Demofall: Security, PC-sharing, nanotechnology touted

San Diego -- An anti-botnet appliance, PC-sharing, and codeless application development were featured technologies at the Demofall 2006 conference Wednesday, with a multitude of hopefuls vying to provide the next industry-changing innovations.

A myriad of offerings in the security, application development, and virtualization areas were covered as attendees gained insight into the use of nanotechnology to improve computer storage.

Trend Micro, which unlike most other Demofall exhibitors has been around for many years, showed its InterCloud Security Service, which features an appliance and a service to combat botnets, which compromise security to gather confidential information.

"We're here today because security threats on the Internet are growing faster than ever before," said Dave Rand, CTO at Trend Micro. "The main objective of these threats? Profit. The main cause? Botnets."

NComputing, meanwhile, pitched its technology for PC-sharing via the use of terminals. "We expand the market by allowing [any] modern PC to be shared by multiple users at an incredibly low cost," said Stephen Dukker, chairman and CEO of nComputing.

The company offers PCI- and Ethernet-based devices to enable sharing of PCs and servers.

On the application development front, BriteSoft touted its system for configuring applications rather than coding them. "The software industry is at a crisis," said Fazel Naghshineh, CEO of BriteSoft. "Four-hundred billion dollars are spent annually on software development," with billions wasted on canceled projects, he said.

He cited code-centric development as the problem, with developers having to choose from a multitude of coding platforms such as Java or Hibernate. BriteSoft, however, offers its BriteWorks system in which templates, a drag-and-drop paradigm, and an objects library are used to assemble applications quickly.

"You can develop applications without writing a single line of code," Naghshineh said.

Widgetbox demonstrated its self-named online directory of Web widgets for use in blogs and Web pages.

"Widgets are hard to build, they're hard to find, and they’re hard to use, and Widgetbox aims to solve that," said Ed Anuff, president and CEO of Widgetbox. The Diggs RSS Viewer was cited as the most popular widget available from Widgetbox.

Meanwhile, an IBM executive touted the potential capabilities of nanotechnology in storage devices. "Nanotechnology is going to affect that in a very dramatic way," said Gian-Luca Bona, department group manager of Science & Technology at IBM's Almaden Research Center, in San Jose, Calif.

One idea being considered for building devices as small as five-by-five nanometers involves the concept of using DNA-based molecular strands, Bona said. "It's all about scaling the technology to smaller and smaller area sizes," reducing costs and increasing performance, he said.