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A few things I've seen so far that looked useful, fun, interesting, or some combination thereof:
* If I were giving a personal award for "Best of Show--So Far" it would go to Earthmine, a geographic information application that goes beyond the already-cool photography of Google Maps' Street View. Earthmine is driving around major cities, taking very high-res photos and stitching everything together so you can look up and down in its application and view the scene from multiple angles. And its geographic database contains extremely precise info like the dimensions of buildings. Sadly, this isn't going to be a cool consumer service--the company plans to sell it to municipalities and other organzations that work with geographic data.
* I'm also seriously intrigued by Live Documents, which--this is a weird idea, but it makes perfect sense--sort of turns Microsoft Office into a competitor to Google Docs and other Web-based suites. It adds Google Docs-like collaboration, stores documents on the Web, and uses a Flash-based interface to let you edit Office documents in your browser, with an interface that looks like Office 2007 itself. I kinda want to use Live Documents before I believe it--the company says that it plans for its Web-based Flash tools to have feature parity with Office within six months, which sounds a little implausible--not that I'm not willing to be proven wrong.
* Vello is a very simple idea: It's a conference-call service that makes outgoing calls to everyone scheduled to be part of the conference, rather than waiting for them to phone in. You can schedule conferences from either your browser or a phone-based Vello app. I've got some questions about this--are you always going to know what phone number everyone wants to be called at?--but it still seems like a cool idea.
* Tubes is a new version of a service that lets you share and synchronize sets of files and create simple Web sites. Neat feature: You can give any file on your local hard drive a URL that lets people get to it over the Net. Unanswered question: Is the service's name a Ted Stevens reference?
* SceneCaster is a Web-based service that lets you assemble browser-based 3D spaces--using, if you want, objects imported from Google's 3D Warehouse--and share them. It's not a MMORPG or a virtual world like Second Life, but it looks like it might be handy for small projects--like, say, recreating a room in your house as you plan a remodeling job.
* Matchmine is trying to create an anonymous, widely used standard for personal preferences--so you don't need to tell a bevy of services what sort of movies, music, and other items you like so they can recommend new stuff to you. The demo was kind of confusing, but I like the idea.
There's lots of DEMO left--more thoughts on more demos to come...
