Fun New Products & Services at DEMO '08

Below are a few new products and services I explored at DEMO 2008 today. Note that these are not clients but solutions I am interested in learning more about........

Flypaper allows you to develop rich media presentations without the cost of Flash, using simple drag-and-drop features. I'm a likely target customer for this solution. First Round Capital is an early investor.

The concept behind Atlaspost.com is also pretty interesting. It's a map-based social network that lets users network on a global map, personalizing their own neighborhoods with buildings, mushrooms, elephants, using their "Map Village" function. Cool idea.

A competitor to Zoho and Filemaker Pro (which I still use), is a new database called Blist. Users can discover, share, publish, distribute and subscribe to data. The database touts that it has the kind of power that you'd get with an IT staff.

A Sprout executive is now on the DEMO stage with a Hawaiian shirt on introducing SproutBuilder. SproutBuilder lets you create sophisticated rich media widgets and other Flash content, self-publish them or distribute them via any of the leading widget platforms.

With SproutBuilder, you can build sophisticated flash files, simply by logging into a website, dragging your content onto your desktop, and even add glow and shadow effects into your presentation. Every element in Sprout has a visual property: you can change size and color.

You can link to both internal pages and external websites. Sprout integrates with various web services, including Yahoo maps, so you can drag and drop these components into your Builder.

I also had the opportunity to get a taste of SupportSpace, who is on stage tomorrow morning. Silicon-Valley based, SupportSpace offers a unique online service dedicated to product support for people like me. It's a proprietary support platform that allows experts to remotely share knowledge.

Think of an marketplace of tech support people you can access for a reasonable price quickly and easily. After wasting hours on the HP website or days with someone on the phone you can't understand and continuously reroutes you to another extension, SupportSpace is a welcome addition.

A variation of the above is another great solution for consumers and SMBs: PC Health Check. It is a fast, free and remote scan of your PC to check if it is running slow or confirm if you are vulnerable to a virus or spyware attack. Even if you are running spyware and virus programs, you're still at risk.

TubeMogul is the first online video analytics and distribution company serving publishers large and small who need independent information about video performance on the Internet and automated upload to the Web's top video sharing sites.

An ideal solution for independent content producers, media companies, ad agencies, digital consultants, record labels, film studios, politicians, and consumer products organizations and corporations, TubeMogul's analytic technology aggregates video-viewing data from multiple sources to give publishers improved understanding of when, where and how often videos are watched.

TubeMogul then tracks and compares what's hot and what's not, measure the impact of marketing campaigns, gather competitive intelligence, and share the data with colleagues or friends.

Another launch this year -- also on stage tomorrow, is Squidcast, which is a new platform that integrates with email and other applications to let users send and stream unlimited amounts of full resolution files for free.

At a time when computer files are getting bigger and bigger (more people are downloading and creating music, photo and video files), Squidcast gives people a cost-effective way to manage those storage and bandwidth issues.