Palm Desert, California: Online video creation, distribution and analytics are becoming more sophisticated as the industry matures. A number of companies focused on video are launching products here at DEMO 08. The highlights:

Xtranormal, based in Montreal, Canada, introduced "movie-making in a box". It can turn an IM-like chat into a movie, attaching the text to a 3D avatar and using emoticon-type animation icons in the text to add movements. It’s an intuitive interface that should be easy enough for children to construct school projects and adults to make their own chat shows, business presentations or animated blogs. Users can add their own mugshots to the avatar to make it more realistic and their animation can take place in a range of sets. Xtranormal will likely sell additional packs of props and sets. The finished result can easily be published to a blog or social networking site. Xtranormal plans to launch in April.

BitGravity launched BG LiveBroadcast, a Flash-based video streaming service. It showed video in high-definition quality and switched between sources in the rapid channel-hopping style of regular television.� There were also digital video recorder features - skipping back and forward. Perry Wu, chief executive, said the service was designed for live broadcasting. "The only thing traditional TV was better at was live broadcasts, today that’s all about to change," he said. To demonstrate its technology, BitGravity has been streaming the DEMO conference itself.

TubeMogul showed off how it could deploy video to different services such as YouTube, Metacafe and MySpace, saving content creators the bother of encoding for the different services and allowing them to instantly reach a larger aggregate audience. For anyone uploading less than 150 videos a month, the service is free. TubeMogul is also able to provide detailed analytics on where the video is being most watched and a breakdown of the demographics of the audience.

Visible Measures can give creators information on how viral their video is and how much it engages its audience. It demonstrated how the well known World of Warcraft Toyota ad lost 20 per of its audience online before the truck actually appeared. It has just acquired Vidmeter, a viral video ratings and distribution service. The Boston-based start-up has also announced $13.5m in second-round funding at DEMO.

Bill Gates faced a fairly benign crowd at the

Institute

of

Directors

in

London

on Wednesday morning where he made his last

UK

speech before his retirement. But it was not without a few moments of controversy.

When the 1000-strong� audience was given a chance to question Mr Gates, one IT manager of a law firm accused Microsoft of being overly dominant in corporate software and complained of the arrogance of the company’s sales force. With other suppliers, he said, he could fire and re-engage them if their terms and conditions changed, but not so with Microsoft’s Office package.

Mr Gates was immediately on the defensive, saying there was plenty of competition in corporate software.

“I’d like to see the terms and conditions you have with IBM and we can immediately match them,” he said, sounding more like a keen-as-mustard sales rep than an executive less than six months away from slipping the corporate leash.

Oracle and many other companies also provided competition, he said. The problem was competition in corporate software just wasn’t covered as much in the media.

Mr Gates went on to stress how innovative the software sector was.

“People should wish that other commercial sectors were as competitive and innovative as the software space. Just think what food would cost and the advantages you would have experienced.”

The competition issue was clearly still a very sore point with him. Earlier, when questioned about his most stressful moments at Microsoft he had sighed “Trying not to be sued by your own government. Especially when it is unjust.”

Perhaps its not surprising given the recent

US

decision to extend its close anti-trust scrutiny of Microsoft by another two years, and the new competition case opened in the EU earlier this month.

Mr Gates was visibly happier when talking about his future plans at his charitable foundation, tackling the world’s health problems and giving away most of his fortune. Then, the shoe will be on the other foot, as he gets to chivvy governments for not being generous enough and demand large sums of money from them.

The Demo technology conference underway in Desert Springs, California always throws up a few standout start-ups – along with lots of ‘me-toos.’ Among the standouts this time around were a couple of communications start-ups with practical and interesting products and services that have the potential to disrupt.

My favourite was Toktumi (pronounced talk-to-me), whose product (also called Toktumi) provides small and home office businesses with a full-functioned PC-based office phone system at really low cost. Toktumi – described by one of my colleagues here as ‘Skype for grown-ups” – is actually a hosted PBX (private branch exchange) service running on the company’s servers in San Francisco.

“There are 40m people working in small businesses with one to nine employees, half of who work out of their homes,” says Peter Sisson, CEO and founder. “This market segment has been ignored by by most providers .”

