Demo, Day 1

I don't have too much to report from the first day of Demo 2006, because I'm bushed from staying up late making sure Kosmix was working properly.  I arrived here around 4:00 MST dying to check my e-mail; but the Wayport network at the resort had ground to a halt, probably because they're not used to servicing a couple hundred bandwidth-hungry geeks.  Eventually, I got enough of the pipe to check the site and write a blog post, but the network is still spotty and slow.

The only Demo event tonight was the Welcome Reception.  I met a couple of interesting people, though I only have time for an elevator pitch right now:

• Zingee - an Australian-based company, who claims they've traveled the furthest to get to Demo.  They allow you to share files from your computer, without any uploads.  A neat way to preserve your privacy!
• SimpleFeed - they're trying to help companies commercialize RSS feeds.  They have all sorts of neat features, like the ability to customize the look-and-feel of feeds, making feeds look nice (instead of those nasty XML screens), advanced per-user tracking, and more.
• RawSugar - I definitely need to look into these folks more.  They do tagging, but they were also telling me how you can use your tags to set up some kind of taxonomy/directory.  As someone who is interested in the connection between folksonomies and taxonomies. . .
• Panoratio - a spin off from Siemens research (das alles ist Deutschland!), these guys claim that they can get lossless compression up to 1:1000.  Of course, only with limited data sets, but they said they're gonna compress 30GB of data on a laptop with 256MB of memory.  I want to see that demo!

Most exciting was that I was interviewed for a PodCast by John Furrier at PodTech.net.  I'll let y'all know as soon as it comes out!

Comments

[Ofer Ben-Shachar]

Good observations about RawSugar. Check out www.sprol.com and see how he uses RawSugar to provide topic navigation to his blog. See the topic box on the top right. Check for another example at: www.rawsugar.com/links/web2point0 and see the navigation you get for a collection of webpages about web 2.0. This is very easy to do with RawSugar and is achieved by tagging (or import from delicious, wordpress, etc) adding hierarchy relationship between tags and RawSugar algorithms do the rest. If you have any questions send me email.