At DEMO Spring 2010, executive producer Matt Marshall announced the products recognized with DEMO awards, as well as the audience-selected favorite. The prize included $1 million in IDG advertising. The winners spanned mobile apps, social networking for children, cloud contact sync, consumer electronics, restaurant software, a Facebook fashion concept, and voice analytics for call centers.
Zosh: Document Signing on an iPhone
Zosh is an iPhone app that lets users sign documents without a scanner or fax machine. It works with PDF, Office, and image files.
The process is straightforward: open an attachment from email and send it to Zosh locally; open the document in Zosh and sign by hand; then merge the signature into the document as a layer.
Everloop: A Social Network for Ages 8 to 13
Everloop is a social networking app aimed at children between 8 and 13. It is currently a white-label product—developed by one company but repackaged and marketed by others—and is expected to operate independently soon.
Gwabbit Cloud Sync: Contact Data from Email
Gwabbit has already won the DEMO God award twice. Its new product, Gwabbit Cloud Sync, extracts sender information from Outlook and BlackBerry email, then saves and syncs it through the Gwabbit service.
Phone Halo: Tags That Watch Over Valuables
Phone Halo uses electronic tags to keep track of a phone, keys, wallet, and other valuables, alerting users when they are at risk of losing them and reducing the likelihood of loss.
It works roughly like this: attach sensor-equipped electronic tags to valuables; install the Phone Halo app on a phone; when the user forgets any tagged item—meaning the phone can no longer sense the other items—the phone sounds an alarm. If the user does not hear the alarm, the phone can email friends or family so they can remind the user about the forgotten item.
Phone Halo's own forecast—or perhaps its hope—was that in 2010, one in five people in the United States would lose a phone, one in ten would lose a wallet, and one in four would lose keys. That suggested a sizable market.
BlueSkies Hospitality Restaurant 2.0: Software for Restaurants
BlueSkies Hospitality Restaurant 2.0 is a restaurant-industry solution, primarily competing with OpenTable.
TAGtheLOOK: Fashion Tagging on Facebook
TAGtheLOOK from UppyMedia is a concept product: a Facebook app that lets users tag fashion photos of themselves or friends and share those tags with others to show off their style. The app could create potential business opportunities for online fashion stores.
MagInify Call Center: Decoding Customer Mood
MagInify from eXaudios decodes the sound and tone of a customer's speech to gauge whether the customer's mood is good or bad. This helps call centers and customer-service agents analyze and measure service quality and identify shortcomings. MagInify Call Center was the audience-selected product.
