DemoFall 2006: Parsing podcasts, car navigation and mojo

I am at the DemoFall 2006 conference, along with fellow ZDNet (Marc Orchant and Mitch Ratcliffe) and CNET blogger (Rafe Needleman) who are covering the 70 products featured over the two-day event. 

One of the highlights of the morning session was Pluggd’s HearHere software that combines semantic/topic analysis and speech recognition to allow searching of audio files for specific content. For example, if you are listening to the Dan & David Show and you want to know when we talked about HP or Mark Hurd, you type keywords in the search box and HearHere visually shows a heat map to indicate where the content most likely to match the request is located in the podcast. The audio file has to be preprocessed by HearHere to return fast results. HearHere will be available to podcasters as well as on the Pluggd.com Web site.

Dash Navigation adds social network features to GPS car navigation systems. Dash drivers who use the two-way connectivity can anonymously share their speeds, creating an up-to-date forecast of traffic patterns on the routing options presented by Dash. In addition, users can send an address from a browser or Microsoft Outlook directly to a car. The navigation system has the other usual features, such as local search, and will be  priced similarly to other automotive navigation systems when it ship next year, said company CEO Paul Lego. More info here.

RingCube's MojoPac brings a Windows XP or Vista PC environment to any USB 2.0 storage device , including iPods, said company CEO Shan Appajodu during his demo. The host system doesn't require any client application, and the MojoPac doesn't leave anything behind on the host system when disconnected. Users can toggle back and forth between the host PC view and the MojoPac view and preferences.