With the DEMO 2008 conference kicking off today, a bunch of tech companies are making announcements. Here are some of the highlights:

BitGravity

Content delivery network BitGravity is launching its streaming video offering, BG LiveBroadcast. The company aims to make streaming video online as instantaneous and high-quality as streaming video on TV, while adding an extra layer of interactivity and customization.

BitGravity already provides on-demand (i.e. recorded) video delivery for fifty clients, including Revision3 and Tom Green. Its streaming video service promises to bring the same robust scalability to live events, allowing thousands if not millions of viewers to watch the same shows simultaneously.

If you want to stream live events using BitGravity, you can request a machine from them that will come preloaded with all the requisite software. Costs will then accrue depending on how much bandwidth you consume.

Blist

Blist, a web-based application that promises to make database management as easy as using Excel, is launching in private beta this Tuesday. A number of improvements have been made to the product’s design since we covered it this past November.

Of particular note is a new “visual query builder” that makes the construction of complex queries easy with a drag-n-drop interface. Blist’s approach to relational data is also notable; relationships are established primarily in the “design” phase of database construction, obviating the need to explicitly extract relational data during query time.

If you become Blist beta tester, head over to InviteShare to share your five invites with others.

Eyealike

Eyealike is announcing a service called Eyealike Copyright that will hunt down copyrighted material found in videos posted across the web. Eyealike purportedly has a knack for finding copyright material mixed in with user generated content on sites like YouTube.

The company claims that its technology can “process hundreds of images and video clips per minute by still objects, object movement, and facial recognition” with 95% accuracy and a “near zero false positive rate.” Its web interface, pictured left, features a prominent “Send Notification” button that will allow companies like Viacom to speed up the process by which they send out take-down requests.

GoldMail

With GoldMail, you can send slideshows accompanied by audio messages to friends, family, and business contacts. The goal is to enrich communication over the net by providing a way to send not only your voice but visual materials, such as photos and diagrams, that reinforce your message as well.

While GoldMail soft launched a little while ago for consumers, it’s rolling out a business offering at DEMO with which companies can brand the service to their liking. For two examples of how organizations have used the branded service, see messages by the Mia Hamm Foundation and the Oakland Raiders.

Enterprise pricing will start off at $5,000 per year, or $500 per month, for 10 seats. GoldMail will perform all of the customization work for their clients.

good2gether

good2gether seeks to help non-profit organizations broaden their reach by connecting them with media partners, sponsors, and volunteers. It’s described as part search engine, part social network.

The main benefit to non-profits seems to be derived from the partnerships good2gether makes with media companies, a list of which will be announced at DEMO. Apparently these partners will include “major newspapers from six of the top 10 media markets”. Just how these media partners will benefit the non-profits is unclear.

MOLI

MOLI is a social network with the mantra “control your privacy”. Members, whether individuals or businesses, can manage multiple profiles, each of which can be made public, private, or hidden. For individuals, the value proposition seems to lie in the ability to create different personas for different contacts (friends, family, colleagues, etc.). I’m not sure just how this functionality will benefit companies who want to establish online presences.

The company says its target audience is “25 to 55 year old knowledge workers (art and fashion designers, technologists, musicians, etc.) and the under served small businesses community”.

SceneCaster

SceneCaster is a virtual world offering that launched at DEMO in the fall and was well-received.

The company will use DEMO 2008 to promote its “SceneWeaver” technology, which allows users to access 3D environments through any XHTML compliant browser. The idea in a nutshell is to bring Second Life-like experiences to the browser, and it even works on the iPhone (no Flash or other plugins are needed).

Online retailers can integrate SceneCaster with their websites to create 3D storefronts, and others can use the technology to create their own 3D webpages.

StandoutJobs

StandoutJobs wants to help companies recruit more effectively by providing them with Netvibes-like pages that contain information for prospective employees. Companies can customize their StandoutJobs sites to include components that inform visitors about company culture, job opportunities, current employees, and more. Other, livelier features such as Flickr photos and quirky corporate videos can be added, too. While companies using StandoutJobs may risk looking like they’re trying too hard, these portals may also add a more personalized touch to the recruitment process.

