Conference Showcases Tools Aimed at Organizing a Torrent of Data

By: DON CLARK and KEVIN J. DELANEY
The Wall Street Journal
Feb. 06, 2006

An annual conference showcasing new products and services is dominated this year by tools intended to help cope with the flood of digital information.

As people have gotten used to accumulating volumes of computerized text, music, photographs and video, "We went through a belief that storage was cheap, so we could save everything," says Chris Shipley, executive producer of the conference called Demo. "Now we are left with really making sense of all that data."

One data-handling offering at Demo, which opens today in Phoenix, will be a photo-hosting service called Riya that can recognize faces in users' photos and label them with people's names for easy retrieval, a help for people trying to organize a lot of photographs. The service, from Ojos Inc., Redwood City, Calif., is designed to become more accurate as it analyzes multiple photos of the same person.

Date and time data attached to photos also help. A partly obscured face in one photo might be identified if the person's shirt matches the garb in a picture taken a few minutes earlier. Cosmix Corp., of Mountain View, Calif., is addressing the weakness of some Web-search engines in researching broad topics. Its Kosmix search classifies information on Web pages into categories to help focus research.

A search for "diabetes," for example, returns categories such as symptoms, treatments, case studies and clinical trials. So far, the classification feature is limited to queries in the areas of health, travel and politics.

Nexidia Inc., an Atlanta start-up, searches through spoken information. Its software converts recorded conversation into a phonetic file format that can be searched by keywords at high speeds. The company, which has sold its technology for homeland-security applications and for analyzing the content of telephone calls recorded at call centers, hopes to license the technology for use in Internet services or personal-computer software, says Drew Lanham, a Nexidia senior vice president.

Some companies are focusing on user collaboration. Kaboodle Inc., of Santa Clara, Calif., has developed a service that lets users paste portions of sites they have visited onto a single Web page, so individuals and groups can compare offerings when they are shopping or managing tasks such as planning a vacation. Such results can be shared for others to use as navigational tools.

PolyVision Corp., a unit of Steelcase Inc. in Suwanee, Ga., focuses on collaboration in conference rooms. Its new $100,000 Thunder system features a sophisticated kind of interactive white board that helps manage meetings and drives six to eight image projectors, displaying information that can be submitted from multiple sources in the room, as well as from traveling laptop users or other Thunder-equipped rooms. The goal is to keep multiple screens of information present, so users can follow a sequence of ideas, said Mike Dunn, PolyVision's chief executive.

Computer security is another Demo focus. Fortify Software Inc., of Palo Alto, Calif., plans to show software that scans business programs for security flaws and insert additional code to patch the problems.

Other Demo offerings are targeting nondata needs. One is a vending machine from MooBella LLC, which forms and freezes individual, scoops of ice cream in 45 seconds. Bruce Ginsberg, president of the a Taunton, Mass., company, said the goal is a fresh-tasting product intended to sell for $2.49 a scoop while avoiding the expense of transporting frozen ice cream to retail outlets. He hopes to place the machines in stores that don't sell ice cream now.

Meanwhile, iGuitar Inc. is trying to make it easier for guitarists to link their instruments with computers and software that can help while composing. The LaGrange, N.Y., company's instruments, expected to sell for about $729, plug directly into computers without the need for accessory devices that now complicate such connections, said Patrick Cummings, its president

ZinkKat LLC hopes to liberate PC-bound teenagers. The Cary, N.C., company's Chili wireless device, which can be worn on the belt, acts as a phone, receives music sent from the computer and informs users about email messages, which can be converted to speech and read aloud. David Dubbs, ZinkKat's chief development officer, is hoping to release the product by Christmas for about $150.