More Good Things From Fall Demo 2006-- Good Companies and Technologies
Other Fall Demo 2006 Products I Really Loved
I-Lighter,-- Want to see me go crazy for a product? Show me something that enhances note taking and which at it’s core is really a collaborative computing platform. I-Lighter does all this without a great deal of user intervention.
OK, I’m a sucker for note taking products and the longer I looked at I-Lighter,, the more I see a product that should be licensed by every law school and major university in the US. Moreover, if there was ever a product that could recreate the bond of a user to their PC like Visicalc did for Apple and Lotus 1-2-3 did for IBM and the cloners, it’s I-Lighter. When I look at this nascent Florida start-up I see a company that could be harbored under the Google umbrella and nurtured until its ready to come roaring out of the nest. Conversely, one of the down sides here is that the growth of this company could be tied to an incredibly strategic and costly resource, server plantations. If I were a venture capitalist or company that had the appropriate alliances (or general wherewithal) I’d invest in this company and immediately begin an aggressive licensing campaign. Standing quietly in the backgrond in the Pavilion for two days I watched as several Venture Capitalists and corporate new biz development specialists ogled the I-Lighter demo like hungry sharks. If there was ever a young lean company made for an event like Demo, It’s I-Lighter. My advice: Sign up for a beta account at www.I-Lighter.com and begin using the product NOW and—where its appropriate—share your data and folders. Damn, why wasn’t Microsoft OneNote this good right out of the door? Keep your eyes on this company for news in the coming six to nine months.
ScrapBlog.com— The heart and soul of a great products are implementations of powerful technologies that, (how can I not use the phrase ) touch the heart and soul of consumers. The heartfekt “ahh’s Rippled through the audience S when its founders showed how he creates multimedia rich scrapbook-like entries documenting the life of his young son. With this simple demo, ScrapBlog did more to show the value of digital imaging and strong content creation tools than most companies I’ve ever seen either on stage at Demo, or in a Demo conference room where I would listen to young companies pitch their technologies in advance of the shows. I liked this company’s concise pitch and intentionally personal message.
(More importantly, having recently attended a 40th high School reunion, I had seen several hundred photos of former classmates’ grand children presented using conventional paper-based-scrapbooks or wallet-sized albums.)
And now to my point. Scrapbooking today is a tactile, paper-based experience. There’s no doubt that scarpbooking will make the leap to digital and that this will happen in the near future. Right now scrapbookers spend several billion dollars a year for various supplies used in this hobby. If you want to see exactly how pervasive scrapbooking is, open your local yellow pages or do a search on the phrase “scrapbook supplies.”
If you’re an aging baby boomer with grandkids, chances are at least on of those children’s grandmothers is already into, (or has close friend who are already) organizing photos into scrapbooks. Likewise, if you come home, find a work table in your kids-former bedroom-turned into-a-den littered with weird textured paper, oddly shaped paper patterns and strange scissors with replaceable blades (or emptied QVC shipping containers), there’s a good chance someone is your household is now into scarpbooking.
The downside for this company is that it’s trying to provide a digital solution to an intensely tactile, paper-based experience. The upside is that ScrapBlog.com sets a very high bar for a new category and could be an early winner. So other than venture capitalists with grand children, new puppies, or existing investments in photo sharing sites who would invest or ink a deal with this company? Well, who wouldn’t? There are some very large companies who could use ScrapBlog.com to jump with very large feet into the digital imaging pool. For example, scrap book stock supplier Avery Dennison, giant retailers like WalMart, Sears/Kmart, as well as greeting card maker HallMark (which has been quite open about its intent to make money as a supplier of digital content) and ink jet printer manufacturers like Canon and HP. And then we come to the list of digital camera makes. Good prospect list? I thought so too.
Scrapblog.com gets a position very high on my list of best consumer technologies I’ve ever seen at Demo. They worked very hard on their Demo and succeeded in showing an important new approach to several existing categories. And it’s exactly this that makes a great company for Demo.
Their demonstration spoke for itself, ScarpBlog.com walked away from Demo Fall 2006 with a well-deserved DemoGod award. Way to go Guys.
Some Thoughts on Another Technology Category:
Maybe I suffer from technology overload, or maybe it’s that I’m too much of a skeptic. Regardless, if there’s one category today that makes me scratch me head in wonderment, every time I see or read about a new entrant, it’s digital imaging and content editing/photo sharing.
Hello, want to see a technology class where the pile of heads of belonging to one-time CEOs looks like the losers of a war with the Mongols, or where millions of venture bucks have been thrown to the wind without appreciable returns? Look no further than this inclusive category.
While I’m skeptical about the ability of new entrants to survive autonomously in this segment, there were some technologies that caught my eye.
Tribeca Labs—Despite my overall misgivings about the viability of just introduced digital image/content tools, Tribeca Labs caught my attention with its “zero click” photo correction software. Truth be told, one of the things I find most annoying about image editing is having to wade through a long combination of steps to produce what I think are acceptable images.
What’s different about Tribeca’s PhotoBot is its automation of the digital photo correction and image transfer processes. Select an image, and its automatically corrected and optimized as well as sent to a secure storage facility-- without any user intervention. “the images are automatically routed to a secure Swiss banking computer system (is that enough “safety” for my digital pictures of last season’s tomato plants and my favorite 4H pig? I think so.).
Looking back to Tribeca’s Demo I see is a technology and service that would make a great enhancement to an existing digital imaging product or services. And that’s also something that makes a good Demo product.
Know what? If I ever learn hoow to rewind my digital camera, I might be able to feel more optimistic about this category.
{Full Disclosure: Jim Forbes (my third-person identity) worked as a Demo producer and wrote for the printed and electronic versions of the DemoLetter newsletter before he retired after having a stroke in the hours before he was scheduled to open a Demo event in Arizona. Forbes has also been a Senior Editor for numerous computer newsweeklies as well as a reporter for newspapers in and around Los Angeles. He currently lives on a small mountain top in rural San Diego County with a mischievous small dog, two ungrateful cats, and several large colonies of hateful burrowing rodents. The views he expresses are his own and not necessarily those of Demo, its producers or parent organizations. Void where prohibited by law. Service subject to temporary termination by the appearance off San Diego along the 30- and 200-fathom lines of pelagic fish such as large Thunnoids, halibut, the infrequent Dorado, or lost and bewildered salmon.}—Jim Forbes 10/17/2006
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