DEMO Begins

Chris Shipley, executive producer of the show, is onstage to kick things off. She's touting the new products here (of which there are 67) as a preview of where technology is going--and giving some stats that prove, she says, that we're not in the midst of Internet Bubble 2.0. She's pointing out that almost every application here is a connected one, and that enterprise software is looking more and more like consumer software these days.

Here's the first demonstrating company--Dash Navigation, "the world's first connected auto navigation system." They're showing Dash Express, which they say will ship in January. It looks like a typical stand-alone GPS device for cars, but it can connect to the Net via cell networks or Wi-Fi.

The connectivity lets people send addresses to your GPS via the Web. And Dash provides multiple routes to a destination, they're saying, with information about travel times and traffic based on aggregated, anonymous data from other Dash units.

Now they're showing how you can use Yahoo Local on the Dash unit to find businesses on your route. You can also look up local events, get gas prices, etc.

Dash will be "competitively priced" (I'm guessing that's betwen $500 and $900) and comes with a subscription price similar to satellite radio (which would be $12.95). California will get it first.

Next company: Tribeca Labs, with Photobot, a new $30 digital photography product. It's a "zero-click" image enhancer, they say--it runs in the background and corrects picture problems on the fly by fixing exposure problems, red eye, and the like. Dash also backs up photos on the fly to data servers. In Switzerland, apparently, with a $5/month feature called "Swiss Picture Bank."

Here's Pluggd, a podcast search company which has, at least, an extremely Web 2.0-ish name. Its HearHere technology lets you find stuff within podcasts, and shows a heat map of audio content that, they say, lets you find the moments that are related to your search. There are other podcast searching tools out there (PodZinger comes to mind) but this looks neat. You can't just search for audio across the Web, but that's coming next year, they say.

Now we're hearing from Presto, which has a service and device for people who don't have computers (and a third of Americans don't, they're saying). They're using "mom" as an example, but I'm thinking "Aunt Carolyn," since she's my last close relative who is, happily, PC-less.

The demo involves taking a photo, then sending it via Gmail to a Presto inbox. Presto then converts the photo into something which can be printed out by an HP printer at mom's house, one which isn't connected to a computer. You can also keep track of when mom's printer needs new ink cartridges, using a Web-based interface.

You can send mom personalized calendars and e-newsletters, among other items. The HP printer is $149, and the service is ten bucks a month. Available next month. If they've explained how the printer is connected to the Net, I missed it (I hope it's via dial-up, preferably not involving a separate ISP account--Aunt Carolyn doesn't have broadband or Wi-Fi...)

Nezt: MojoPac, which lets you put a self-contained Windows environment on an iPod or other external device. Sort of like a U3 thumb drive on steroids, and neat looking--good demo. Available now.

The next bunch of companies are demoing Web 2.0-flavored enterprise services; I'm not going to try and blog 'em all, but will report back later with thoughts on any that are particularly intriguing...