Demo spotlights innovation

Daring challenges to traditional technology are expected at Demo 2004.

The annual high-tech showcase for hardware and software products will see Evermore Software, a China-based software company, unveil an integrated productivity application targeted directly at Microsoft Office users. EIO (Evermore Integrated Office) uses a single file format for all its productivity components, which include word processing, spreadsheet, business graphics, and presentation. Using its patent-pending Data Object Oriented Repository System, the application lets users link and paste components with a single keystroke.

EIO will be available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X and will ship in April.

AllenPort, meanwhile, will launch a desktop with ATM ease-of-use aimed at both Windows PC and Mac users. The AllenPort combines desktoplike hardware with a subscription service based on open source OSes and applications such as Star Office for productivity and Ximian for e-mail.

After the AllenPort is installed, users can gain access to the service via any computing device.

“The service is what simplifies the computing. It eliminates viruses, passwords, software updates, remote access, and security,” said Joel Allen, president and founder of AllenPort.

For IT, Above All Software is leveraging APIs and Web services standards to allow users to query multiple applications and to build composite applications on the fly.

“Web services makes it a simpler model to send XML input and get XML output back,” said Roger Sipple, CEO and founder of Above All Software.

Mainsoft — an ISV whose primary application, Visual MainWin, is already used to port the Visual .Net development environment to Unix — will launch Visual MainWin for J2EE. The application will allow both C# and Visual Basic .Net programmers to write in their current environment and run .Net-created applications on J2EE application servers.

Openwave Systems will use Demo to unveil Openwave Edge Gx, a security product that promises to stop spam and viruses before they get into the network.

Edge Gx is targeted at operators who up until now have been using little more than free network filters such as Spam Assassin to stop unwanted attacks, said Rich Wong, general manager of messaging and anti-abuse at Openwave.

Openwave Edge Gx will deploy a number of sophisticated operations including “network tarpitting” and “receipt to harvester.” Network tarpitting drops connections from potential attackers when it identifies numerous incorrect attempts to find user names, and receipt to harvester limits the number of connections a single entity is allowed to make to a network.