If you’re an entrepreneur struggling to find the time or inspiration to udpate the company blog, a new service called Scribit offers a solution.

Scribit was developed by a startup called Vertical Acuity, whose initial product helped publishers syndicate their articles to other sites and find fresh content for themselves. President Joe Fiveash used to work at Weather.com, and he says that this kind of content-sharing normally requires a lot of time-consuming deal-making. With Scribit, publishers can pre-approve their content for syndication at a set payment rate, so it’s a simple process to republish something.

More recently, Fiveash says, “We felt this technology could benefit from a larger audience.” Scribit offers capabilities similar to the existing Vertical Acuity service, targeted this time at businesses who need a little help with content marketing. There’s more and more buzz about creating content that promotes your company or helps establish you as an important voice in the industry, but writing those articles or blog posts yourself can be time-consuming, and hiring someone else can to do it can be expensive, especially for a small business or startup.

Instead, you can pay Scribit a rate starting at $50 per month (the price goes up as you add more features and draw more traffic), then search for relevant content from partners like Business Insider, Discovery, and TVGuide.com. If you find an article that seems like a good fit for your website, you can republish it with just a few clicks, and also push a link to your social network accounts. The article still has the branding of the original publisher, but you can now customers and other visitors to can read it without leaving your site. (As a bonus, it’s real editorial content, not just an ad or “advertorial” for your company — and that’s the more effective way to do content marketing.)

You probably don’t want to let outside content take over your site completely, Fiveash says, but this could be a nice way to supplement the articles or blog posts that you’re writing yourself. And with the analytics data that Scribit provides, you can experience to find the mix that works best for you.

Scribit is launching this week at the DEMO conference, co-produced by VentureBeat.

Not all hotels are created equal. That’s why paying $150 for a night at one hotel might be a rip off, but it could be a great deal somewhere else — and that, in turn, is why DealAngel is launching a new way to search for hotels.

When you go to the DealAngel site and select your dates, it provides a list of hotels and prices for your trip. Each of those rooms is assigned a “value” score — basically, how the offered price compares to the expected market rate for the room. If a room on a given night would normally cost $300, and instead it’s priced at $150, that’s a great value — but you might not see that if you’re searching purely based on price.

That “market rate” estimate for the room is based on pricing data from both that hotel and surrounding locations — in fact, DealAngel says its algorithm looks at millions of data points across the Web. Co-founders Roman Peskin (the CEO) and Bob Rogers (the COO) bring different kinds of industry experience to the table — Peskin managed revenue at a group of hotels in Prague, while Rogers worked at Expedia. Peskin says that with their experience, and the technology they’ve developed, searching for hotel rooms on DealAngel is like playing the slot machines in Vegas while the slot machine maker looks over your shoulder and gives you advice.

The real question, ultimately, is: How much do consumers care? If you find a cheap, decent hotel, do you really care if it’s a great “value”? Conversely, are you going to want to stay at a hotel that costs $50 more per night because of that value?

“Who doesn’t like staying in a five-star hotel for the price of a three-star hotel?” Peskin counters.

He also points to the success of companies like Groupon as a sign that people aren’t just looking for the lowest price, but also the best deal. (And even though there are hotel deals on Groupon, Peskin says it can be a challenge to apply those deals to the dates you want — not a problem at DealAngel, where you’re reserving a room for a specific night.)

Peskin and Rogers first built a market intelligence product for hotels, but they decided that they had a bigger opportunity turning that technology into a consumer product. DealAngel is launching this week at DEMO, the technology conference co-produced by VentureBeat (my old employer). The company has raised a seed round of less than $500,000 from Foresight Ventures.

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:

1. Marginize: Marginize is a browser add-on that allows you to annotate Websites and to leave comments, adding a social layer to every site you visit. The user can add or join an existing “margin” layer to browse and discover what others have said about the site you’re visiting. You can leave a comment or browse those left by others.

