Thirty nine companies presented at DEMO 09. All interesting, but these five impressed me most; AppZero, Vue, How Simple, Primal Fusion, and Pixetell.
AppZero - Instant application provisioning from the datacenter into the cloud. AppZero packages a server application and all its components, but not the operating system, into an object that can be easily moved from the datacenter to any of the supported cloud services. The AppZero console is presented in a browser (see screen shot) that allows you to drag and drop applications from one cloud to another cloud service provider. Behind the scenes AppZero takes care of all the provisioning details and rationalizes the differences in formats.
Cloud computing is the fourth major platform shift in the last 30 years. Each platform shift in the past (Main frame, PC, Web) has introduced new capabilities but also new challenges that have required new tools, applications, and management utilities. Companies like AppZero and CloudSwitch, another Boston based cloud startup, will ease the transition to Cloud Computing.
Avaak - maker of Vue, a network of wireless cameras that stream video directly to the Internet from anywhere in your home or business. Vue eliminates the need for wires and expensive installation. The Vue Personal Video Network costs just $299 and comes with two wireless, battery-powered cameras, four magnetic camera mounts, and a base station. Set up is really simple. You plug the Vue base station into your home router, bring each camera to within one foot of the gateway, and press a button on the gateway to pair it with the camera. Once the camera is “paired” with the gateway you can put the camera anywhere up to 300 feet away. There is no software to install. The video automatically gets uploaded to the Internet on the Vue servers. You can password protect the video, share it with others, or download it to your computer for later viewing.
How Simple – A desktop viewer that lets you view and interact with three or more “panels” in one screen. For example, you could have Microsoft Word, Outlook email, and a web browser, all open in one window. You can copy and paste any text, graphics, links from one panel onto another panel. This would be useful for composing a document or email that consolidates lots of content from other sources. It avoids the constant tabbing from one browser window to another…and back again.
You can open up to 35 panels on one screen and create what How Simple calls a Q, short for queue. However, the more panels you open, the smaller the panels become, until they are essentially dynamic thumbnails.You can stack lots of web sites into a collection of queues that pre-loads them into dynamic windows. These queues are like bookmarks, but again pre-loaded so you can quickly browse through the content. For example, you could create a Q of all news related web sites to constantly monitor breaking news. The panels are fully dynamic, can be moved around to be in priority order, and be expanded to full screen when necessary. If you do lots of web research or compose documents that incorporate lots of content from various sources, you might want to try How Simple’s Q.
Primal Fusion - Primal Fusion's "thought networking" service helps you find the content you are “thinking” about. Primal fusion is a friendly easy to use search engine that has powerful semantic technology under the covers. It works by first typing in a few words like you would with any search engine. It then returns a tag cloud for related topics. You select the cloud topics you are interested in, and then get highly relevant and targeted search results. You can save the relationships between your original topics and the other ones that came from Primal Fusion to create a kind of stored search query. These thought networks are aggregated to define an interest profile. One really cool feature is the ability to create a personal “web site” that aggregates content, web sites, and topics around your defined thought network. There is powerful technology under the covers that I will cover in more detail in a future post.
Pixetell - Two primary tools for business collaboration are online meetings ( WebEx/LiveMeeting ) and e-mail. Pixetell combines the best of both. It allows you to combine screen recordings, voice, video, and attachments, into an interactive message sent over existing channels including email, blogs, wikis, IM, and Twitter. For example, you could verbally and visually explain a spreadsheet, a drawing, design, or proposal, by putting it on the screen, moving the cursor to the area you wish to describe, recording your voice description, adding notes, and sending it off in an email. It eliminates the need for travel, multiple phone calls, meetings, and makes it much faster for dispersed groups to gain consensus and get things done.
