Analysis: DEMO not what it used to be

gallery

Among the best were:

•
Symantec’s Project Guru, a web-based console that lets IT professionals remotely manage the constant demands of befuddled friends and family. No time to help, or simply can’t puzzle out everyone else’s computer problems? For a fee, they can hire a Symantec NortonLive professional on the spot.

•
For the moment, Asurion’s Mobile Address Book is only available on phones running Google’s Android operating system. But its smooth merger of address book, social media, photos and even games will soon be on an iPhone near you.

•
eFormic's CO2Code coordinates a database of UPC codes that shows the carbon emissions for a vast array of consumer products. Total up your carbon emissions, buy the appropriate offsets on the eFormic’s site and know that you’re doing your part to keep the world green.

•
Ensembli’s modified RSS reader, still in beta, mines copious data about what you read to refine its guesses about what you’ll want to see in the future. Combine that with semantic and behavioural analyses of other users and Ensembli draws eerily accurate lists of suggested content.

•
Speaking of looking at others’ choices to refine your own, Xmarks (formerly known as Foxmarks) not only lets you manage and backup your bookmarks in the browser Firefox, but also guides users to the sites most commonly bookmarked by others. That accomplishes two things: if a site is bookmarked, the users who did so must trust that it’s a reputable site. And if those bookmarks are sorted into folders, Xmarks then can detect which sites most likely are related to one another. It’s the semantic Web finally coming to fruition.

•
And speaking of semantics, Evri offers up aggregated pages that quickly identify new people, places and things. As a toolbar, that contextual information now can follow a user from site to site, helping to filter through the daily morass of data.

Whether any of these companies will still be around in a year is anyone’s guess. But just making it DEMO and surviving six nerve-wracking minutes in the spotlight gets each of them that much closer to making it.

Email to a friend

Print this page