Inside DEMOfall 08

It's quite jarring and must be a startup thing. Many of the conference participants launched products and/or companies at the conference, which concludes today in San Diego.

I had walked about 2 feet into the vendor pavilion before a young woman approached, put her hand on my shoulder and said, "Hello, Joe. What do you cover for eWEEK?"

GOT A TIP OR RUMOR?

WTH? Did she have laser surgery to create eagle eyes? Because she had to read my name tag from about 20 feet away before approaching me. As soon as she completed the demonstration, a PR person from another company grabbed me for yet another presentation.

Surprisingly, or perhaps not, many of the most aggressive PR people worked for companies presenting during DEMOfall's afternoon session. I don't mean to be critical, by the way. Their determination was commendable, and I respect the effort. Besides, I refuse to use the F word to describe PR professionals, as I know many other journalists do.

DEMO Does the Enterprise
The afternoon presentations were products for businesses.

Quantivo has technology that, if it works as promised, is the Holy Grail for business intelligence. Near as I can tell, Quantivo is able to process unstructured data and gain meaningful analysis from it. I got a much better demo at the Quantivo booth than was given onstage.

The company claims to be able take data from pretty much any source, analyze it and derive trends. Quantivo executives understand that most enterprises won't just chuck BI solutions for which they invested millions of dollars; the service is designed to complement installed solutions. During the demo presentation, I was told how the software/service can detect trends that are unintuitive, such as that people buying diapers also buy beer.

There are many shortcomings to the traditional, structured database approach. Example: A business doesn't know what question to ask to get the answer about a business trend. If the business knew the answer it could ask the question.

Microsoft is hot-and-heavily into BI solutions, but the company is constrained by structured data. Microsoft managers don't like to talk about this limitation, as I've learned from interviews trying to get them to discuss structured versus unstructured data analysis. I heard this afternoon at the Quantivo booth that three different people from Microsoft stopped by asking about partnering.

Momindum's North American CEO gave me a much better demo at the booth than the company presented on stage this afternoon. At Deeptagging.com, Momindum offers a service for tagging videos. Near as I could understand, the service allows simple keyword tagging of videos. It's an exciting concept, searching for a keyword and jumping to the portion of the video tagged by that word.

From the demo, it wasn't 100 percent clear to me how automated the tagging process is. Momindum provides keywords, which can be customized. Unless I misunderstood, the tagging requires some kind of accompanying text, such as a transcript. Too bad, if true. Momindum pitches the service for training and educational purposes.

BizEquity didn't pitch me at the vendor pavilion, but someone from the company sat at my table during lunch. The service helps small businesses determine their value. BizEquity claims that the value of U.S. small businesses is $5.9 trillion compared with $3.9 trillion for publicly traded companies on Nasdaq.

Infovell is research for people that find search to be inadequate. Infovell claims that search engines like Google only index about 1 percent of Web pages. Infovell says it gets the rest. Both claims are quite bold. The service isn't available until Sept. 22, so I can't test it yet.

When I think of Microsoft and some of its broader search goals, Infovell is a company worth looking at for Microsoft as a partner, at least.

A Refreshing Break
It's not often I get to cover events that aren't directly related to Microsoft. DEMOfall was refreshing because many of the participants are newer companies. They're young, hungry and anxious. They want to succeed. That explains why the PR folks all but formed a line to lead me from booth to booth. Even the smallest news story could be hugely beneficial to them. Many of these companies need funding, too.

Over lunch, I spoke with Koollage CEO Mythili Sankaran about her decision to attend DEMOfall. She could have gone to TechCrunch50, which also is going on the week of Sept. 8. Mythili said the TechCrunch conference probably would have exposed her startup to more venture capitalists. But she chose DEMOfall because of better, broader exposure. Koollage got it, she said.

Back to the afternoon session. Microsoft technical evangelist Jon Udell got put on the spot in the worst possible way. In the mother of all loaded questions, he was asked if the Web was evolving into a kind of human brain for which Google was the platform. Jon squirmed but answered, "I don't think one entity will control the global mind."

Good answer. He probably saved three Microsoft PR people from having heart attacks.

[Please send your tips or rumors to watchtips at live.com]