DEMO 06: Day one

Wow. What a day! A few truly outstanding products, a lot of solid ones, and a few that made you wonder how they were going to make money. In much the same way, there were some terrific presentations, a few good ones, and a couple that were not so much bad as ill-considered. So, from DEMO 06, Day one, here’s what I caught my attention …

MooBella (http://www.moobella.com/): High tech, super fast ice cream vending machine. The difference? Makes your ice cream in 45 seconds from scratch with any of 96 additives and flavors. Secret ingredient? Employs a totally new way of making ice cream (aerates the milk before flash freezing to create ice cream crystal structure). Runs on Linux, communicates with central control system for restocking and repair. Blurb BookSmart (http://www.blurb.com/): Think IPhoto’s book making feature on steroids but less expensive (books start at $30). StreetDeck (http://streetdeck.com/): An in-car unit bundled with a Fujitsu tablet PC that provides navigation, satellite radio, car diagnostics, Bluetooth phone integration, media ripping, camera support with photo album, WiFi syncing … does it all. Complete package is expected to be around $2,000. Accomplice (http://accomplicesoftware.com/): Think team task management integrated with Outlook meets Get Things Done. I’m running the beta – watch for a future Gearhead review. Pleo (http://www.ugobe.com/): Think open platform discount Aibo. Pleo is a robot dinosaur with personality. Pricing to be around $200. Makes Sony’s recent announcement that they are discontinuing Aibo look really smart. Pleo has an MMC slot and a USB connector — Ugobe intends to provide both “simple” and “deep” APIs making the little devil both a toy and a robotics platform. Riya.com (http://riya.com/): Think Flickr with facial and text recognition. Outstanding. Ripe for early acquisition. TagWorld (http://www.tagworld.com/): Very interesting social networking site to mediate purchasing decisions through consumer created lists on customizable Web pages along with blogging, tagging, file storage, and P2P tools. Krugle (http://www.krugle.net/): Outstanding concept – a vertical search engine for open source code. IPswap (http://www.ipswap.com/): You want a software mod for your iPod? Perhaps a special add-in for Outlook? An overclock mod for your WAP to get more range? On ipswap.com you can make such a request and the idea is developers will bid for your business. Along with the deal you will be able to set additional terms such as revenue splits from ongoing sales. In addition, developers who already have some product they want to sell can offer it for sale on ipswap.com. I suspect that there’s a huge army of student and amateur coders out there who will make IPswap work and we may well see some serious products emerge from the service. More tomorrow …