DEMO Fall happened last week - since it was at the Santa Clara Convention center, 20 minutes away, I signed up. My impression from the pre-show material was that it was very oriented towards small software startups hoping to be picked up by investors with the eventual target customer being big enterprises - and there was a good deal of that. There were some interesting infrastructure ideas. A noticeable fraction of the audience was international. According to Matt Marshall, the producer of the show, 800 people registered, 200 of them in the last few days - my rough headcount in the main hall on Wednesday came to about 500. The hall was well filled, with enough room to find a seat if you came in late.

The agenda has links to video of the live demos given by each of the attending companies. Of most interest to me were :

Vizerra

The people with the best pictures were Vizerra (company name 3DreamTeam, though their business cards say 'Vizerra'). It's a software platform for building 3D representations - they've started with World Heritage sites. Their demo also had clips from a simulation done for a helicopter vendor with a rendering of the interiors as well as the flying experience. The development team is located in Moscow.

Range Networks

These people brought a working cell phone base station to the show - in a 19" rack mount unit about 4U high. They just provided service at Burning Man, using a 60W solar powered battery backed unit. There's an embedded software defined radio, adaptable to assorted multinational frequencies. Target price is $10000 per base station, supporting IP - enabling cellphone service for $2/month per user. There's open source software available for it, as well as proprietary supported software.

Always Innovating

If you like the iPad format, but can't be constrained by Apple, look at the Touch Book - it's a tablet, with a robust detachable keyboard, with its own OS on an ARM processor and support for assorted Linux distributions.

SeePort

Had two of its hand built prototypes working at the show. The goal is to sell a device which will sit or hang in the kitchen or family room, and provide an always on window to somewhere else, requiring no expertise from the user. The initial target audience is people who want reassurance about remote family and friends, without having to press buttons or make a call.

Ether2

This is a proposal for a synchronous layer 2 framing protocol, to replace Ethernet, and a Distributed Queue Switch Architecture to use the framing. The company has far too many ideas about how it might be used. They say they are going to open source an implementation.

Square

There were several on stage interviews. Jack Dorsey (Twitter founder) talked about what he'd learned there. Square, his most recent venture, is a payments service - so requires a very different reliability model to Twitter. It has been heavily instrumented for measurement analytics (unlike Twitter, which initially had no measurement or monitoring). Square is bringing on customers gradually as it gains understanding of its scaling issues.

Asked to say what he expected to be the next big thing, he suggested that in a year or two, preventative health care would be an interesting market.

References

DEMO Agenda
Vizzera places
Always Innovating FAQ
Ether2 white papers

DEMO conference just published pictures from the conference. I'm writing something about Musemantik for Vizerra's COO.

Cunning Systems evaluates product and service ideas in computing and communications. If you would like to discuss an idea, contact us at info@cunningsystems.com