   The widget is similar to other real-time commenting platforms (like, say, Disqus), except that Marginize puts interaction and commentary back into the hands of the individual user, rather than allowing the owner of the Web site to control and moderate what’s said. In a way, Marginize is akin to a private Twitter feed for Yelp, because the widget creates this pop-out tab (or “margin”) on the side of every Website, where users can provide supplementary information about the site, write reviews, or discuss the site’s credibility.

   Though the company launched six months ago (and was mentioned even before that on TC by Don Dodge), yesterday at DEMO they announced an amendment to their product strategy, now offering publishers and content creators a chance to enter the game. The company added a “publisher widget”, which allows publishers to seamlessly insert the feature on any Website so that the tab is visible to both publishers and users. The idea behind Marginize itself may not be new, but the product has an eminent usability and interface that sets it apart from those that came before it.

2. Gut Check: In today’s digital world, the traditional methods of market research have become too cumbersome, expensive, and too much of a drain on manpower. Gut Check, the winner of DEMO’s “People’s Choice Award” (and $1 million in free advertising from IDG publications) is a DIY research tool that allows companies to conduct qualitative research, like focus groups, over the Web.

   Users define the type of audience they want to canvass from an exhaustive list of categories, and Gut Check then uses the profile to select a targeted group from their bullpen of 5 million research participants. Following that, the service allows you to perform interactive interviews with individual participants through its portal while sharing images and asking questions.

   At $40-per-session, I can see this relatively cheap tool coming in handy for both big and small companies that make frequent updates to their products or services and want to gather feedback from a targeted consumer in near real-time.

3. Enterproid: Divide by Enterproid, Qualcomm’s QPrize winner, is software that allows busy professionals to finally start using their personal phone for business needs. Unfortunately, many of the Web 2.0 tools people use on their personal phones are not backed by corporate IT, and security compliances prohibit the use of many apps and features you would like to use in a professional setting. To resolve this issue, Enterproid adds an entire, separate enterprise section to your phone, which contains its own email, calendar, contacts, messaging and browser apps that encrypts — and can securely access — all your corporate data.

   The Enterproid apps appear as a separate home screen, yet enables both your enterprise and personal homescreens to be aware of each other, alerting you if you receive a personal email while in the enterprise section, for example. Enterproid also offers a set of rules that can be accessed by the corporate IT department, allowing IT to change security setting and shut off access to a particular app when worried about security issues. Though VMWare is planning a virtualization platform that allows a user to have two profiles on an Android phone, Enterproid’s platform is likely to be very appealing for small businesses, especially in terms of cost optimization, as employees can now keep their personal phones for business.

4. Live.pro: Television is, by nature, a social experience, often enjoyed in the company of friends and family. However, social television technologies have by-and-large failed to take off, seemingly launching before the average TV viewer is ready for them. eLive Entertainment applies social technology to the Web with a free site that allows you to show videos from YouTube and other video sites to your friends, while encouraging interaction and commenting on what you’re watching.

   Users can pull in videos and annotate them with voice-overs, drawing mark-ups, or add typed comments in a dialogue box. Videos can be slowed down to enable this annotation, made into links that can later be shared, stored on-demand, watched simultaneously, and synced with Facebook, Twitter, and Google. While it may still be too early for a social TV solution to gain mainstream adoption, enabling an interactive and social viewing experience on the Web is a very appealing idea.

5. HeyStaks: Many in the tech industry and beyond have become disillusioned with the current state of search. Content farms litter search with annoying links, with seemingly little being done to disrupt search as Google did when it first hit the Web. Heystaks, a new search startup, hopes to be a part of the evolution by making search social — and not simply by searching social data, like Tweets and photos, as others have done, but by using your social community to drive better results.

   HeyStaks uses a comprehensive back-end social search algorithm to drive highly relevant community filtered recommendations. The idea was developed over a number of years by group of scientists in Ireland and is now teamed up with Jonathan Dillon, former VP of M&A/Integration at Yahoo!. Dillon was part of the team that acquired Delicious, which offered a scaled-down (and relatively unsuccessful) version of Heystaks beginning in 2005. Part of the reason it didn’t take off, according to Dillon, was that social graphs and networks were not yet as pervasive as they are today.

