Demo 06 to launch 68 startups

Demo 06, the place where startups meet investors, got off to a very cold and unusual start on Tuesday morning, when MooBella demonstrated an ice cream maker in a vending machine.

With a promised launch in Boston later this year, the company claimed its right to be at the 16-year-old gathering of high-tech innovators by running the ice cream maker on Linux. But the real fun of the device was in its ability to make a fully customizable ice cream in 90 different combinations, from full fat to low fat, with myriad flavors and add-ins, in about 90 seconds.

The system actually makes the ice from aeration to mixing once the customer orders.

The business model, according to Bruce Ginsberg, president of MooBella, is to sell vending machines to retail outlets like Starbucks.

“Starbucks can become the largest ice cream retailer overnight,” said Ginsberg. For now, however, the company is looking for funding to build all of those ice cream vending machines.

Returning to what are more typical Demo topics, Grass Roots Software presented Freepath, a Microsoft PowerPoint-like application that allows users to import files that PowerPoint cannot.

A presentation is built by importing audio, video, Web site URLs, and PDFs, for example, in addition to the typical Word and Excel files.

By dragging and dropping file windows, a presenter can also change the order of a presentation on the fly. The length of video files is determined by clicking on the beginning of the file and clicking again to determine the endpoint of the video.

Presentation software on a small scale was demoed by Digislide, a company headquartered in Sydney, Australia. They offer a miniaturized projection system that can be used to project files from a mobile device onto any surface with an 11-by-17-inch image. Scheduled for release late in 2006, the beta version hardware measures 1.5 inches by .5-inch square, with a 20 percent size reduction expected by its release date so it can fit inside most handheld devices. No peripheral devices are required. Images are projected from the mobile unit in which it is installed.

Profits, not presentations, was the main topic from Multiverse Networks, an online, gaming development platform for the MMOG [massively multi-player online game] market.

According to Robin McCollum, a co-founder at Multiverse Networks, the most popular MMOG at present is World of Warcraft, with 5.5 million subscribers paying $15 each to play, bringing in revenues of approximately $1 billion.

However, the game cost upwards of $55 million to create. Multiverse’s goal is to dramatically reduce the cost of developing MMOGs by giving developers a platform with built-in templates and import capabilities that will reduce development time and the number of developers needed to create an MMOG.

Demonstrated on stage, for example, was a terrain generator with a height map editor that can instantly create mountain ranges and plains, while another tool allows developers to place objects in the environment by importing files created by the most popular 3-D modeling tools.

Perhaps it was the revenue figures and not the technology that enticed James Cameron, creator of the movie “Titanic,” to become a member of its board of advisors.

One of the original online high-tech news providers was also at the show. The CNET Channel took the stage to debut its cross-sell technology and database for online e-tailers.

CNET has collected data on approximately 2 million consumer electronic products, which it is now combining with a rules-based engine to allow retailers to offer their customers a better way to cross-sell products.

Typical online commerce sites, for instance, will offer a customer buying a notebook PC additional memory, even when a system comes installed with 1GB of RAM. Using the rules-based engine, CNET’s Intelligent Cross-Sell application allows e-tailers to create more targeted opportunities, such as a wireless travel mouse.

So confident are CNET executives that the application will improve sales, CNET’s business model is based on a pay-for-improved-sales-performance fee structure.

Meanwhile, if computer troubleshooting is a major pain point for a company, Network Streaming says it has the solution with a 1U rack-mounted appliance for remote control of user desktops to resolve trouble tickets.

In total, there were 17 products, both consumer and enterprise, presented in the morning session, with more promised for later in the day.