communications for companies that couldn't previously afford it. The product is designed to appeal to non-video professionals who still have video needs. The system includes pre-built title screens, graphics and other professional broadcasting features. Officials from Newtek say the system is so easy to use that one person can take the place of a whole control studio. The company says it hopes to have systems shipping as soon as possible, and by April at the latest.

Browsing at the speed of thought

Click to see:

Browster has a better idea - instead of clicking to move ahead, why not mouse over the link and be presented with a pop-up window that gives you a visual representation of the Web page? If you don't like the result, just move your mouse and it disappears. If you do like it, click on a non-link area of the window and the page moves into your original browser area. Browster is a plug-in for Internet Explorer (free download for end users) that does just that.

Browster uses an end user's CPU and bandwidth for a concept it calls "pre-fetching." When a Web page comes up, the Browster plug-in goes to work and gathers all the page information for all the links in advance.When the user moves the mouse over the link, the information appears instantly in the Browster window. Users can determine the length of time the mouse needs to stay over the link before the Browster window pops up to avoid windows popping up all over the place.

The system works with any link, not just search engine results. For example, with Web-based e-mail you can mouse over the subject line in the e-mail and see the contents of the e-mail (almost like a preview pane in Outlook). The Browster makers also talk about having the system recognize daily browsing patterns - for example, if you go to Yahoo every morning and click on certain news links, the system will eventually recognize these patterns and pre-fetch the "favorites" quicker than other links.