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 COLUMN
Wandering Demos Lost in the Desert Every year International Data Group, which also owns InfoWorld, holds a conference called Demo, in Palm Springs, Calif. As the high-tech equivalent of a debutante ball, the annual Demo conference plays host to over 100 companies that use the conference to show new technologies publicly for the first time. Attendees at the conference include journalists, a few venture capitalists, and a raft of marketing people all looking for the next great thing while being entertained by the likes of Shawn Colvin and The Spinners. Like any such gathering, however, there are a lot more half-baked notions than actual viable products.
For example, a new offering from McAfee.com, which is a unit of Network Associates Inc. (NAI), promises to resolve the inherent conflict between target marketing on the Internet and an individual's right to privacy. By leveraging McAfee's security technology, a Web site can employ a series of rules that will allow it to target a customer with specific banner advertisements, but once that visitor leaves the site, no trace of their personal data remains. The good news is that privacy issues are now getting enough attention on the Web that sites such as Dell.com and Microsoft.com are expected to adopt the McAfee technology. Elsewhere at Demo, there was a demonstration of a new application service provider offering from ThinkFree.com that would allow users to remotely access Microsoft Office on the Web after downloading an applet. Trellix, which is headed by Dan Bricklin, who is credited with inventing the spreadsheet, unveiled a similar type of service using its own suite of applications. The underlying theme of both releases is that the existence of client software is a bad thing, and everything good should happen on the server. Platforms were also very much in evidence, especially in the e-commerce area with companies such as Global CommerceZone, which claims to be able to enable international e-commerce by helping potential customers to navigate automatically all the different tax rates and tariffs in just about every major country. Other notable e-commerce platforms included Perfect.com, which supports real-time personalization to facilitate target marketing, and X-Time, a provider of a Sabre-like reservation system that allows businesses to schedule services over the Web. But the definition of platform is also being redefined. Instead of building or buying a suite of applications, a third option is starting to emerge by which Web sites just provision the services they need. For example, rather than build a community section on your site, they simply can put their label over an offering from notHarvard.com . In addition to provisioning software services, Web sites also can provision server hardware from LoudCloud, the latest start-up effort of former Netscape wunderkind Marc Andreessen, or storage from Viathan. Two other vendors worthy of note were Televend, which showed how people will be able to use phones to conduct electronic transactions over the Web, and Disappearing, which showcased a tool that may offer a way to better manage electronic mail systems without consuming racks of storage space in the data center. It's way too early to tell if any of these products will ever make it. In fact, a large number of the companies at Demo were showcasing products that are probably going to wind up as features in somebody else's bigger product. But if the companies that own them run into trouble, they can always turn to Keen.com, which launched an on-line service for expert advice. No idea where Keen.com finds experts that have nothing else to do but answer questions over the phone for a dollar a minute, but should that fail, there's always Dial-a-Prayer. Got another point of view? Write to me at michael_vizard@infoworld.com. Michael Vizard is editor in chief at InfoWorld.  RELATED SUBJECTS  Web TechnologiesMORE > SPONSORED WHITE PAPERS 
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