Demo 08 sees wikis, translation and sales tools unveiled

This year's Demo08 conference in Palm Desert, Calif., got off to an unusually eclectic start. Typically, demonstrators are organized around categories like mobile, email, social networking and the like. Not this year. Each of the first dozen or so presenters were unrelated in terms of category to one another. Before I give you the highlights from the first set of demonstrators let me tell those who don’t know wh

This year's Demo08 conference in Palm Desert, Calif., got off to an unusually eclectic start. Typically, demonstrators are organized around categories like mobile, email, social networking and the like.

Not this year. Each of the first dozen or so presenters were unrelated in terms of category to one another.

Before I give you the highlights from the first set of demonstrators let me tell those who don’t know what Demo is all about.

Demo has mostly startups, 77 this year, who are looking for investment dollars. So the audience is filled with, you guessed it, VCs and executives from the investment arm from most of the major high tech companies.

CitiPort was the highlight of the early morning demonstrators as far as I was concerned. It is wiki meets travel information.

This travel service allows locals who know a city best to contribute information on restaurants, places of interest that a typical traveler may not know about but a city local does.

In addition, the information can be organized by location. So if you decide to go to a museum first you click add and the graphic of the museum is added to your itinerary. It will then show you what other points of interest are near by.

If you click on restaurants for lunch, for example, it will show you local recommendations keyed to eateries that are close by.

A very neat and very useful tool that I think will get both millions of hits with longevity of views that will make CitiPort a success.

It may not be related to traveling but making appointments both local and long distance, via Web conference or telephone conversations is what TimeTrade Systems technology is all about.

Sales people know that the easier you make it for your customer the better chance you have to sell them something. So, instead of a going through the painful process of multiple back and forth emails in order to find a mutually agreeable time for an appointment, TimeTrade embeds a schedule button in email to ease the pain of making appointments.

Iterasi has nothing to do with travel or appointment making except for those of you who consider Web browsing as traveling.

Iterasi allows users to save any Web site page.

It is the equivalent to a typical page capture or print screen only this is for Web pages.

What makes it better than saving favorite sites is that it actually takes you to the page you want to get to rather than the home page of the Web site.

It also allows users to tag the page, take notes and then do searches on tags, words used on page or by date of the save.

SpeakLike offers yet another attempt at translation software for those who talk to business associates worldwide from the comfort of their desk chair and instant messaging.

It is a hybrid that uses both machine translation and human intervention, when required, to make an IM conversation completely understandable.

The human assist is especially handy when idoms and slang words are used by one of the IMers.

Stay tuned and I'll be blogging on more demonstrators after the next batch comes on stage.