   HeyStaks hopes to leverage the now more mature social graphs and collaboration technologies not by becoming a search engine, but by improving your Google and Bing results through the addition of community-sourced content to the top of those pages. To target those with a common goal or shared interests to better parse results, users can create “search staks”, or collections of the best Web pages from a group of users on a particular topic. These “staks” can be made public and easily shared with colleagues and friends via email, Twitter, or kept private or shared on an invite-only basis. Heystaks currently offers an iPhone app, a Firefox plug-in, and a Chrome extension still in alpha. I’m not positive that this can work, but the presentation was intriguing. Check it out here.

With the growing influence of Facebook’s social graph, several DEMO startups became advocates for the value of incorporating the social network into both our personal and professional circles. So, for good measure, I’m including a bonus: Two startups that caught my attention for how they’re attempting to improve upon the Facebook experience — both at home and at work.

6. FetchFans is a social media design engine that allows businesses to create custom-branded pages on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media in an effort to make them look more professional. FetchFans targets companies with multiple holdings in, say, the form local branches. Specific customer demographics can vary regionally (think real estate companies), so FetchFans offers ten specially designed Facebook page templates branded to the parent company, which localized representatives can choose from and modify according to their particular needs. Targeted at social e-commerce with add-ons like chat, photos, video, and real-time lead generation, this service looks like a great way to improve upon the somewhat underwhelming state of business profiles on today’s social networks.
7. Pixable’s Photofeed is a free application for the iPad that provides curated, personalized streams of photos, like “top photos of the day”, displaying them in a full-size, one-touch, swipe-through format. During their demo, the startup said that there are 60 billion photos on Facebook and 5 billion photos are added each month, making it difficult to sort through them all to find what you’re looking for.

   Pixable’s WonderRank technology, which reminds me of Pandora’s Music Genome, takes your friends’ photos and analyzes the metadata associated with the photos (think “likes” and comments) to create combined and categorized viewing, as well as an easier way to rank and discover new photos. The app also allows you to like, comment, or tag photos, follow your closest friends, and receive alerts when they upload new photos. Knowing the importance of photos to Facebook’s overall success (and evolution), I wonder if Pixable could become a potential target for acquisition? We’ll see.

Check out Day 1 coverage here.

Photo Credit: Rodrigo Pena

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

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.

Originally, Mintz said, Bump was conceived as a “replacement for business cards” and had more “serious” contexts in mind, but when they began to see that Bump was being used to share more than just CV data, they began adapting. Contact sharing remains at the core of Bump’s business, but Mintz said that, in the last year, many users have come to Bump as a way to share photos, and maximizing the value of both aspects of their mobile business has been “a delicate balance”.

Somewhat serendipitously, Bump went to Marc Andreesen, Ben Horowitz, and John O’Farrell for advice on how to grow the business, although they were not looking for investment at the time. Mintz said that the partners later came to them saying they would like to invest in spite of Bump’s reluctancy to raise additional funding. So, in January, Andreessen Horrowitz invested a sizable $16.5 million in Bump, with Andreessen joining Bump’s board.

When asked what they wanted to do with so much money, Mintz said that it would be used primarily to hire designers and developers, indicating that, as Andreessen had said to him, there will be multiple social networks in the future — beyond Facebook — and the team wants to build a social technology that “interfaces with the real world.”

It remains to be seen, he said, whether Facebook would eventually become a competitor for Bump, but today they continue to collaborate and make strides in areas that Facebook does not yet control.

Part of this growth, Mintz said, is from recognizing the important element of user experience. Bump remains determined not fall victim to spamming its users with notifications: “We all know apps can also be used as a tool for evil — an app that will send you a push notification every 15 minutes,” he said. “Some apps have used that mechanic and grown very quickly, and you have this really powerful opportunity to be a part of someone’s life — but in the long-term you have to focus on the user experience.”

Early Bump incarnations essentially allowed customers to download and begin using immediately without having to register or specify user settings. And while this approach worked initially and avoided breakage, a few core features went unused, because the app didn’t guide its users through a setup process, Mintz said.

