DEMO 08 Day One Wrap-Up

We're about to begin the second day of product demos at DEMO, so I oughta mention some noteworthy products from yesterday that I haven't gotten around to mentioning.

First, there's LiveScribe's Pulse, the latest of a long series of attempts to create an electronic pen which lets you convert notes-on-paper to digital form. (Here's one earlier attempt; here's another.) I'm instinctively skeptical about the basic idea here--I think the number of people in the world who want to see their handwritten notes onscreen is limited (as witness the failure of the Tablet PC), and Pulse, like some of its predecessors, requires that you write on special paper that's been imprinted with a tiny grid of dots, so the pen can figure out where it is on the page. And while some of the things it can do are very, very clever--you can write a word, then touch it to hear a spoken translation into another language--I have a hard time summoning up all that many real-world scenarios where they'd be more useful than other solutions involving devices I'd probably have with me, such as a cell phone.

But if nothing else, Pulse is easily the least-clunky digital pen so far: It's not that much bigger than a good-sized fountain pen. And it uses built-in and external microphones to record audio that's synchronized with the notes you take; when LiveScribe demonstrated Pulse to me at PC World's offices awhile back, the sound quality was impressive. So as a guy who attends a lot of meetings, I'm intrigued by the pen as a sort of superpowered digital audio recorder.

If the crowds around the LiveScribe booth are any indicator, Pulse was the hit of day one at DEMO. It's scheduled to ship in March, in 1GB ($149) and 2GB ($199) versions.

Another debutante from yesterday with good buzz is Sprout, a Web-based tool for building embeddable widgets that you can put on any Web page. (As far as I can tell, Sprout just calls the things it lets you build "Sprouts"--but widgets they are. The Sprout-building interface is implemented in Flash, and while I ran into a few glitches, I'm impressed by how slick, easy, and powerful it is.

Here's a very basic Sprout I built in a few minutes:

Lastly, I liked TimeDriver, a service that lets people whose work involves around appointments offer a self-serve, Web-based method for folks to schedule meetings with them. TimeDriver syncs with Outlook and Google Calendar, and while it's a completely unglamorous idea, the execution looked really well done.

More notes from DEMO later today...