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Yesterday was the first day of DEMO 2009, and I wasn’t able to spend time liveblogging it. Don’t you hate it when work gets in the way of fun? Well, that won’t happen today, as I’ve cleared my schedule to pay attention to the presentations. Since I did such a poor job covering DEMO yesterday, here’s a quick wrapup of yesterday’s presenters.

BitGravity- BitGravity is the company doing the live online HD broadcast of DEMO 2009, and they’re launching BG LiveBroadcast, which is "the first carrier grade live broadcasting solution, which will make live video pervasive on the web. BG LiveBroadcast is a flash-based streaming service that delivers a simple, robust solution for content providers, with an unmatched user experience." If you want to watch the live broadcast today, go here, and you’ll see LiveBroadcast in action. I am really impressed by the quality and am thankful to BitGravity for giving me the opportunity to watch all the presentations from my apartment instead of having to go to the desert.

Launching Pixetell, a technology that lets people describe and record what’s happening on their screen and email a video message.

Transformyx, Inc.- Announcing Rallypoint, which is “a web-based Crisis Communication and Employee Accountability application. RallyPoint stands in a unique position offering the only “true” inbound and outbound messaging solution.” So what’s that mean? Well, transformyx is a company out of Baton Rouge Louisiana, and the product is a result of the failures during hurricaine Katrina. This is actually really cool, and it’s the kind of product you don’t really think about until after a crisis occurs. Rallypoint is a data/text/voice portal that is an "authenticated communications platform". Think of all the miscommunication during a crisis. Rallypoint attempts to provide accountability by showing who is giving what information. The product is also a remote backup solution.

Vokle describes themselves as a "live web-based, video communication and collaboration platform for individuals and companies to better promote their content through instantaneous word-of-mouth discussions." Everything is user submitted, and it’s like digg/reddit but for products. It’s as if you took the video conferencing aspects of a Stickam and threw that ontop of a social news site. Interesting concept, as most social news sites have their activity based on anonymity. I wonder how people will discuss products when they know that brand managers are watching them, and I wonder how they’ll react when contacted by a brand rep.

Technicopia, LLC- Announced gwabbit, a Microsoft Outlook add-on that finds and adds contacts to your address book. When I see things like this, my knee-jerk reaction is "Ah, it’s just a plugin, and it only works for Outlook. Meh." That’s mainly because I loathe Outlook and don’t use it. But when I’ve been at a job that made me use it, I probably could have used something like this. And hey, there are a LOT of Outlook users out there, so even if gwabbit is used by a small percentage of that userbase, they’ll rake in a ton of dough.

CC:Betty is another email assistant, which reminds me of a product called I Want Sandy, which closed in December of last year. You just cc: Betty@ccbetty.com in your emails, and the service parses your message and saves the contents in an "online mail space".  There are a couple of story lines here. First, resurrecting a service idea that failed very recently makes me wonder: what are they going to do differently than I Want Sandy? Second: their design, naming convention, even the idea that they have a woman’s name as the representative of the service is so reminiscent of IWantSandy that it begs comparisons. This was intentional, right? Finally, I want to know what’s going to happen when every email spammer on the planet CC:s Betty. Will their system be overrun by garbage? I’d love to talk to someone in the company about what they’re doing to combat spam. Anyway, here’s the vid.

Announcing GoView, which is another screen recording/hosting/editing service that lets people to screencasts, demos, etc.

Zuora is launching Z-Commerce for facebook, which allows facebook app developers to charge for their apps on a monthly sub basis.

Document Depository Corporation- Document storage stuff for legal documentation. Sorry, I can’t give you much insight on this one….it’s totally out of my universe.

Home-Account Inc.-  Okay, so this one sounded like a snoozer, but they made me change my mind. I mean, a mortgage buying subscription service doesn’t sound all that mind-blowing, right? But it makes sense. It is a service that constantly is looking out there to find you a better deal. Now that’s useful.

Zipadi- I watched Zipadi’s presentation, and still didn’t really get it. It’s somewhere between print and the web, and allows companies to create web sites using existing materials.

7 Billion People- Announced WebLegend, which dynamically modifies ecommerce pages based on the customer’s buying behavior. Think of it as behavioral targeting inside a shopping cart.

Liquid Media announced Loyal2Me, which is described as "a consumer controlled marketing ecosystem". The vid:

CO2code- another one of the "offset your carbon emissions" companies that tells you the amount of emissions each product has caused.

So, that’s it for the first session. I was going to cover the entire day in one post, but it’s getting too long. The winners in this session:

• Rallypoint gets my award for The Product That Isn’t Very Sexy But Will Actually Do Some Good
• Gwabbit gets my award for The Product That Does One Thing And Actually Has A Business Model
• Home-Account gets my award for The Product That Saves You Money

Filed under: DEMO 2009