@LARGE
Demo-gods

By Scott Kirsner  Link to bio

It's terribly unfortunate that neither of us is at the Pointe Hilton Tapatio Cliffs Resort in Phoenix this week.

We could be playing golf at the par-72 Lookout Mountain Golf Club, exploring the Sonoran Desert on horseback, luxuriating in an herbal body wrap at the spa, or getting a first look at the technology world's newest innovations.

This week, the resort hosts Chris Shipley's annual DEMO Conference. It's one of the most important tech confabs of the year - the Palm Pilot and Java software were first shown in public at DEMO. Shipley carefully screens more than 800 new products and services from technology companies big and small, and selects 76 to debut at DEMO before they're shown anywhere else. And among the chosen this year are eleven promising Boston-area startups.

One of them is Expound, the company run by David Lord, former CEO of Toysmart.com. (The last time I wrote about Lord and Expound in this column, the company was called Navlex Corp.) Expound's software agent can have an intelligent electronic dialogue with a Web user, walking her through a product set-up process, offering online help, or advising her on the perfect fly-fishing rod for a beginner. Unlike the search engine Ask Jeeves, which lets users conduct searches by asking questions, Expound's software can ask you a series of questions about what you want to guide you to the right information or product.

Lord's backer at Toysmart - Disney - pulled the plug last spring when it got cold feet about consumer e-commerce and Toysmart's burn rate. (Given the recent demise of eToys, Disney now seems prescient.) When Lord picked his next opportunity, he hooked up with two established companies that he figured were long-term believers in technology: chipmaker Intel and the speech recognition firm Lernout & Hauspie.

Originally, Expound was a joint venture between the two, with Intel holding 51 percent of the equity. When Lernout & Hauspie began to attract SEC scrutiny and eventually was forced to declare bankruptcy, Intel decided that it didn't want to fund Expound on its own. In December, Lord and his colleagues had to decide whether they wanted to shut the company down or look for outside funding.

"We had to sit down as a company," he says. "We had to ask whether we really thought we could be the major player in this space. That's what you need to believe to get investors. You can't be the No. 5 player."

The team at Expound, which now includes several veterans of both Toysmart and Lernout & Hauspie, felt they could make a dent in the market for what Lord calls "active, intelligent dialogue." Intel will keep a small stake in the company, and Lord will be talking with several prospective investors while he's in Phoenix this week.

Two other local companies that want to help people navigate the Web more easily will also be at DEMO: LingoMotors and Endeca. Endeca, known until recently as OptiGrab, seems to be the more focused of the two, with a technology geared to helping shoppers navigate their purchase options in a complex domain like mutual funds. Endeca's old name was borrowed from the Steve Martin movie "The Jerk." Its new name comes from the German word "entdecken," which means "to discover."

Another company presenting at this year's edition of DEMO, Maynard-based Tilion, takes its name from a J.R.R. Tolkein novel. "[The character] Tilion is a steersman of the moon who creates light from darkness," explains CEO Chris Stone.

Tilion's software is intended to illuminate a company's supply chain. "We're going to use the Sony PlayStation 2 shortage as an example at DEMO," Stone says. "If Sony [could have seen] the inventory levels at the chip manufacturer that makes the graphics accelerator [chip] for PlayStation 2, they would have known they had a problem much earlier than they did. They could have reduced their marketing, or spun up a contract manufacturer or another plant. It's a classic example of what can go wrong with the supply chain, and it happens every day with lots of companies."

Stone isn't at DEMO looking for financing; he raised $36 million in late November. Instead, he's seeking "buzz creation." Stone believes that as technology purchases at big companies slow because of the cooling economy, Tilion needs name recognition. If he can achieve that, and prove that Tilion's "commerce chain transparency" can save companies money, Stone will have a hot company on his hands.

One of the flat-out coolest products to be unveiled at DEMO comes from a small Wellesley company called Digital Ink. The n-scribe pen lets you translate anything you write or draw into a digital file. Your handwriting can then be uploaded via cable or infrared connection to a cell phone, handheld computer, or a laptop. A cocktail napkin sketch sent to a cell phone could then be faxed or e-mailed, for example, or accessed later on the Web. The n-scribe is expected to cost about $100, and will be on the market by fall. Also at DEMO 2001: iRobot of Somerville will bring the iRobot-LE, a home robot that's controllable over the Internet. Ed Takacs will show off PeopleStream, a kind of closed-circuit job referral network in which groups of people can help each other fill positions. Rohit Arora and D.P. Singh will exhibit adAlive, a system that lets billboard advertisers in airports offer e-mail access and free information, like city guides, to users of handheld computers via a small beaming device attached to the billboard. AdAlive now has its first set of billboards up and running at JFK Airport in New York.

RemoteReality Corp. of Westborough has an "omni-directional imaging system" that lets Web users see not just a 360-degree panorama of an environment, but also everything above and below them - blind spots for existing technologies. Envoy Worldwide's MessageBlaster product lets companies communicate with employees or customers over the right device at the right time, whether it's a cell phone, Palm, fax, or pager. Acallto, founded by Allen Razdow and Franklin Reece, helps businesses and individuals manage incoming phone calls over the Web.

DEMO goddess Shipley, who may not have time this week for horseback riding, contends that despite the continuing shakeout, good ideas haven't gone extinct. She calls this year's conference "proof that the technology industry is entering a period of solid growth and innovation." And she says Boston-based companies are playing an important part.

"The history of the Boston area is about really fundamental technologies that deliver real value," says Shipley. "You didn't have engineers leaving Digital to go start Cheese.com. Boston may never have hit the peak of all the dot-com frothiness, but that also means it's less likely to feel the worst of the trough."

Especially if we're all out in Phoenix, playing golf.

Scott Kirsner is a Boston freelance writer and a contributing editor at Wired and Fast Company magazines.