The basic Toktumi software is a free download and runs on virtually any PC turning it into a powerful yet simple to operate�office system complete with call transfer, voicemail, conferencing and auto attendant in less than five minutes. The software requires no special hardware, but helpfully Toktumi also offers an adapter that enables users to plug any standard analogue desktop phone into a USB port completing the setup.

The free version of the service comes with a free phone number (likely to be an out-of-the-way rural area code so don’t expect�a 415 or 212 number) voicemail and free calling�and conferencing with other Toktumi customers worldwide. For $13-a-month and 2-cents a minute, users can upgrade to a premium version that allows outbound calls to regular phones worldwide and allows customers to select their phone number or port their current POTS (plain old telephone service) number over to Toktumi.

None
of this functionality is really new, but the way Toktumi puts the PC at
the centre of the office phone system is unique. There is also one
really cool feature called ‘Search Dialing’ which enables users to
place calls from a PC simply by typing in the name of the person,
company or category of company you want to call.�Toktumi
then trawls through your PC contact book and then the web to find the
number you are looking for and presents them on screen ready to click
and dial.

The Toktumi service is currently available as an invitation-only beta form but Sisson hopes to make it generally available shortly. In the meantime, he notes, about half of those signing up for the beta are overseas.

The other comms company that caught my attention at Demo was Ribbit which describes itself as “Silicon Valley’s first phone company.” Ribbit’s Amphibian technology platform is designed to bridge the gap between a mobile phone and an internet-connected PC.

Among its features, Amphibian enables users to manage mobile voicemail as though it is email on your computer and on your mobile phone, convert voicemail into text to make voice messages shareable and searchable, and make mobile calls from any browser or web page - such as iGoogle, Facebook et al. The interface is smooth and polished and because Ribbit’s APIs (application program interfaces) are open, the technology is already attracting a host of cool third-party add-ons.

Palm Desert, California: One of the themes of DEMO 08 is new web
services that allow ordinary users to create content in forms usually
left to the professionals.
Blist, Flypaper and Sprout showed how anyone could easily create databases, Flash presentations and widgets respectively.

Kevin Merritt, Blist chief executive, said mainstream users until now
have tried to wedge all their data into an Excel spreadsheet. Blist in
its list view looks like an Excel spreadsheet, with some columns you
might not expect. Its impressively simple interface allows users to
drag in columns such as star ratings, document links and pictures. Long
lists can be included in single cells and icons can be inserted from
drop-down boxes. There is the standard database record view and also a
calendar view to show when tasks are due. Filters can be created just
by dragging the relevant columns into a box and defining the criteria
for them.

Flypaper says it has developed the easiest way to tell stories that
stick on the web by bringing the power of custom Flash programming to
everyone. Flypaper provides Flash page templates and model
presentations that can be edited and adapted with drag-and-drop
objects. It is also building a community of users that will share their
models and extend its library. It demonstrated how to create a CV with
text, pictures and video elements� that will play in Flash like a
YouTube clip. In fact, it can be posted directly to sites like YouTube,
Facebook and MySpace.

Sprout has a similar widget creation tool, with pre-built templates and
drag-and-drop features. It allows users to publish to a range of
websites, make instant changes and see how much their widgets are being
used through analytical tables and charts.

So now that anyone can do this web content thing, it looks like Flash
programmers and widget developers are going to be relegated to the same
lowered status as photographers and ….journalists.

� If you’re an investor in Yahoo! you’re probably starting to wonder just when all the upheaval will end. Consider these comments from some of its executives in the years since the dotcom bubble burst:

2003: "We changed the whole sales team. We started all over again." (Former CEO Terry Semel)

2006: "The internet is continuing to grow and evolve at a rapid pace, and we’re reshaping Yahoo to be a leader in this transformation." (Semel)

2007: "A year of transition in display" advertising. (Sue Decker, president)

2008: "An evolutionary and transformative year for Yahoo." (Blake Jorgensen, CFO)

Jerry Yang had the final word today as Yahoo warned that the latest repair work will not happen overnight: "This kind of transformation takes time." He’s not kidding.

Palm Desert, California: Here at DEMO 08, we have two days of product launches by 77 companies unveiling new web tools and services, hardware, software and the latest in consumer electronics.

Products like the Roomba vacuum cleaner and Pleo the robot dinosaur were introduced at DEMO and the room here is packed with media and venture capitalists watching six-minute demos of the next big ideas.

