The DEMO Spring 2011 conference kicked off yesterday in Palm Springs, featuring 27 startups in the consumer, enterprise, and cloud sectors. Each company was allowed six minutes to make their presentation and try to wow the audience with their product launches.
Some let their products do the talking, while others added humor to their pitches. For example, Dr. Shamus Husheer, inventor of the technology behind DuoFertility — a monitor that helps couples struggling to conceive — began by saying, “my name is Shamus, and my job is to get millions of women pregnant”.

From mind-reading headbands and Coinstar receptacles for your old electronic devices to applications that protect your Facebook page from spam, here (in no particular order) are introductions to 7 of the most interesting companies from Day 1.

AboutOne: AboutOne is a secure online family management system that makes it easier to organize your family life. Targeting valuables like household information and memories, the platform enables you to store digitized pictures, video, and text, and access this information anytime from any web-enabled device. The service also allows you to store digital scans of children’s artwork, create photo albums from your family pictures, store insurance contracts, as well as keep track of anniversary dates, birthdays, and post instructions to the family baby sitter. Connecting with other services via API, AboutOne takes away the need to input all of this information manually. Enter your car’s VIN number, for example, and AboutOne is able to automatically import the model, make, year, etc. into its system. Founder & CEO Joanne Lang was previously on the cloud team at SAP, and though the demo wandered a bit, AboutOne seems to be assembling features that you would otherwise have to go to multiple different services to employ, so the future may be bright for AboutOne.

Manilla: Manilla is a free online account management service, which gathers your household bills, financial accounts, travel rewards, and subscriptions all in one place. Sign on once and access all of your accounts, and view your bills the way they look in hard copy. Manilla recently announced partnerships with Comcast and Citibank, yet, as there are quite a few automated payment platforms already up and running, Manilla’s success will depend on its UI and how quickly it can bring all of the big banks and utility companies into the fold.

ecoATM: If the folks at ecoATM are correct in saying that 500 million electronic gadgets are purchased yearly — and that this number will only continue to grow — the market for recycling these devices is enormous. Enter ecoATM, the Coinstar for electronic devices. ecoATM is a self-serve recycling kiosk that buys back consumer electronics. Using its “patented machine vision, electronic diagnostics, and artificial intelligence”, ecoATM assesses the pristine or crappy condition, maker, and year of your device. It then ascribes a price and offers you the chance for instant cash back or store credit. The large device manufacturers have the infrastructure and manpower to potentially win this race in the long haul (take Verizon’s Trade-In Program, for example), but cash-back and a quick-to-market strategy could build gain ecoATM some serious traction.

NeuroSky: NeuroSky are the makers of a futuristic brain and attention-scanning device that looks, in practice, like a BlueTooth headset for your noggin. NeuroSky calls their device “exercise equipment for children’s minds”, as it works by monitoring electrical EEG brainwaves from the forehead, which then pass through algorithmic functions to determine the intensity of mental states like “relaxation” and “attention.” The company has said that the technology will be used in a number of different products that target ADD and ADHD. (A large reason this one is so close to my heart. Well, brain.) NeuroSky then allows the user to connect to one of ten educational, neuroscience apps, designed to help kids learn math and to improve their focus — all by playing games. Will this help fight the shrinking modern attention span? I hope so.

CVAC Systems, Inc: Straight out of “2001: A Space Odyssey” comes this newfangled pod that simulates high-altitude living. The so-called Cyclic Variations in Altitude Conditioning (CVAC) process apparently improves your fitness by applying “precisely composed rhythm-based changes to pressure, temperature and density of air” to your body as you sit in the egg-shaped pod. According to CVAC, its technology promotes longevity (adding years to your life), especially for those with diabetes. Supposedly, the combination of exercise and high altitude conditioning offers an array of health benefits. To their credit, CVAC cited numerous scientific studies to support their claims, but for now, it still requires a leap of faith.

