The DEMO Spring 2011 conference wrapped up yesterday in Palm Springs, and echoing the current climate in the Valley, day two of the conference belonged to startups focused on social technologies. From social CRM platforms, photo sharing, and social networks to aggregation and reader engagement tools to video and group chat, the day’s startups showed that the interest in the “social” Web only continues to blossom.
Here, in no particular order, is a look at seven new interesting startups worth keeping an eye on. → Read More
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. → Read More
The two-year trajectory of Bump Technologies, the designers of the app that makes it easy to swap contact information, music, and other data between mobile devices, is a somewhat interesting case study in the evolution of early-stage app startups.
Speaking from the DEMO Conference today in Palm Springs, Founder Jake Mintz told the audience that Bump started as a “nights and weekends project” among close friends. Co-founders Mintz, David Lieb, and Andy Huibers launched Bump in March of 2009, and a month-and-a-half later, their nights and weekend project had already pulled in 1 million users.
The founders then decided to move their operations to San Francisco, where they began couch hopping in earnest. Mintz said that between May 2009 and February 2010, even though Bump raised nearly $3.5 million in Series A in November 2009 from Sequoia, they slept on couches, devoting all waking hours to their project. → Read More
I see a lot of demos for a lot of apps. Today, in particular, I sat through a dozen back-to-back demos for startups launching at Disrupt next week. Some of them really blew me away. But none of them quite compare to the unexpected demo I got after my long day when I walked into a Palo Alto CVS to buy some toothpaste.
As I was waiting in the checkout line, a very polite Stanford college student named Parth Bhakta asked me if I would be willing to test out a prototype for an augmented reality mobile app. I was tired, but I am a supporter of higher education.
When I looked down at his hands, however, instead of an iPhone, he held a few pieces of paper with wireframe drawings in pencil. This was his app. I was supposed to pretend the paper was an iPhone screen and press the hand-drawn buttons as I shuffled through the flow. The idea is that you could point your camera at a magazine rack and get digital versions of the magazines, which you could preview on your iPhone and then purchase individual articles or the entire magazine. It made a lot more sense when he did it (see video). → Read More
After watching SAP CEO Bill McDermott, HP CTO Phil McKinney, and Square Co-founder Jack Dorsey give their conference spiel today, I took a stroll into the DEMO pit in order to find the seven best startups at DEMO.
While the presentation junkets split all 67 worthy startups into Mobile Technologies, Cloud Technologies, Consumer and Social and Media Technologies, I’ve culled the seven that caught my eye (and ear) and presented them here in no particular order: → Read More
Sony has filed a patent for a new type of video game demo that’s worth mentioning here. Rather than your typical demo, where they give you level to mess around with, they essentially give you the whole game. As you play the demo, the game “disappears.” → Read More
The winner of DEMO’s enterprise category and people’s choice award, Liaise, is moving from private to open beta by launching their much anticipated mobile calendar integration and introducing their Team Services platform.
Liaise focuses on collaboration within email: it analyzes the content within your incoming and outgoing emails, captures the important information (Liaise dubs these KeyPoints) which needs to be acted upon, and sets up a management list based on this info. → Read More
Email has quickly become the center of our daily working lives. Many people receive hundreds of emails a day full of information which needs to be sorted and prioritized. However, with such a high number of emails being received, people are bound to forget about projects or actions which need to be completed. This is where Liaise, debuting at DEMOFall 09, comes into play. Their product analyzes the content of your incoming and out-going emails, picks out information which needs action, and then sets up a management list based on this info.
The product works quite intuitively. For instance, let’s imagine I am sending an email to a fellow writer: “Greg, make sure you interview the CEO of Liaise on Thursday.” The software will then recognize that my email is a call to action directed towards Greg and that it is due Thursday. The priority for this will be set at normal because it is due a few days from now. However, Liaise is a learning software; so it will change the way it works based off of the language I use and the edits to the suggestions which Liaise has made. For instance, lets say that I manually changed the priority of this issue to Very High. In the future, when I use the phrase “make sure,” in an email, Liaise will set the priority to high. If Liaise does not identify some parts of an email, there is an edit option to add your own action items. → Read More
There’s really no excuse for going on a date in this day and age without knowing anything about the person — even if they’re a complete stranger. With so much information available about people online whether through Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn, or the like, it’s relatively easy to find out way more information than you probably want to know. And now there’s an app for that.