Some highlights from the opening session:

Iterasi unveiled its "Notarize" web toolbar. This is bookmarking on steroids. Iterasi captures a complete web page when you click on its button. That means not just the link, but an image of the page and a full html version that will render just as you first saw it. This has become more difficult as sites have become increasingly complex with the use of Ajax, but search results pages and annotated maps can be saved as you created them. The page can also be tagged and filed to make it more findable.

LeapFrog, the educational toy company which has sold 30m of its LeapPad platforms worldwide and more than 70m LeapPad books, introduced its new Tag device.� The pen-like peripheral is aimed at helping four to eight-year-olds to read. Pressing on any word or object in Tag-enabled books makes the pen speak the word. It can also be connected to a PC to download words for new books and to upload information on the child’s reading, showing a parent how their child is progressing.

One of the irritations of current mobile phone browsers is that they lack the software capabilities to play video. Skyfire launched a browser for mobile phones at DEMO that can handle Flash, Ajax, Java and Quicktime elements in web pages. The bad news is that is still in private beta and only works on Windows Mobile devices currently. The presenters said users could also listen to last.fm music, and later showed me how other kinds of non-Flash-based internet radio like the BBC could be heard.

The storage company Fabrik showed off Joggle, which it described as "aggregation through virtualisation". Joggle, built on the Adobe Air platform, finds your content whether it is online or offline and presents it in a single view. Fabrik showed a window of thumbnail pictures that were stored on a combination of Flickr, a USB thumb drive and a MyDocuments folder. Content such as photos and music can be dragged into a slideshow creation tool that can then be served as a widget on a users’ blog or MySpace page.

SpeakLike showed an instant-messaging translation service. An English speaker typed in English in his chat window, but his words appeared translated into Spanish in the window of his Spanish friend. The reply in Spanish was translated back into English. SpeakLike also demo’d an English to Chinese conversation. The company uses a mixture of machine translation and human interpreters, which raises questions about how the business will scale and make money.

Finally, Notchup showed off a job recruitment service for people not looking for jobs. The idea is that people happy in their jobs but interested in listening to good offers are the most sought-after recruits. Companies can pay tens of thousands of dollars to headhunters to reach these people, but Notchup cuts out the middleman. Workers enter their CVs and use a calculator for their skills to set a price of say $500 that they expect to be paid to be interviewed. Companies contact them directly although the worker’s anonymity is initially preserved. Notchup says 50,000 people and 400 corporate clients have signed up in the past eight days.

Intel, which has been engaged in a battle royal with Advanced Micro Devices over whose chips go in high-end servers, is beginning to encounter a similar level of competition from a smaller rival at the other end of the scale.

VIA, based in Taiwan, is often forgotten as a player in the dominant "x86" market for PC microprocessors. It has never had more than 5 per cent market-share and is normally in the 1 to 2 per cent range, with Intel taking around 80 per cent and AMD the rest.

However, it seems to be a match for Intel in the niche segment largely ignored by AMD for low-powered computing.

Samsung has tried both VIA and Intel microprocessors in its Q1 ultra-mobile PC.� VIA is preferred in the 02 by� Silicon Valley’s OQO, which pioneered the category. A VIA processor is also powering the Everex CloudBook, which created a stir at the Consumer Electronics Show this month.

Intel is pushing a new category called Mobile Internet Devices or Mids and is expected to become more competitive when it introduces its low-power Silverthorne chip. More details of its capabilities are expected next month.

This week, VIA announced its next-generation Isaiah architecture, which it believes will keep it ahead of Intel, even after Silverthorne appears in the second quarter.

While Intel has switched from increasing speeds to decreasing power demands in its chip designs, VIA is going the other way.

Its strength has always been the extended battery life it permits through the low wattage of its microprocessors. With Isaiah, it says the power demands will be the same, but the Isaiah chip will perform two to four times better than its predecessor.

"Our chips are the best in the market for performance per watt, but the level of performance we can achieve with Isaiah means we can be more competitive in other segments," says Glenn Henry, president of Centaur Technology, a VIA subsidiary that designed the chip.

The performance boost could even make VIA a competitor for the microprocessor slot in full-sized PCs, he says, a move that would certainly get the attention of both Intel and AMD.