The Bump team is now looking to add a short registration process and tutorial that will offer detailed instructions and walk users through how to optimize the niche features that will be arriving later this year. As to what to expect from Bump’s future additions, Mintz added, “if your vision involves finding the best and easiest ways to use a smartphone in the real world, we know that our users might walk into store and want to interact with a brand, or interact with a product, and we want to ask ‘how do we facilitate our growth around that?’”

Keeping an eye on customer experience has worked so far for Bump, as Mintz said that the application has become the eighth-most downloaded app on the Apple App store, attracting 8 million active monthly users, and 27 million downloads. Not too shabby.

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).

Now, there is nothing wrong with getting your ideas down on paper or paper prototypes to work out the kinks before you start coding. But you might want to wait until you have an actual working app on an iPhone before testing it out in the wild and asking for feedback from normal people. To be fair, Bhakta was only following his assignment, which was to make a paper prototype of an app that could enhance the experience of standing in line and test it on potential users. So I blame his professor for sending him on this hapless mission. (There is really no way to test an iPhone app on paper, the buttons don’t do anything). The best part: the course is called “Introduction to Human-Computer Interaction Design.” I didn’t want to break it to him, but he was missing the computer part.

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:

Parallels Definitely the darling of DEMO, the already established Parallels chose Santa Clara to launch its Parallels Desktop 6/Parallels Desktop 6 for Mac app which allows people to use their iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch in order to remotely access Windows applications running on a Mac. You know what this means? Yes, Flash and printing, on an iPad, Uh huh, that’s right.

IQ Engines This startup’s Any Image Recognition Engine is a visual search engine that uses both an exact and category algorithm as well as crowdsourcing in order to tag any image you throw at it with a relevant label. Attempting to one up Google Goggles, IQ Engines aims to provide accurate and comprehensive image intelligence services to shopping applications, web publishers, photo labeling applications, as well as tools for the visually impaired.

Range Networks Open BTS’ Range Networks aim is pretty noble, to provide low cost web connected cell phones to everyone on the planet using scalable mobile infrastructure. Founded by Glenn Edens, the startup uses GSM technology which allows people to route calls over the Internet. And, not having to send as much info through expensive landlines, Range Networks holds that it can set up cell phone plans for $2 to $3 a month. Heard of them before? They’re the ones that built all the open source VoIP stuff for Burning Man.

Dynamics Dynamics (see photos above) is a credit cards payments system that is attempting to disrupt current payment system practices in order to to create “Card 2.0.”  A Dynamics card looks like a normal credit card but is in fact a thin flexible computing platform, which allows for both a programmable multi-account and a “hidden” functionality, preventing theft as well as increasing convenience as you get to choose what “card” you use.

Bump Ever wish you could send really mean texts to someone who had blocked your driveway, getting them to respond and perhaps even move their car? You’re one step closer with the BUMPME iPhone app, which allows users who don’t know each other to to send and receive messages to each other through unique identifiers, like license plates.

Particle Particle is an integrated development environment (like OpenPlug) which lets developers to translate one mobile app into the native language of another app, enabling programmers who write in Java to develop apps for the iPhone (in Objective-C) and vice versa, switching through what used to be incompatible platforms with ease.

Footfeed Like Check.in, Footfeed tries to eliminate Checkin fatigue by aggregating checkins from Foursquare, Facebook, Gowalla, Britekite and Twitter but, unlike Check.in, Footfeed’s got an iPhone app where you can still reap the benefits of cross platform mayorships, points, deals, tokens or whatever the kids are doing these days on the go! It’s about time.

Sonyhas 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.”

So, let’s say you’re playing a racing game demo—you have all the cars and tracks available to your. After one race, now you only have half the number of cars and tracks to select from. After the next race, half that number, and so on.

Neat, right? One thing that could be an issue, today’s demos are typically fairly small in size, so if these new demos are to includes much more content, that would increase the size of the download. That might be an issue if you have a smaller hard drive, or slower Internet connection, but otherwise, yeah, let’s beat the beat up.

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.

To quote from our previous coverage of Liaise:

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 (these are the KeyPoints). 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.