Voyant

Voyant is launching a web-based financial software offering called Voyant @Home intended for individuals who want to gain “direct control over their financial health”. The software has been billed as particularly useful for generating “what if” scenarios and forecasts stemming from your current financial situation. Users can also use the service to track their financial goals.

For any aspiring guitarists out there, here is a site for you. iVideosongs is launching at DEMO today after two years in the making. It offers video tutorials on how to play guitar from world-class instructors, musicians and sidemen. You won’t find instruction videos from Slash here (yet), but there are guitar videos from Graham Nash, John Oates, and Alex Lifeson (the guitarist from Rush). This site seems to be aimed squarely at the aging Baby Boomer male who still wans to play guitar. And there are a lot of those. But, actually, anyone can learn from the videos, which are quite good. The videos are large and clearly show closeups of exactly what you need to do.

The startup was founded in 2006, and has raised $3 million in angel funding. It’s spent the past two years licensing rights to song libraries from all the major music publishers. The site offers some free tutorial videos, but most cost $5 (for instructor videos) or $10 (for artist videos). Compare this to $35 to $40 an hour for guitar lessons.

That’s the beauty of the Internet: you can be taught by the best instructors at a fraction of what they would charge you for a one-on-one session. With each download, you get one song, broken up into bite-sized chapters for learning a song’s intro, verse, chorus, bridge, and outro. Artist videos also include interiews where they talk about their influences, guitar-picking history, and inspiration for a particular song. The site is launching with a catalog of 50 songs, plus 25 free tutorials. By the end of the year, it hopes to have 1,000 different songs. Instructions for how to play the drums and keyboard are available as well.

Here are some more screen shots:

The DEMO conference is underway here in San Diego and some clear trends are emerging among the 67 exclusively selected companies presenting. Many of the products are just launched and still less developed than they could be, but they are exciting none the less. The following are some of the most prominent themes of the conference and my favorite examples of companies working in these directions.

Breaking it down

Lots of companies presenting are focused on making data and online objects more granular for portability and user manipulation.

Pluggd is demonstrating a new technology called HearHere, which uses speech recognition and semantic analysis to let users search inside audio files for key words and related terms that are displayed on a heat map for skipping to relevant parts of a podcast. I posted more details and a screen shot in this post on Pluggd.

BuzzLogic is showing off an enterprise social media tracker that’s been two years in development. It discovers and ranks influential blog posts and mainstream media stories about any topic of interest, displays circles of influence in a nice UI and tracks actions taken in response to emerging conversations by a team of users. Priced very low, the company gathers and presents the same kind of data that sophisticated search and RSS could acquire but in one place and a usable format. I think this could be a winner in the race to make the new web usable for non-technical users.

MindTouch is unveiling their DekiBox enterprise appliance that, among other things, extracts data from email messages and attachments with one click and places it in a secure wiki.

SportsStatz works with high schools and colleges around the country to capture video and stats on sporting events. The company provides cameras and software loaded laptops to the schools and the teams get free game tapes and stats. Just four seconds after real time, individual subscribers to the service can search inside games to find particular highlights and view them on the web or with a mobile device. Highlights from favorite players can be subscribed to and delivered automatically. Clips can be saved, shared and commented on in a social networking environment. The service is in early stages but has completed tracking one season of high school basketball in several states and aims to secure partnerships with 1000 schools by the end of the year. Though the site is still being developed, the company’s demo is really impressive and there’s a clear market for capturing and using content like this.

Pixsense uses a patent pending compression algorithm to compress multimedia files up to 85% and is targeting mobile content creation. Established companies from several sectors are expressing interest in the company and making mobile multimedia that much more lightweight is something everyone would love.

