Demo Fall gives six minutes of fame

Hope springs eternal, as this year’s Demo Fall 2005 conference proves. For the 16th consecutive year, high-tech innovators will get six minutes in the spotlight to entice an audience of venture capitalists and established tech vendors into investing in their new technology.

Startups and established companies this week will introduce more than 60 new products.

For the enterprise, The SCO Group will introduce Me Inc., a platform for creating digital services on smart phones. SCO’s technology differentiator for the mobile market is edge server middleware that allows users to off-load code and data from the end point.

“The edge processor does proxy processing and storage, taking it away from the end point [handset] device, which improves security and performance,” said Chris Sontag, senior vice president and general manager at SCO.

Cell phone services appear to be an attractive market for developers with startup company ACIN Technology Center, which is introducing Smarter Agent Wireless Location Aware Real Estate Search.

ACIN CEO Brad Blumberg said real estate is a $1 trillion industry and his company has the perfect product: a location-based service using built-in cell phone capabilities that allows agents, buyers, first responders, appraisers, and insurers to download home and building information based on the location of the user.

NextPage will launch Version 2 of its subscription service for document collaboration, adding team view capabilities. The NextPage service is somewhat of a Global Positioning System for documents, too, using metadata pointers to track Word, PowerPoint, or Excel files whether they’re in an e-mail, on a hard drive, or on a shared drive.

TrueLab, from Hatsize Learning, uses the utility computing concept and VMware (Virtual Machine) to dynamically allocate computer resources for technology training and education.

“We can build up and bring down virtual machines for just-in-time training,” said Dean Hardy, Hatsize president and co-founder.

The results mean that the same set of servers could serve up round-the-clock, worldwide applications, reconfiguring the service for different needs and locations.