Demo update – the tech keeps getting better

I’m here in Palm Desert at Demo 07 conference.

If you don’t know what that is go to this Demo link and you’ll find out.

If you want to see the slide show of Demo click here.

And here is the offical Demo blog site.

In a nutshell though it’s where startups present their technology in the hopes of attracting investors.

What’s good about the show is there are none of those boring panel discussions where everybody ends up agreeing with each other instead of disagreeing, arguing and calling each other names like they should be doing.

What is also good about the show is you get to see some interesting tech stuff.

Here’s a few of the things I’ve seen so far that haven’t been written about yet.

Dave from Seagate Technology is a hard drive about the size of a business card that stores 10GB or 20GB.

But what makes it interesting is that it also includes a USB port, Wi-Fi , Bluetooth and an application processor running at 2.7GHz.

Now the possibilities get more interesting.

Add to that embedded Linux as an OS and it gets even better.

Targeted at cell phone users the idea is you can use this lightweight hard drive for storage and backup, voice, video music and pictures.

But with Linux and the processor you might also have developers write programs that can be stored on the drive and downloaded to wherever.

It reminds me of the old Brick concept where it was promised that someday you would havde a single, portable small device you carried around with you and when you arrive at a location with a monitor and keyboard available you just plug it in and it becomes your personal computer.

Then there’s Charlie Crystal, CEO of SalesWorks who has the audacity to call software as a service, SaaS, old school.

“Anytime you get religious about a technology you lose,” says Crystal. He’s probably right.

SalesWorks offers an alternative to SaaS that Crystal calls a hybrid application. It sits partly on the desktop and partly on the Web.

If you want a mashup you might take your customer database from the desktop and mash it with Google maps, for example, or you might mash you customer database with Dun & Bradstreet ratings.

Any if you work for a really old school publication, something I think they used to call a newspaper, ThePort technology helps the old school get hip.

Calling themselves online social media software, ThePort was recently hired by the Atlanta Constitution to stop the bleeding, probably more like hemorrhaging of readers to more enticing Web Web sites.

Now the Constition offers a blog site with user profiles ala MySpace and affinity groups, becoming blog central for American Idol fans to talk to each other and comment.

Finally, two enterprise level applications targeted at troubleshooting, predicting and preventing problems in enterprise applications from Integrien and Triumfant.

Integrien’s Alive 5.5 helps network managers create profiles of past problems and uses that profile for pattern recognition in preventing a second occurrence.

Triumfant Resolutoin Manager diagnoses and fixes a number of system problems.

Three of the most common problems are breaking a business application by deleting files, either accidentally or by a faulty install process; deploying an incorrect option from a program such as deploying the option in Outlook that permanently deletes junk email instead of saving it to a junk email folder; and installing an undesirable application.

Resolution Manager builds on an initial reference model based on scanning over 200,000 data points per computer on a network.

Once a baseline has been established it looks for aberrant data by collecting data rather than reacting to the problem after the fact. The system compares every computer to every other computer to see what is normal.

As a result it can detect an unexpected file and an unexpected process and with one click the process dies and the file gets deleted.

As far as the Outlook problem, it can uncover an unexpected value according to the corporate option selected, so it can restore the expected value, in this case save junk in junk email folder.

Finally it fixes faulty application installations by finding a donor machine and finds missing files and ports them over from donor machine.

That’s it. It’s time to go back to the presentations. I’ll report back again soon.