Philipp Heintze

DEMO 08 was a blur of excitement and adrenaline as 77 companies showcased their stuff in front of the tech world. I pulled together roundups for Day 1 and Day 2. Now I want to look back and express the launches that I found the most interesting. Please keep in mind that there might be some great products that I left off this list because I could not relate to them as well as the ones on the list. If you attended DEMO 08 please drop a comment below and let me know which launches were keen on.

BitGravity - Crystal clear image quality in online video might have just become a reality with this startup. I am extremely impressed with what BitGravity can do for online video. They broadcast the DEMO08 show live on the demo site and it was flawless. I think they one to watch in 2008 and beyond.

Sprout - The SproutBuilder toolkits empowers anyone to create interactive Flash widgets in a matter of minutes.

TubeMogul - If you are producing online video you have got to checkout TubeMogul as they help to get your videos distributed across all the big video content sites. They also offer video metrics which could help you to sell in video advertisements.

Movial Social Communicator - Takes your mobile phone contact list and turning it into a one click multi-modal social sharing and discovery product. Is this the future of instant messaging? It certainly paints a very compelling picture.

LiquidTalk - Empowers anyone with a Blackberry or iPhone to be able to stay connected with the office via video and audio messages.

Iterasi - Allows anyone to keep tabs on changes on a particular Website via a handy browser plugin and could be helpful to webmasters or for competitive analysis purposes.

SpeakLike - This product breaks down communication barriers by translating instant messages real-time. It could become a very useful tool in our global economy.

Leapfrog TAG Reading System - This is an innovative learning tool for kids and it made me want to immediately try it out.

Toktumi pronounced "Talk to me" - Makes it easy for any small business to setup a professional phone network. I did not get a chance to swing by their booth but would love to snag one of their network adapters and give it a whirl.

Ribbit - As an online phone company which enables you to use your mobile phone via the Web. It also offers widgets which can be added to you startpage thus putting your mobile contacts in constant view and at your fingertips.

iVideoSongs - Offering downloadable music lessons that you can own. For music lovers like myself this could be a great way to learn how to play an instrument or specific song right from the artists themselves. 

blist - Creating a custom database without knowing anything about databases just got a lot easier. The visual representations of a database make a complex thing very easy.

LiveScribe - Offers a smart-pen gadget that records your pen strokes and audio and can save up to 5 years worth of data for recall via search. Pens might have just gotten a second life with this new gadget.

Redux - People discovery search is hot and I think Redux is positioned well to leverage algorithms to better connect people.

Rove Mobile - PCMobilizer enabling access to EVERYTHING on your computer from your mobile phone. I am on the go all the time so I like the capabilities to be able to everything from my mobile phone.

Hubdub - A Digg-like news aggregator with predictive markets puts a new spin on creating reoccurring interest on a particular story.

Seesmic - A video twitter product has already opened its API and the dev community is responding with some cool creations. Seesmic needs to improve its video quality but this early stage startup is moving in the right direction in online video innovation.

Huddle.net - Turns your Facebook console into a collaboration tool similar to 37signals' Basecamp.

Squidcast - Makes it possible to send large high quality video files and maintain the video quality. I could use this right away.Now I just need to get a beta account.

Greenplug - Of course the sound of a universal plug for all my gadgets would be wonderful. However, I am a little skeptical as to if the masses will buy in. It is an interesting prospect nonetheless.

Delver - Taps your social graph to provide relevant social search results. This is a very interesting approach and I cannot way to give it a try to see how helpful the result sets are.

Silobreaker - An innovative trend analysis site with lots of visual goodies to dig deeper.

Circos.com - A semetic Web search for local information and reviews. I could see myself using this search immediately to find new restaurants and hotels just how I describe them - in my own words.

Jodange - Now you can search on what people think, or their public opinions that is. There is nothing else like it on the Web.

Nirvanix - Though online storage is not the sexiest web business it is still an service that is needed by many. Nirvanix offers the backend to power a number of applications via its open APIs. If you looking to build an online product that requires some fast storage you might want to look to Nirvanix.

Outside of the flow of launches I also got to talk with the myvu team which launched its viewing goggles at CES. I tried them out and while I felt a little and probably looked silly I actually really liked the viewing capabilities that they offer.

One advantage of putting all my photos into the public domain? People are now uploading them to Wikipedia. Like this entry for AT&T’s CEO. All my photos are in the public domain now. You can use them without even attributing them, or giving me credit (although I do appreciate those of you who give credit for my work). Why do I do that? Because sharing my work with the world has brought me back so much goodness. This is also a gift to the world from Fast Company Magazine, which paid my travel expenses to go to Davos.

