Demo 2006 preview, part 1

I arrived in Phoenix at the site of Demo 2006, which will showcase 68 new and improved products, ranging across consumer and enterprise hardware and software. Some of the companies launching products (mostly beta) won't have much info on their Web sites until the event officially begins on Tuesday. Here's a sample of what's to come:

On the search engine front, BiggerBoat is launching an entertainment specific search engine, Kosmix categorization technology for vertical search, and Krugle a vertical search engine that gives programmers access to open source code and technical information (project information, documentation, license information, tips & hints, user reviews, legal information). Users will be able to add commentary to specific results.

Blurb is showing off its platform for creating and marketing bookstore-quality books. Kaboodle is  demoing its social shopping search engine, which has been in beta for three weeks.

Plum is introducing a free internet service for collecting and sharing pages, text, photos, feeds, email and sharing it as a blog, list, album or live feed.

ID Vault from GuardID Systems will demo a consumer-focused product to improve online security by buying a two-factor security token.

iGuitar turns the guitar into a plug and play computer peripheral. "The strategy is to ship iGuitar, iAcoustics (a line of acoustic guitars coming later this year. The company also plans to license technology to other instrument makers, said company president Patrick Cummings (see photo below). The fully digital iGuitar for the Mac and PC ships in the second of this year.

On the enterprise front, Accomplice Software is introducing a peer-to-peer based, collaborative task manager that integrates with Outlook and PDAs. Avokia's apLive data virtualization software supports transaction replication and load balancing across multiple identical active databases. The company is also announcing what it claims is the first virtualized database spanning a distance of over 1,700 miles with Telus.  

Cesura's Business Certainly Solution measures continuously the health of a system and generates alerts and identifies possible problem causes. Jitterbit is introducing Open Edition, and open source integration tool that allows design, configuration, testing and deployment of integrated solutions on Linux or Windows.

Fortify has a new security product that monitors and protects business applications from misuse, regardless of whether the source of attack is inside or outside an enterprise.
LogLogic captures transactional data in the form of logs from applications, devices, servers and operating systems, and provides real-time alerting, reporting and search.

More to come...