DEMO Fall has just announced the winners of its media prizes, who will each receive $500,000 in free advertising across IDG’s publishing properties and a number of sites including VentureBeat.
The winner of the ‘Enterprise’ category is Liaise, which allows you to automatically generate a To-Do list from your Email. The application performs semantic analysis to determine which portions of an Email message require an action, and can automatically generate a list of these, complete with different priorities and deadlines. Provided the technology works well this could prove very useful (no more trudging through the Email trenches to figure out what you need to do that day) but to be effective it will need to really work every time — it won’t do much good if it only catches most of your to-dos.
Liaise is available in a limited beta for Outlook, with plans to come to more platforms in the future (though we’ve heard that one before).The application is free for its beta period, with plans to charge under $10 once it fully launches.
Taking top prize in the ‘Consumer’ category is Emo Labs, which has created an impressive new speaker technology that’s fully-transparent. This means that speakers can actually be included as part of LCDs and other flat-panel displays, without the clunky black boxes sticking out the side. The company also says that because the surface area of the LCD panel (and in turn, the transparent speakers) is typically far greater than that of traditional speakers, users should actually notice an improvement in sound quality. For more on this new technology, check out the Emo Labs page here.
