Tech entrepreneurs made their way to California this week for DEMO, a conference that provides a platform for new startups to show off their products. At today's keynote presentation, a number of exciting new companies took stage—as did a number of duds.
Here are the three we think will make the biggest splash in the coming months, plus the two biggest trends we spotted among the presenters.
1. Gut Check. Colorado-based Gut Check knows that traditional market research doesn't work in the digital era. It's too slow, too expensive, and requires too many employees, distracting them for too long from doing their day-to-day jobs. Gut Check is a do-it-yourself, Web-based market research tool that costs $40 per session. Users select attributes that define the audience they're looking to survey, from age to marital status to income. The service matches your defined profile with the 5 million research participants it has on hand and pulls up a match. The user can then interview the participant via the Web portal, showing them images, asking them questions. This tool will be a game-changer for businesses that need feedback quickly and frequently, especially those that have daily or weekly changes in their products or services.
2. Marginize. Marginize is a widget that lets you add or join a "margin" layer on any Web site where people write comments about that page. It's similar to any other commenting system, except that the community has the power—not the Web site author. The community, therefore, has the ability to discuss the credibility of the source or provide other information in context because the comments sit just off to the side of the page. The browser add-on launched six months ago and has already been used on 500 million sites. Marginize also puts you in touch with people of similar interest based on the sites you visit. Today, Marginize announced its publisher widget, which lets Web publishers add Marginize directly to its site so it's visible to anyone, rather than only the users have installed the application.
3. eLive.pro. Social television projects have a history of failure not because they were bad ideas, but because they launched before the TV-watching masses were ready for them. ELive Entertainment may finally have the timing right with eLive.pro. The free site lets people pull in videos and annotate them with voice-overs, drawing mark-ups (think of sports television), and typed comments in a chat box. You can slow down the video while you're marking it up and commenting on it. Your friends can watch the video later when you send them a link, or they can join you and watch synchronously.
4. Trend: Social Searching. Several presentations at DEMO had variations on the theme of improving search tools with something social, be it suggestions from your trusted friends or the validity of a community of like-minded people. Customizable search curation tool Thoora and social search tool Heystaks are two examples.
5. Trend: Facebook Accessories. A number of new startups pushed the importance of Facebook in both our social and business lives, unveiling new products that seek to improve the Facebook experience. Singapore-based FetchFans, for example, is rolling out an online tool that helps businesses create custom-branded Facebook pages and Twitter backdrops that are particularly enticing to international or nation-wide businesses that deal with local branches or specific customer demographics regionally, such as real estate companies. The localized representatives can use the branded content, but alter it to fit their local needs. Another newcomer to the Facebook arena is Photo Feed for iPad by Pixable, which curates photos from one's social network to a one-touch swipe-through display.