A Showcase for the Coolest Modern Gadget-and One Prehistoric One

By: Paul Taylor
Financial Times
Feb. 24, 2006

Consider this riddle: what do a company called MooBella that has developed an instant ice-cream vending machine and a software company called StrikeForce Technologies that has built a security tool that blocks "keyloggers" and a P2P (peer-to-peer) file-sharing program called Zingee have in common?

Well, they were among the 68 start-ups that pitched their products and services to venture capitalists and other would-be investors at Demo '06, the twice-yearly technology showcase held this month in Phoenix, Arizona.

Many of the products and services on show fell into three broad categories: security tools that aim to make the networked and online worlds safer, advanced search services and products designed to help users find and organise content, and software and services designed to exploit the power of online communities.

My top pick came from a company called Riya (www.riya.com) and falls into the search-and organisation tools category. I suspect that, like me, most digital photographers have folders full of images with names such as dscf0549.jpg that cry out to be renamed, or "tagged", using a program such as Google's Picasa to make images easier to sort.

Riya has developed a digital photo search engine that uses proprietary face and text recognition technology to sift through a digital image library on a hard drive or elsewhere. The software - which is in a pre-beta form and not yet available for download - sidesteps the need to "tag" each image. It should be available for free download in a few weeks' time.

The technology seems to work extremely well and, while Riya currently works only with faces or text, it clearly points the way towards "smarter" software.

Seattle-based Vizrea (www.vizrea.com) was showing a free downloadable photo application called Vizrea Snap designed for camera phone and PC users.

Most camera phone owners soon lose interest in their handset's photo capabilities. Vizrea aims to change this by making it simpler to transfer and share digital images. Vizrea Snap automatically sends photos taken on a camera phone to a user's PC using the phone's data connection or Bluetooth wireless networking capability. It also organises the images and provides the option to share them via an automatically created Vizrea-hosted website.

When the software is run on a PC, it scans the PC for digital images, organises them and creates a website for sharing them online. Any image stored on the PC or Vizrea website can also be downloaded and viewed on the user's mobile phone.

Several other companies were demonstrating advanced search services. Nexidia (www.Nexidia.com) was showing off its Nexidia Media Search software, which facilitates finding specific references in audio files, including podcasts.

Nexidia's phonetic search technology enables those looking for commentary on a topic to type in the term and have Nexidia find relevant audio clips ready for playback. The software appeared to work well.

Other companies were showing software or services designed to categorise content such as web pages or aggregate and share search results. For example, Kosmix (www.kosmix.com) has developed technology that categorises websites into more digestible groups, such as health, travel or politics. The technology delivers more relevant results within the three categories so far supported than a search using a general search engine.

Kaboodle (www.kaboodle. com) combines elements of search and community- based technology in an effort to enable online shoppers to collect information from multiple websites, compare results and share information with other Kaboodle users.

Two other companies at Demo '06, RawSugar (www.rawsugar.com) and Plum (www.plum.com), were showing search-based services with quite different approaches. RawSugar Directory is a social search engine that enables users to create, organise and publish a hierarchical directory of tagged websites (URLs). Its success depends heavily on bloggers and other RawSugar members tagging websites accurately and then producing/publishing interesting directories.

Plum is simpler and perhaps more powerful, allowing you to collect and share anything on the web (or your hard drive). Plum users can "grab" anything from a web page, their desktop or email inbox and share it as a blog, list, album or live feed.

Plum's founders set out to develop an alternative to e-mail for collecting and annotating information. They had noted that using e-mail this way results in an endless cut-and-paste exercise that involves wrestling with cumbersome attachments and often makes it nearly impossible to find things again later.

Plum enables users to collate information from virtually any source - it works with services such as Yahoo, Google, craigslist, Amazon, Ebay, Flickr and so on - turn this collection into a blog, list or other format with one click and, if required, share it. Plum automatically links users to other users' collections.

Two services that caught my attention at Demo '06 are aimed at small businesses. Iotum (www.iotum.com) is designed to ease the problem of communications overload by prioritising incoming voice calls based on who is calling, time of day, what appointments the user has and other factors. Important calls can then be routed to the user or forwarded while others are sent to voicemail.

Mailroom from Sproutit (www.sproutit.com) aims to deliver similar productivity gains to small businesses deluged with e-mail. The web-based e-mail management software package automatically sorts and routes e-mails. It also tracks all correspondence between a business and a customer.

My final Demo '06 choice has nothing to do with personal technology or small business productivity but was without doubt the cutest product on display. Ugobe (www.ugobe.com), which develops "organic robots", was showing the first of a series of "designer life forms" - Pleo, a pintsized dinosaur that is expected to go on sale for $200 later this year.

Pleo, modelled on a one-week-old camarasaurus dinosaur, features 46 touch, sound, light and tilt sensors and 14 servo joints with force feedback, enabling it to demonstrate what Ugobe terms "the basic traits of autonomous life", including organic movement and behaviour that allow him to relate to mere humans on a personal level.