DateCheck by Intelius (more on them below), which launched today at the DEMO conference in San Diego is an iPhone app that allows you to look up a whole range of information about the person you’re on a date with. All you really need is one piece of data as a starting point. It can be something as simple as a name, an email address, or a phone number. From there, you can look up a whole range of information. → Read More
I dropped by the NY Auto Show yesterday and checked out this active park assist thing from Ford. I was a little skeptical about a self-parallel parking car, but it is 2009 and I’m pretty sure we were supposed to have flying cars by now. Check out the demo I got in the Lincoln MKS. → Read More
Douglas did a fine job detailing what OnLive is yesterday and today we’re bringing you a hands-on demo of the cloud gaming service from the GDC show floor. The chap who gave us the demo does a find job of explaining how OnLive works in case you missed yesterday’s post. Sit tight and watch Devin suck at GRID.
We questioned one of the OnLive developers about possible bandwidth issues because of the nature of this service, but he says that ISPs like Comcast are fully aware and on-board with what OnLive is doing. It worked well in this isolated situation but we’ll have to wait and see what happens when it hits the market and thousands of folks are hitting their servers at once. But so far, so good. → Read More
Things are changing at DEMO, the startup and product-launch conference owned by IDG that competes with our own TechCrunch50 conference. After 13 years, conference organizer Chris Shipley will make way for Matt Marshall, editor of VentureBeat. The two will co-produce DEMO as Marshall gets up to speed, then he will take over. Marshall says he will focus on “injecting deeper themes” into DEMO.
DEMO could certainly use the new blood. And VentureBeat could use the extra cash that the deal will bring it. (VentureBeat will share in the profits of the conference). But Marshall is going to have to do a lot more than appeal to the chin-strokers in the audience. He is going to have to reinvigorate a dying brand. It is not so much about the themes of the conference as it is who goes to them. → Read More
Yes, Microsoft will release Halo Wars here in North America on March 3. Great, right? Sure. But that demo that will be released on Xbox Live on February 5, well, if you’re lucky, you’ll be able to play it a few days early. You can thank the good folks at Major League Gaming. → Read More
Capcom released the demo for Resident Evil 5 last week in Japan, but did you know that you, the average American Xbox 360 owner, can play it right now? It’s extraordinarily easy, since all you need is a bank CD or DVD and the wherewithal to burn a data disc. Are you ready? → Read More
I got to spend about 5 glorious minutes with the HTC Touch HD behind closed doors not too long ago, and I’ve been having withdrawals since. We’ve still got a few months before this guy even hits European shores, so it’ll be a while before I can get my Yank hands on it again. In the mean time, I’ll just watch HTC’s newly released Touch HD demo on repeat – with a soundtrack like that, who could resist? From the video: “Discover a place of adventure.. where imagination becomes reality.. and your wildest fantasies come to life”. Holy crap, the HTC Touch HD is Disneyland. → Read More
http://www.gametrailers.com/remote_wrap.php?mid=34642 Lucas Arts’ upcoming Fracture title won’t be available for retail until October 7th in the US, but everyone will get a chance to play, if you’re on XBL, on September 18th. → Read More
Remember this demo? Japan’s Famitsu magazine reports that the upcoming Final Fantasy XIII demo will be upwards of two hours in length. A two-hour demo, people! Who has that kind of time nowadays? Well, I do, but I don’t have a PS3, nor do I have any intention to get one, so… The demo, remember, comes with Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children Complete (on Blu-ray, ergo the demo will be PS3-only), a new cut of the Advent Children movie that came out a few years ago. It was largely, um, okay. Note that the movie still doesn’t have a North American release, while it’s scheduled to be released in Japan next March. → Read More
http://blip.tv/scripts/flash/showplayer.swf?enablejs=true&file=http%3A%2F%2Fcrunchgear%2Eblip%2Etv%2Frss%2Fflash%2F&showplayerpath=http%3A%2F%2Fblip%2Etv%2Fscripts%2Fflash%2Fshowplayer%2Eswf → Read More
http://blip.tv/scripts/flash/showplayer.swf?enablejs=true&feedurl=http%3A%2F%2Fcrunchgear%2Eblip%2Etv%2Frss&file=http%3A%2F%2Fblip%2Etv%2Frss%2Fflash%2F800411&showplayerpath=http%3A%2F%2Fblip%2Etv%2Fscripts%2Fflash%2Fshowplayer%2Eswf This video is unedited, so my apologies for the inclusion of any unwanted extra footage, but I wanted to get it up ASAP. → Read More
