Best Apollo Demos

There were a bunch of product demos today at Adobe’s Engage event, but there were a few that stood out and should have a big impact on the startup world. They also happened to be some of the best demos of the day.

Virtual Ubiquity - Rick Treitman demoed their word processor application, BuzzWord, which was built entirely in Flex 2 and looks like it could be a direct competitor to Google Docs. The team focused heavily on making sure pagination and typeography were first class, something Flash has been bad at. They’ve created a great UI around the document workflow and have features like ruler tooltips when embedding assets that help people work with their documents. They are focusing on the collaborative document space so that users can be designated as reviewers, read-only, or actual authors and discuss the document. They are aiming for a public beta later this summer.

Scrybe - Faizan Budar presented Scrybe and showed the features that were in the video that generated so much buzz. He demoed all three major features live and made a point of saying that everything in the video is now working in the application. He showed off the calendar portion of the application, which has a great UI, the “PaperVision” which allows you to print your information into special pocket size chunks, and the option to save content to your Scrybe account from any website. The user interface is clean, useful, and it all works offline. They’ve opened up the beta to a limited number of people and hope to open it up to the general public after their next round of features are complete.

yourminis - Alex Bard, the CEO of Goowy Media , demoed what yourminis is working on. A lot of it has been covered by TechCrunch, but they really dug into Apollo and the API that they plan to release next week. With Apollo, they are building out a widget platform that will touch the web, embeddable properties, and the desktop. Alex took a yourmini widget and dragged it to the desktop straight from the browser which made for a poweful demo. Their API is going to enable developers to create their own widgets on the yourminis platform. They built a Twitter widget using the API that is great, so I think content providers are going to be excited about the freedom that the API allows.

Intelisea - One application that didn’t fall into the category of web startup but demonstrated how far the Flash application has come was an app from Intelisea. The application, built in Flex 2, is the front end for controlling a yacht. It runs on a touch screen interface and allows the user to look at engine stats, fuel levels, weather and GPS coordinates. There’s also a security feature that uses RFID tags to track the people on the boat and sounds an alarm when someone falls overboard. It displays a red dot on a schematic of the ship to indicate where the person fell off. It’s something that will never be seen on Web 2.0, but makes for a fun story when it comes to the Flash Platform.

Engage did a good job of showing how diverse the Flash platform is. There were a lot of great questions about the role Adobe needs to play in the design community and what makes web apps better (it’s not gratuitous animation or UI). And there are a lot of interesting startups using the Flash platform. Luckily we got a look at some of those today.

• Sphere It
• 

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 28th, 2007 at 10:06 am and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.