Demofall: Security, PC-sharing, nanotechnology touted

San Diego — An anti-botnet appliance, PC-sharing, and codeless application development were featured technologies at the Demofall 2006 conference Wednesday, with a multitude of hopefuls vying to provide the next industry-changing innovations.

A myriad of offerings in the security, application development, and virtualization areas were covered as attendees gained insight into the use of nanotechnology to improve computer storage.

Trend Micro, which unlike most other Demofall exhibitors has been around for many years, showed its InterCloud Security Service, which features an appliance and a service to combat botnets, which compromise security to gather confidential information.

“We’re here today because security threats on the Internet are growing faster than ever before,” said Dave Rand, CTO at Trend Micro. “The main objective of these threats? Profit. The main cause? Botnets.”

NComputing, meanwhile, pitched its technology for PC-sharing via the use of terminals. “We expand the market by allowing [any] modern PC to be shared by multiple users at an incredibly low cost,” said Stephen Dukker, chairman and CEO of nComputing.

The company offers PCI- and Ethernet-based devices to enable sharing of PCs and servers.

On the application development front, BriteSoft touted its system for configuring applications rather than coding them. “The software industry is at a crisis,” said Fazel Naghshineh, CEO of BriteSoft. “Four-hundred billion dollars are spent annually on software development,” with billions wasted on canceled projects, he said.

He cited code-centric development as the problem, with developers having to choose from a multitude of coding platforms such as Java or Hibernate. BriteSoft, however, offers its BriteWorks system in which templates, a drag-and-drop paradigm, and an objects library are used to assemble applications quickly.

“You can develop applications without writing a single line of code,” Naghshineh said.

Widgetbox demonstrated its self-named online directory of Web widgets for use in blogs and Web pages.

“Widgets are hard to build, they’re hard to find, and they’re hard to use, and Widgetbox aims to solve that,” said Ed Anuff, president and CEO of Widgetbox. The Diggs RSS Viewer was cited as the most popular widget available from Widgetbox.

Meanwhile, an IBM executive touted the potential capabilities of nanotechnology in storage devices. “Nanotechnology is going to affect that in a very dramatic way,” said Gian-Luca Bona, department group manager of Science & Technology at IBM’s Almaden Research Center, in San Jose, Calif.

One idea being considered for building devices as small as five-by-five nanometers involves the concept of using DNA-based molecular strands, Bona said. “It’s all about scaling the technology to smaller and smaller area sizes,” reducing costs and increasing performance, he said.

Research is being done on scaling down storage devices but obstacles remain in atomic-based developments, according to Bona. But devices are being sought that are faster than today’s flash or hard disk drives. “We’re talking about 1 million instructions per second that you want to retrieve information out of a device that is non-volatile,” which means it holds onto information when turned off, Bona said.

Also in security, Data Security Systems Solutions showed its OTPK (One Time Private Key) online digital signature technology enabling secure transactions via handheld devices.

“When was the last time you saw a digital signature on a mobile phone that’s legally binding?” said Tan Teik Guan, CEO and CTO of the company.

Imaginestics demonstrated its 3DSeek search site that enables users to doodle diagrams of component parts they need but cannot describe in words. A user, for example, could sketch a metal bracket and the site would retrieve items that resemble that drawing.

PostPath unveiled version 2.0 of its PostPath Server, providing a Linux-based alternative to Microsoft Exchange. The new version features an AJAX-based (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) Web client.

“We’re so compatible that Outlook thinks it’s talking to Exchange. Really, it’s talking to PostPath,” said Duncan Greatwood, CEO of PostPath.

Teneros added disaster recovery support to its “e-mail continuity appliance,” called the Teneros Disaster Recovery Appliance for Microsoft Exchange. Trigence touted its application virtualization technology that uses the concept of an application “capsule,” in which a virtual application environment is created with everything needed to run an application elsewhere.

Tuesday afternoon featured one of the more peculiar inventions displayed at the conference. Violet launched its “Smart Rabbit,” called Nabaztag. The rabbit-shaped, interactive device performs a variety of tasks for its owners and connects wireless Internet users with others. Nabaztag can recite text messages and e-mails, monitor the weather, and play M3 and MIDI files.

Responding to commands issued wirelessly or from the Internet, Nabaztag’s mobile ears engage in “ear play,” in which one Nabaztag owner can reposition its ears and the recipient rabbit’s ears then make the same movement.

Moixa Energy on Tuesday presented its new battery technology USBcell, which features batteries that leverage USB ports for recharging.