demo 2008

Video advertising online is certainly becoming more common, but it's still difficult to get a good handle on exactly the kind of impact those types of ads are having.

Three companies came to Demo to push their individual strategy on how to improve the placement of video ads and the information gathered about them.

Liquidus: This 6-year-old Web marketing company has come up with a quick way for digital cable providers to produce and push video classified ads to the Web and TV screens via video on demand. Liquidus' video publishing platform aggregates video ads from a variety of … Read more

The social network companies just left the stage at Demo 2008. Looking for inspiration from the group, I got this: The future of social networking will belong to companies that leverage the implicit, or derived, "social graph." I do not think that companies that are trying to create new online communities (from the Demo companies: iLeonardo, HubDub, AtlasPost) will own the future.

However, companies that divine the social network from what is already online are on to something. In that group there's Delver, which I reviewed last night, and these two interesting companies from the Demo session … Read more

Capzles takes the idea of telling a story with a photo album or a vacation video and puts it all into one multimedia package.

The start-up calls its product "social storytelling." Of course, this means the stories you make with its Web-based authoring tool are eminently shareable with anyone and everyone.

Using a patent-pending Flash-based technology, photos, video clips, and audio files are uploaded to Capzles in a linear, chronological strip. Each image or file can be scrolled through horizontally and selected. Each can have a caption, links, and a blog.

It seems best suited for creating stories … Read more

Standout Jobs' Reception is a hosted recruiting service for companies. It replaces the lame jobs pages that many companies run with a more developed service, including application forms, applicant tracking, support for videos, discussions, and so on. I like the idea, but I like JobScore's (review) model even more: With permission, it puts applicants that aren't hired into a general pool that hiring managers at other companies can pay to see.

Seen at: Demo 2008

Cozimo is a tool for real-time collaboration around photos and videos.

It promises tight synchronization--at the exact frame level in videos--when multiple viewers are online, and a timeline-based annotation system that sounds a bit like Viddler's video-commenting feature.

Founder Joshua Rosen, who presented his product at Demo 08 Wednesday morning, said the genesis for Cozimo was a bit of desperation. Working on the artwork for the movie Peter Pan several years ago, Rosen and his team were split up all over the world and finding it hard to find time to edit images and video for the film. His … Read more

Xtranormal makes a fun tool for making animated shows with cartoon characters. It could also be a tool for making machinima, if the company manages to license characters from game companies.

In the demo I saw last night, Xtranormal's Paul Nightingale wrote a simple script, where he wrote a few lines for two characters, added some emotion tags and gestures, and put them in a setting with a prop. He pressed the "render" button and generated a cute little animation. Quality was very good--certainly better than Saturday morning cartoons. The cuts and angles were automatically generated and … Read more

This is one of the most innovative ideas at Demo 2008: Delver, a search engine that displays results for you based on what your friends and contacts are doing online. First, you tell it your name, and it scans the usual social networks to find out who your friends are. At this early stage of development, it scans LinkedIn, MySpace, Hi5, and Flickr, but Facebook and Twitter will be added.

Once Delver discovers who you know (and also who's in your extended circle--your friends of friends), it uses that data to return search results. For example, if you're … Read more

Seesmic, aka video Twitter, is still in private beta, but CEO Loic Le Meur is here at Demo 2008 anyway, showcasing a few new features. Nothing revolutionary, just a few nice tweaks. First, you can now easily see video responses to a video post, and in fact play all the responses in a continuous stream. It's like Friend TV.

Also, there's now a mobile application (Nokia N95 only so far), from which you can create and view Seesmic posts. Mobile Seesmics aren't streamed live like they are with Qik or Flixwagon, but it does make it easier … Read more

Not everyone should let their co-workers see their full online social profile, as this guy would likely attest.

Moli.com, which already has a solution for individuals who want to control who sees their profile, is now expanding its service as a platform for enterprise users.

A single account can have public (anyone can see), private (it can be searched for, but not accessed), and hidden (only those with permission from the account holder can see it exists) versions. The aim is to increase privacy.

Moli offers white label, private label, and co-branded versions for businesses.

Companies that purchase the … Read more