Previously, Liaise only worked with desktop clients, but hoped to expand into the mobile market. Today, they have done just that. Now, utilizing Microsoft Outlook’s synchronization process, users are able to see their KeyPoints directly on their iPhone, BlackBerry, or with any other device that supports an Outlook-enabled calendar.

Liaise has also upgraded the interface of their application. When a team used Liaise to collaborate before, users would have to individually update their to-do list. With the addition of Team Services however, they no longer have to send new emails to each other to update the status of shared action items or issues. Instead, these updates are automatically synchronized when completed (or not) through each user’s calendar, simplifying the process.

The product now gives users the ability to hide KeyPoints from the individual they are emailing. This is beneficial because it allows Liaise users to check up on their subordinates without making it seem obtrusive. Thus, end users get the tasks assigned to them, and Liaise users are constantly appraised of their progress without seeming like they are micromanaging.

Liaise is sticking to their original price point and will be charging between $4.95-9.95 per user, per month when the beta is completed. Liaise is headquartered in Sunnyvale and has received an undisclosed amount of Series A funding from Southern Cross Venture Partners.

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.

Liaise currently works as a plug-in for Microsoft Outlook, but their CEO Sidney Minassian said that he hopes to create a product for Gmail and is focusing on the mobile market next.

The product is best utilized when all members of a team have Liaise installed, but it still has its advantages even when others do not use it. If you send an email with Liaise installed to someone with Gmail for instance, the email will be displayed as a regular email to them but the information is still put into a to-do list on your end for your reference. Also, emails which are sent to you from non-Liaise based emails will be analyzed in Outlook and a to-do list will be populated. When all users on a project have Liaise installed, the team is able to synchronize the to-do lists and keep track of the projects in real-time.

Liaise is entering quite a crowded market. They state that their competitors include anyone in the collaboration space. Products such as Sharepoint, and companies like Salesforce have a marked advantage as they provide similar collaboration tools as well as having a formidable user base.

Based in Sunnyvale California, Liaise has received a round of funding from Southern Cross Venture Partners. They are currently in a free limited Beta, but plan to price their services at $4.95-$9.95 per person, per month once they go live.

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.

The best feature is the “Sleaze Detector”. Basically, this takes the information you collected and does a background check on the person to see if they have a criminal record. This works by current or previous registered addresses that the person has. You can also check out a person’s net worth, their living situation (are they living with their parents), as well as get the usual range of information from Facebook, Twitter, etc.

Unfortunately, though Intelius didn’t really mention it on stage, obtaining all of this information costs money, as TechFlash notes. For example, a criminal check is $19.95. Pulling social network info? $9.95. So while the app itself may be free, the service is anything but.

All of this is more than slightly creepy, but with tag lines like “hook up before you look up” it was an easy crowd favorite at DEMO. Unfortunately, Intelius, and its co-founder Naveen Jain, have a bit of a sketchy history, including allegations of fraud. Jain, who left InfoSpace to start Intelius, was said to be buried in lawsuits back in March, and the company was looking like it could be in trouble.

Have things turned around for Intelius? Will a hooking up app save them? In a world where a sex offender finder app was a hit, it seems like this certainly could be. But the extra costs will likely kill it. Hopefully, Intelius is up front about these costs unlike it has been in the past.

I also hope people don’t try to go to do a Google search for “datecheck” — the first result is an “Escort Directory of Female MILF Escorts.”

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.

Press release

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.

[PSGallery=4oe36ocm18]

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.

And here Marshall has an uphill battle to climb because DEMO charges presenting companies nearly $20,000 to attend (in contrast, presenting companies at TechCrunch 50 are selected on merit and attend for free). Maybe IDG is giving discounts this year, but in this economy that is a tough sell. At least Marshall says he is willing to re-assess the model if need be:

We are going to bring fresh eyes to this and are reviewing it. We are going to do what it takes to keep this brand’s integrity

But convincing IDG to change its economic model won’t be easy. I think Marshall himself realizes this:

This is an organization that has been around since 1991 and has been through ups and downs, and companies have continued to come. These are companies launching real products for a market and the model seems to work. They keep coming back.