Ajax Cloud9 IDE: Ajax’s Cloud9 IDE is a cloud-based integrated development environment (IDE) for JavaScript developers that supports HTML5, Python, Ruby, and PHP. The environment will allow developers to build apps and create projects that can be accessed, edited or shared anytime, anywhere. Thanks to the cloud, all you need to operate the environment is a browser and a computer, removing the burden of managing and maintaining large developer infrastructures. During their demo, Cloud9 said that Mozilla would be merging its Skywriter project with their technology and that they are in talks with IBM about Eclipse. If these claims are true, HTML5 developers might soon be on Cloud9. Ey-oh!

Websense’s Defensio for Facebook: Defensio for Facebook is an app that provides companies with active Facebook and other social network accounts added security measures for preventing unwanted content, spam, and spyware. Thanks to the ease and low cost of creating fake applications for Facebook, many brands and companies watch as their pages suffer from an overload of spam. Using Websense’s monitoring and analytics technology, Defensio offers the user a host of cloud-based configuration tools, allowing you to moderate the comments on your page, Facebook Wall, news stream, photos, and block the content you don’t want. You can also choose from, or input, a list of sites you don’t want your page to link to or language you may not want to appear — and you can have Defensio monitor multiple pages. Very cool.

Nimble: Nimble is a social relationship manager, which you can use to easily connect your contacts, calendars, and communications. The platform integrates with your mail, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn accounts, bringing them into one environment and allowing you to see all of your connections with a particular person across all of those media. If, for example, someone sends you an email, it can pull up any previous conversations with them from any platform, or if you aren’t familiar with the person, you can pull their info from social networks. Nimble is free for individuals, but requires a small fee for the paid features that come with company plans and small groups. The company is aiming to make it easier for brands to interact and converse with their customers. With a seamless UI and deep integration with all social networks, Nimble could become a highly usable platform. I’m excited to test it.

Photo credit: Rodrigo Peña

Website security software company Websense has acquired Defensio, a comment spam blocker used by blogs. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Defensio competes with Akismet, the spam blocker that comes with WordPress, and Mollom. One of Defensio’s features is that it can sort blocked comments by spamminess and also offers an API for use on Websites other than blogs.

Websense will incorporate Defensio into its ThreatSeeker Network, where it will help detect comment spam on blogs, forums, and social networks. Websense also plans on extending Defensio so that it works on broadly distributed Web applications.

The company recently used Defensio technology to detect malicious hackers on BarackObama.com. Moreover, Websense claims to have research showing that:

. . . more than 95 percent of all Web posts on blogs, forums and other sites are unwanted content such as spam and malicious content. Additionally, more than 70 percent of all Web spam and unwanted content is hosted on legitimate sites that allow user-generated content.

That sounds inflated to me, but comment spam definitely is a problem that needs to be squashed. So the more technologies out there trying to squash it, the better.

A new spam blocker called Defensio is attempting to improve on the standard set by Automattic’s Akismet, the default blocker for WordPress.

Defensio boasts a few features lacking in Akismet, most notably the ability to sort your blog’s blocked comments by “spamminess” so you don’t have to wade through them chronologically to find false positives. Defensio will rank comments that it labels as spam according to how likely it thinks the comments are indeed spam, listing the least likely comments on top. The blocker will even color code your blocked comments to help you find the ones you want to approve.

Defensio also adapts to the content of your blog so that it can target spam more effectively. It’s success at blocking the right comments for each individual blog can be tracked, so you’ll know just how well Defensio is performing for you.

Among Defensio’s other innovations is an open API that makes the blocker available for use with non-blogging applications. Defensio also provides RSS feeds for your comments (sorted by spamminess, of course) so you can track them outside of your publishing platform.

Today, the company releases plugins for both WordPress and Pixelpost, and they may release one for the CMS Umbraco as well. Plugins for Rails and .NET developers will also be available. Defensio plans to develop plugins across a wide range of platforms over the coming months.