My top picks from Demo 08

After two days of immersion in 6-minute product pitches from 77 companies, my head is still spinning from Demo 08. Like a centrifuge some of the material is coalescing, demos floating to the surface, which I presume are those that struck me as worthy of more than a passing glance.

A few enterprise products got my attention. Sterna Technologies Business Positioning System (BPS) was impressive. It's an application for delivering real-time business and predictive analytics in a corporate dashboard.

Aternity deals with a different slice of business intelligence, going from the end user's workstation to the back office to analyze system performance. Agents on end user machines collect and aggregate performance metrics and the engine builds a model of baseline performance characteristics, which are used for problem detection and analysis.

StackSafe's virtualized staging and testing solution for IT operations offers a way to reduce the downtime in deploying software into production.

If there were an overarching theme, it would be ease of use, making existing classes of products less cumbersome to use. I wrote about a few of them from the conference. In particular Sprout, a Web-based drag and drop environment for building sophisticated Flash files, and Blist, database build with a Flash-based interface stood out. In addition, Fabrik's Joggle looked like a useful virtual storage utility for managing files across different services, and Cozimo developed an elegant collaboration space for creative projects. LiquidPlanner's online project management software also stood out as a well designed Web 2.0 application.

I also liked Ribbit's Amphibian voiceware platform, Green Plug's universal power supply, Hubdub's news-oriented prediction markets and Huddle's clever groupware integration with Facebook (below).

Content aggregation and social media was another theme. Delver showed off a "socially connected" search engine. Delver prioritizes results based on a user’s social network, indexing information from the social networking profiles, blogs, photo and video sharing sites and other services.

 

Circos aggregates and ranks expert commenters in answering questions via a search interface. You say you want an affordable hotel with a spa, fitness center and Web access in San Francisco and Circos brings back scored results, based on the "intensity of expression," from pre-screened sources from blogs, online communities, forums, and review sites. Currently Circos searches restaurants and hotels in major cities. The company is considering digital cameras, MP3 players and automotive as it builds out categories.

Ribbit's Amphibian voiceware platform, Green Plug's universal power supply and video measurement software from Visible Measures and TubeMogul (below).

Several companies debuted video delivery services. BitGravity debuted its LiveBroadcast system and Vidyo demoed its conferencing solution based on the enhanced H.264 standard for video compression--Scalable Video Coding (SVC). Asankya's Hypermesh, a media delivery network that uses parallel networking to optimize video streaming over Internet, and Avistar's C3 video collaboration product looked interesting.

More on Demo 08 from ZDNet Photo: (cc) Brian Solis, www.briansolis.com , bub.blibicio.us