So why change it, right? It is fine by us if DEMO sticks to its model of extorting startups.

The one thing Marshall does have going in his favor is his blog. The readers of VentureBeat overlap with the type of people IDG wants to attract to DEMO, and VentureBeat keeps them engaged in conversation all year long. If you want to build a community, blogs are the way to do it. The only time anyone bothers to go to the DEMO Website is during the conferences themselves to watch the free videos that they didn’t want to pay to see in person.

I should note that while VentureBeat competes with TechCrunch every day on the blogging front, it is also a co-host of the Crunchies Awards, another event we put on. So this is just another area where we will have to crush them. It’s called co-opetition.

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.

Simply post in this thread on MLG’s Web site and you’ll automatically be entered into a random drawing for an early access demo code. Code in hand, or at least in your browser’s copy-paste buffer, you’ll be able to play the Halo Wars demo on January 29. That’s this Thursday, so you’ll have a whole weekend to play it.

Twenty five winners will be selected, so the old “many will enter, few will win” mantra applies.

via Kotaku

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?

It’s like this: the demo was released in Japan, and only Japan, last week. It doesn’t have a U.S. release date just yet, so if you’re hankering to play today (and don’t mind dabbing into a gray area that may or may not be piracy) and don’t want to wait around till Capcom officially releases it here, do the following:

1. Go to The Pirate Bay (or your favorite BitTorrent tracker or whatever)

2. Search for the file “Resident Evil 5 Demo For Xbox360” (I don’t think a direct link is allowed, but you can figure it out) and download

3. Unrar the resulting archive. You should end up with a file called “re5_demo.” Move the rar’s out of the directory (00080000) while leaving “re5_demo” there.

4. Burn the “Content” folder as a data disc (not an ISO or anything fancy). I used Disco for Mac OS X.

5. Put that disc (it can be a CD or DVD, doesn’t matter) in your Xbox 360. It’ll show up as “mixed media” in the menu.

6. Select your game demos tab (Game Library in the NXE) and you should see the demo there.

7. Play!

(If you’re someone who needs photos for this type of thing, this site has a few that may help.)

Like I said in our podcast, I played the game no problem earlier today, and my Xbox 360 isn’t modded at all. If you liked Resident Evil 4—who didn’t?—you’ll probably like Resident Evil 5.

The game is scheduled for release in North America on March 13, 2009.

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.

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.

LucasArts announced today that they will release the official demo of their upcoming action game Fracture on Xbox Live Marketplace and PlayStation Network on Thursday, September 18. The demo will introduce players to the revolutionary gameplay behind Terrain Deformation, a key gameplay mechanic that allows for the dynamic creation of on-the-fly cover and geographic manipulation.

Developed in partnership with Chicago-based Day 1 Studios, Fracture takes place in the year 2161 in a United States plagued by disaster. Years of environmental neglect have split the nation in two and resulted in two conflicting ways of life. Survivors of the Atlantic Alliance have turned to cybernetics and technology, while the Pacifican States in the West have turned to stem cell research and genetic engineering for a better way of life. These two conflicting ideologies come to a head in a deadly civil war for not only the fate of the free world, but also the future of mankind itself.

Utilize the power of Terrain Deformation to create cover, solve puzzles and revolutionize battlefield tactics as you guide Atlantic Alliance soldier Jet Brody in his quest to quell the Pacifican uprising through an exciting single player campaign that begins in the now-dried-out San Francisco bay, and traverses the ravaged country.

When the game ships to retail you will also be able to test your mettle in over-the-top multiplayer modes where nonstop action meet Terrain Deformation for brutal 12-player battles in modes specifically built for Fracture and TD technology.

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.

The N96 – which is similar to the N95 but is one more better – has finally gotten its own special Flash-based web-tour. It goes into all the dirty details regarding GPS, music playback, and Internet browsing but sadly leaves out the cool bloopy music we’re used to when we see these sorts of tours.

Nothing amazingly exciting but if you’re a Nokiard you might get a kick out of it.