Cool New Apps to be Shown at DEMO

DEMO is a tech event all about unveiling new technologies.

In some past iterations I've found semi-interesting apps, but not all that much I considered to be very innovative uses of broadband.

Well I just came upon this NetworkWorld feature that highlights ten new products about to be unveiled at DEMO '08, three of which I thought worthy of sharing:

iVideosongs
They're not the first site I've com across trying to establish itself in the music instruction business, but they've got established musicians involved with famous groups like the Allman Brothers Band and 3 Doors Down. Plus they're very much focused on delivering high quality (and therefore bandwidth-intensive) video.

While they seem primarily involved with delivering on-demand video, it'll be interesting to see if/how they incorporate other broadband applications like live video and two-way video into their offerings as they get off the ground.

EyeAlike
I don't usually tout technologies geared towards fighting piracy, but I thought this worth mentioning as its mechanism for doing so is a visual search engine. So they're claiming the ability to identify what a video is by scanning the video itself rather than relying on textual metadata that describes what's in the video.

Visual search is something I first encountered with a company called Imaginestics, who I got out to Fort Wayne, IN to present at the Killer App Expo last year. In talking with their CEO, I learned that processing a visual search requires massive amounts more bandwidth than a text search through a site like Google. We're talking about ten times more bandwidth at least.

Xtranormal
Here's one of the cooler things I've seen in a while. It's a site that will allow you to create movies using 3D avatars and real-life video quickly and easily.

Looking at the videos on their site the concept still seems somewhat rudimentary, but I can see so much potential in what they're attempting, basically allowing anyone to create and share a movie over the Internet from their computer without any special training.

When I think about how much money is often spent to produce 3D animations for training and corporate uses, it seems like this endeavor might revolutionize that, and in so doing make it accessible to a much broader range of use cases. Definitely an app worth keeping an eye on.