My DemoGod selections

Dinner starts in a few minutes and the Academy of Demo God selection, using their mysterious and occasionally controversial criteria will be announcing their selections for DEMO God. The following are my picks.  They are based on hallway buzz, more than my personal picks.  I have eliminated any companies with whom I have worked for this conference or previously.

Some of these were not my personal favorites. Ahem the envelopes please:

1.  Blinkx.com, the last presenter today is a video search engine. More than the technology, they were helped by an extremely funny, yet articulate presentation by CTO Surango Chandratillake.

2 eJamming. This was yesterday's closer and it ended the day on a high not, probbly a G sharp.  This is the music collaboration company with the singing CEO.

3.Jaman. This is one of the companies with cool technology. It is a community play for people who would like to see award winning cinema that never made it into commercial distribution. I wonder how many people will really be willing to pay to buy or rent these selections, which I'm sure are works of some great unknown artists.
4. Magnify.net.  This is an extremely cool search engine for citizen generated online videos. CEO Beth Temple is among my favorite new people.  It was among the most mentioned companies I heard about.

5.  D'Fusion is a virtual reality advertising company who gave the best demo I ever saw a couple of years back. Two-third's of this years Demo hit glitches.  The remainder drew enough oohs and ahs to make them a winner and the stuff worked beautifully at their DEMO station.

6. Vuvox is service that lets users very simply tell their stories online by aggregate their multimedia doigital content. They willprobably compete with my client Scrapblogs but they seem to be a people's choice at this conference.

7. ZINK, the paperless portable, unless photo printing device was clearly the floor favorite from what i could make out. If they don't get named a god, I will demand a recount.

Comments

[kent]

Did the eJamming people mention that it is for MIDI devices only? So that excludes 99.999% of all guitars, basses, and drums...

I was all interested when I saw the site a while back, until I saw that requirement. Call me again when it is full audio data, not just MIDI.

[Kathy Sierra]

The technology for adding a midi pickup to a guitar has come a long way, and is (relatively) inexpensive... $200 or something like that. So, a guitar retrofit is pretty easy (and soooo much fun), and given that guitars are probably what most people would be using eJamming for, I don't think this is the big problem.

Latency, on the other hand, has got to be a HUGE issue, and I'm going to stay extremely skeptical until I have more evidence that musicians can adjust and believe it's worth it. The eJamming folks claim that musicians quickly adjust, but this conflicts with what most of us have experienced when using virtual instruments on our own machines. (I don't buy into their claim that jamming musicians make these adjustments all the time... differences are not the same as delays)

But the company has some evidence that people do adjust, and at some point in the future when latency is sufficiently reduced, online jamming will be fantastic. So, I'll be interested to see how this really plays out, and I do believe it's just a matter of time.

[shel israel]

I cannot speak to the MIDI issue, but at the booth I was told that there is no latency problem provided there is at least a broadband speed of over 400. I was told the wider the pipe the better, but most of us have over 400 most of the time.