DEMO: iTunes Cleanup, Home Biomass Generator

I missed yesterday's opening sessions of the Demo Fall 2010 conference, which was mostly focused on cloud technologies, but this morning focused on consumer technologies, including a neat iTunes add-in, a way of transcribing and sharing voice calls and meetings, a replacement for magnetic strips on credit cards, and a fascinating tool for converting biomass into electricity for your home.

Tune-Up Media  has an interesting plug in for iTunes that automatically identifies songs you try to enter into iTunes.By using the Gracenote database, it identifies the music, and then can correct and clean up your library, fixing typos in song names, etc. Already the company has 1.5 million users. It also can add things like cover art. What's new now is a sidebar called "Tuniverse" that easily lets you share information about your music collection to your social network, such as Facebook, an alternative to Apple's own Ping. One neat feature lets you know which artists in your collection are playing concerts near you. New features coming include song deduplication and lyrics. I've long thought this was a great looking application, and it looks to be getting even better.

VoiceBase  treats voice mail conversations, or indeed any audio recording, just like email. It uses voice recognition to let you search through your voice messages as if they were text messages; and then you can view it as a transcription or hear the message.You can also share messages with others, just like sending email (with users getting links to the content) and sharing via things like Twitter and Facebook.You can upload voice messages to VoiceBase easily from your computer or from iPhone or Android devices.The system offers free transcription and one year storage; or for more fees, better transcription and longer storage. For voice mail, my guess is this kind of feature is more likely to end up integrated into a unified communication system; but for general meetings, like voice conference, it could be very cool.

Dynamics, Inc. showed its "Card 2.0," a replacement for the existing magnetic stripe on your credit card and on readers.The new cards actually have processing power on the cards, allowing them to be much more flexible.One demo included a multiple account card, so you could just click one button on the card to change it from a credit card to a debit card.Another let you enter a pin directly on the card whenever you use it, so the full number is not actually stored on it at all, allowing for better security. The new cards are meant to be as durable as existing ones; and are backwards compatible with the existing magnetic card readers.I thought this looked quite good.

E-Fuel showed MicroFueler, which converts organic waste into Ethanol, and then showed its GridBuster generator, which then converts it into electricity for your home. The company says it can convert biomass into electricity for 2.2 cents per kilowatt, much less than gird electrical costs.What's new here is a very simple device that the company says can convert biowaste into fuel very quickly, much like the home fusion generator from Back to the Future. I don't have any idea if this really works, but it's sure fascinating.

Perchora Technologies showed GoToCamera,  which lets you use your existing web cams on computers as security cameras.What seems to make this different is that it is supposed to be much easier to set up; and with a sharing service over the Internet that starts at free for a single camera, with inexpensive additions for more cameras.

HealthinReach  makes it easier to search for doctors, learn about their experience and skills;compare prices, and make appointments.The idea seems cool, but the big challenge will be getting all the information.So far there doesn't seem to be enough data on the site.

Independa  offers Angela, an Androidbased tablet aimed at caregivers for elderly users.The device is designed to monitor the environment within a home, remind the older person of appointments and medicines, and allow the caregiver to monitor what is going on, get alerts if things are wrong, etc..It includes basic things like web browsing, Facebook, and email. The concept sounds good, but I wonder if the product isn't trying to do too much; and if many of the people in the target market already have other solutions.

Primal Pages aggregates content from across the web, letting you automatically create web pages based on specific topics.It lets a publisher create pages easily, and then lets readers look at the pages and create other pages on the same topic, with the idea that it will engage readers more. It seems designed more as a way of augmenting presentations or existing web sites.

Semantifi is a search engine platform designed for searching data rather than web pages.The onstage demos looked good, and I was particularly happy with its way of showing information as charts.The company has taken a lot ofdata from the web and put in its format; and offers a way for the community or other publishers to add data; for instance, making commercial data sets for financial information available in friendly format. It looked quitegood, but my guess is it will make more sense as a part f other services than as a stand alone web site.

Uvisor.com  is a job search web site aimed atjob seekers that includes things such as resume writing and a number of tools that help you narrow your search by focusing on your strengths, where jobs are, etc.The goal is to be more customized than other job search sites, which is a nice idea, but it's a very crowded market.

Veebeem  has a device you plug into your TV, that then connects your PC or laptop to your television.It can do "screencasting" from the device to the TV, as in Intel's Wireless Display technology; and can also stream content from hard drives onto the TV at 1080p. It seemed ok, and at $99, it's well priced;but I've seen all sorts of devices in this market that look pretty good recently, including those from Orb, the new Boxee Box from D-Link, and solutions for sharing from hard drives from companies like Seagate and Western Digital. Still, this does combine some tools in a different way.

Originally posted to Michael Miller's blog, Forward Thinking.