demo

Puzzlegeddon lives up to its name by combining the mental challenge of a puzzle game with the excitement of a fighting game. While slightly complicated, it will quickly hook those who try it.

One of Puzzlegeddon's strong points is its professional design and layout, with graphics that look like they came from a pricey store-bought game. The vivid color and detail, combined with excellent tutorials and simple mouse controls, made for easy but exciting game play. Its helpful onscreen tutorial was a necessity, since we'd never played a game with such complex goals before. Your primary job is … Read more

Crayon Physics Deluxe Demo has a lot of surprises for a simple art game. We were impressed by its addictive play, and we think kids will fall in love with it, too.

The program's interface was stunningly beautiful and easy to navigate. It's primarily set up for a child or a child and parent, so the onscreen directions were appropriate. There's no Help file, but the program's intuitive design was easy to understand. The crayon-on-paper game centers on rolling a ball so that it meets up with a star. Each "island" contains several levels … Read more

Should you launch your product at a trade show like Demo or CES, or should you try to drum up interest on your own? This week on the Roundtable, Revision 3 CEO Jim Louderback and Stage Two Consulting's Jeremy Toeman discuss successful and doomed strategies for introducing new products to the market.

Today, we're talking about product launches. The reason we're doing this show now is that the Demo conference just ended, a week after the TechCrunch50 conference. One hundred and twenty products were launched at these shows. Is that smart? Is this how products should be launched? Is there a better way? To talk about this issue in some depth, I have two great guests....

As usual, watch or listen to the podcast for the content. The notes below are for those keeping score at home.

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Twitter trades hype for a huge cash infusion, Windows 7 attempts to create hype with a spectacularly awfsome video, and we cover all the hype falling out of the Demo conference. Speaking of falling, Honda's new Segway-style unicycle looks amazingly easy to fall off of.

Report: No Palm Pre for Verizon Wireless http://news.cnet.com/8301-30686_3-10361144-266.html

Twitter Appears Set to Raise $100 Million, Valuing It at $1 Billion http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/25/technology/internet/25twitter.html … Read more

Before the DemoFall start-up conference kicked off, I wrote a "What to watch" story covering what I thought would be the hot products at the show. As usual, I identified a few of the interesting companies, missed some others, and misidentified some that I thought would be hot but weren't. Now that the show is over and I've spent time with almost all the products introduced there, I've picked out my top winning products, companies, and concepts. I paid no attention to the wisdom of the crowds nor to the official Demo God awards handed … Read more

In the last three years, September has become a busy time for Web start-ups and other new companies looking to make their mark. Warring start-up conferences TechCrunch50 and DemoFall take place within mere days of one another, leaving a wake of more than 100 companies that are launched within just a week's time, all vying for media and consumer attention.

Last year it was even worse, as both conferences happened at the exact same time.

This scramble to get things ready often leaves companies not ready for the users they hope will flock to use their product. So, as … Read more

SAN DIEGO--The Demo community--an august group of entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and technology reporters--gave a fond farewell Wednesday afternoon here to longtime Demo managing director Chris Shipley.

As is well known, Shipley is leaving the helm of Demo, having now officially handed off the reins to VentureBeat founder Matt Marshall.

But as just about the last official act of DemoFall 09, Pat McGovern, the founder and chairman of IDG, which owns the Demo conferences, led the audience in a standing ovation for Shipley.

Prior to that sentimental moment, meanwhile, seven Demo God winners were announced, as well as the two winners … Read more

At Demo on Tuesday, Third Iris pitched Viaas, a video-monitoring system for business that's simple to install and use. Plug the cameras into just an Ethernet cable (if it's enabled for Power-over-Ethernet, that is), log into the Viaas Web site, and you can get your own business surveillance system up and running in a snap.

From a business perspective, Viaas follows the mobile phone model: the cameras, which sell for a low price ($199.95) considering their high-end sensors, are subsidized by the monthly fee you pay to access them, $29.95, or more if you want to … Read more

SAN DIEGO--For better or worse, text messaging has become, according to a company called Scientific Media, the most popular mobile application on Earth. And while many companies are trying to build marketing efforts around people's use of texting, it's clear there is a long way to go before those efforts are coherent.

At the DemoFall 09 conference here Wednesday, Scientific Media unveiled its Dot Go service, a tool it hopes large numbers of companies will employ to try to boost their text messaging-based marketing.

The idea? Blow apart the current texting/marketing dynamic, in which companies try to … Read more