Here’s my people photos from Davos (other photos are now up too). Thank you to Nikon for loaning me a brand new D3 camera, which was really awesome. It shoots in 1/4th the light (two stops) than my Canon 5D, which made many of these photos possible. I made all these images using only one lens: a 50 mm F1.4.

0. Caterina Fake, co-founder of Flickr. Without her none of this would be possible. I just uploaded a second photo of her.
1. Pardis Sabeti, biological anthropologist at Harvard University.
2. Robert Crawford, author. He wrote the summaries for the program. This photo is a testament to the low-light capabilities of the Nikon. If you were there you would barely have been able to see Robert because we were in a really dark bar.
3. Neil Kane, CEO of Advanced Diamond Technologies, talks with John Gage, researcher at Sun Microsystems.
4. Benjamin Zander, conductor of Boston Philharmonic Orchestra.
5. Feng Jim, CEO of Beijing Hual Information Digital Technology Co. He showed me some incredible devices. I posted a video of him earlier.
6. Reza Jafari, head of the ITU.
7. Tim O’Reilly, head of O’Reilly Publishing.
8. Matthias Lufkens, head of PR for the World Economic Forum, talking with Larry Page, co-founder of Google.
9. Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, talking with David Kirkpatrick of Fortune Magazine.
10. Jeff Zucker, CEO of NBC Interactive.
11. John Markoff, technology journalist for the New York Times (I didn’t recognize him while skiing, naughty Scoble, naughty!).
12. Craig Barrett, Chairman of Intel.
13. Mustafa Ceric, Grand Mufti of Bosnia (top religious leader).
14. Steve Forbes, CEO of Forbes.
15. Yo Yo Ma, famous cellist.
16. Richard Edelman, CEO of Edelman, world’s largest PR firm, talks with Larry Brilliant, head of Google Foundation.
17. Queen Rania of Jordan talks with Lee Bollinger, president of Columbia University. The Queen is the only person that I saw stop a room when she walked in.
18. Lee Bollinger talking with Richard N. Haass, President of Council on Foreign Relations.
19. David Gergen, political commentator.
20. Yossi Vardi, Israeli venture capitalist, talks with Shimon Peres, Israel’s President.
21. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, hangs out with Phillip Rosedale, CEO of Linden Labs (the folks who bring you Second Life).
22. Pervez Musharraf. President of Pakistan.
23. Congressman Brian Baird (Washington State).
24. Dan Shine, vice president at AMD.
25. Nicholas Negroponte. Head of the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) project, among many other things.
26. Patrick Aebischer. Famous neuroscientist.
27. Larry Brilliant, head of the Google Foundation.
28. Elie Wiesel, Nobel Laureate. Real honor to meet him.
29. Meghan Asha and Mike Arrington. I got a photo of Meghan giving her editorial opinion of Mike.
30. Gerhard Florin executive at Electronic Arts talks with John Markoff, tech journalist for the New York Times.
31. Alexander Straub, CEO of Truphone.
32. Brenda Musilli. She is Director of Education for Intel and President of the Intel Foundation.
33. Reza Jafari. Head of ITU.
34. William Brody. Head of Johns Hopkins University.
35. J. Vasudev. Founder of Ishafoundation.
36. John Maeda of MIT. Famous graphic designer.
37. Ellen Langer. First female tenured psychology professor at Harvard. I have a second photo of her here.
38. Bob Lessin. Interesting guy, was a vice chairman at Smith Barney before he had a stroke here’s a Fast Company article on him.
39. Bono and Al Gore.
40. Al Gore making a point.
41. Mabel van Oranje (princess of Netherlands) talks with Robert Shriver who runs Bono’s Product Red Initiative and Richard Lovett, head of the Creative Artists Agency (Hollywood’s most powerful talent agent).
42. Michael Spence. Nobel Laureate/Economics.
43. Edmund Phelps, Joseph Stiglitz, Shimon Peres, Elie Wiesel at the “Nobel Nightcap.”
44. Reid Hoffman, CEO of LinkedIn.
45. Mitch Kapor. Chair of the Open Source Applications Foundation.
46. Don Tapscott. Author of “Wikinomics.”
47. Jonathan Rothberg, genome researcher.
48. Condoleezza Rice. United States Secretary of State.
49. Chad Hurley. Co-founder of YouTube.
50. HTC’s Chairwoman, Cher Wang.
51. William Amelio. Lenovo CEO.
52. Randall Stephenson. AT&T CEO.
53. Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, goofs around with Loic Le Meur, CEO of Seesmic.
54. Jeff Jarvis. Famous blogger.
55. Tariq Krim, CEO of Netvibes, talks with Mike Arrington.
56. danah boyd. Social networking researcher.
57. Esther Dyson. Famous technologist and sticker collector.
58. Linda Avey. Founder of 23 and Me.
59. Tim Brown. CEO of IDEO.

Whew, that’s a lot of photos of interesting people for one week.