My Favorite:
Adaptive Blue launched its Blue Organizer out of beta at DEMO. A Firefox extension for social bookmarking, Blue Organizer combines its own ontology with your tags, lets you perform a very long list of functions with each item you’ve saved and does a lot of smart little things like gleaning tags from topical databases and bookmarking pages automatically once you’ve visited them three times. Social bookmarking is a crowded space, but for people who seek a well constructed tool that balances an intuitive user experience with features to please the power user, Blue Organizer may be a very good option. The beauty is in the details in this one.

Rolling Your Own

Personalization is a key goal for Web 2.0 and a number of companies are making it easier than ever for content providers to make it happen.

PrefPass is going live at DEMO and Adam Marsh’s service targets a key pain point online. Users identify URLs they like in an anonymous profile. PrefPass extracts tags from those pages that are used to generate personalized content on participating sites that would otherwise offer either a dreaded registration requirement (which makes a site the opposite of sticky) or impersonal advertisements and supplemental content. When users go to a participating page, they can click the PrefPass badge to grant access to their anonymous list of preference tags and the site can then offer targeted content or ads. You can see PrefPass in action, sorting TechCrunch posts to your particular tastes at CustomCrunch.com.

NanoLearning is an easy way to make educational games or training modules in Flash. Users provide the content (text, graphics, audio, video, questions and answers) and NanoLearning provides the templates and forms to create your modules. Here’s one example, but I can imagine lots of people rapidly developing tutorials and interactive presentations with this tool.

My favorite:

Widget marketplace Widgetbox just keeps coming up with more ways for publishers to embrace the small pieces loosely jolned ethic and pull live data into their websites. The Hummer Winblad company now lets users place on piece of code on their sites to create a widget field that can then be managed by drag and drop to move any of 200 widgets on and off of the published page. Today the company showed me a browser sidebar popup that lets site visitors continue to interact with your widgets even if they leave a particular URL. For more details check out our initial review of Widgetbox. Widgets might have a silly name (and Cute Overload is right now one of the most subscribed widgets on the site) but just like blogging changed the world by letting non-technical users publish original content easily online, so too are widgets a harbinger of a new era when users are mixing and mashing dynamic data from all around the web.

Let’s talk untethered

Some of the most interesting companies are launching services that will enable communication beyond previous limitations.

JaJah released a mobile product at DEMO that lets users make very low cost VOIP calls through their mobile phones. See Mike Arrington’s longer review of this launch and last night’s news about competitor SoonR’s partnership with WebEX to enable mobile web conferencing.

Flurry is showing off their service that lets more than 200 Java enabled mobile phone provide simple push email and read RSS feeds.

TotalView is unveiling an enterprise VOIP video conferencing product called BeHere that captures a 360 degree view of conference rooms and provides easily configured views on each participant’s desktop. Users can share the view of applications across the system. I wish that the company was doing a lot more with the technology, like offering actual file transfer, chat back channels and conference recording – but the product as it stands is in a good position to be distributed through resellers to VOIP enabled conference rooms everywhere. They’ve raised $7 million in Series A funding, are nearing the end of a B round and will sell the service for less than $2000. It definitely beats a VOIP speaker phone.

My favorite:
Grand Central uses VOIP and a web interface to provide one phone number that can route calls by incoming number to any phone of your choice, manage voice mail on the web, record calls and much more. From the execs harkening from Yahoo! acquired DialPad, GrandCentral has a long and impressive feature set that I reviewed here.

Other companies that a lot of people are talking about at the conference include SystemOne, an enterpise wiki CMS that analyzes your documents as you write and searches for related keywords on the web, in your feeds, files and the rest of the wiki. I reviewed SystemOne a few weeks ago. Koral is another hot topic; it’s an enterprise CMS that offers drag and drop file organizing, recommended tags and IM notification if a user accesses an out of date version of any shared file. Wallop, the Microsoft spin-off social networking service, is obviously a hot topic as well.

All of the companies selected to present at DEMO are worth a look – here’s the list and videos. Excitement is in the air here and the innovation is tangible.