DEMOblog

While the show may be officially “over,” there’s still a lot of commenting to go on as we all digest the demos and products that we saw over the past two days. Here’s a bunch of companies and demos that impressed me on Day 2:

Boston-Power launched its SONATA battery, which can not only match the lifespan of a notebook (solves battery fade problems), but also delivers a 50% increase in recharge time for laptop users. If you run your notebook on batteries a lot (I tend to bring my power adapter with me as much as possible), having a faster recharge time and a non-fading battery is quite impressive. It also looks like the company can use this technology to go beyond notebooks and use this for other mobile devices that take batteries (well, pretty much anything).

I’m not the target market for BUZ Interactive, but their GetaBUZ.com Web site and service could appeal to mobile phone users who enjoy buying ring tones. The service lets you add music to your voice mail messages that you send to other people, as well as your own voice mail message for people who are calling you. While the company doesn’t yet have the song ‘Funky Town’, I was able to use the service to send a BUZ message to my wife for Valentine’s Day, since you can schedule your messages for delivery at another time (shh, don’t tell her).

Boorah showed off its restaurant review service, which aggregates a bunch of restaurant reviews from other locations around the Internet, including blog postings. The company launched its service in three major cities (San Francisco, L.A. and New York), but other cities are likely to be added as the community is developed.

I’m intrigued by Nexo Systems, which aims to make “Groups” type Web sites easier to create and manage. The user interface and tools offer the latest in rich media, integrated e-mail, social networking and real-time group collaboration. Features include a shared calendar, forums, tasks, blog writing abilities, RSS feeds, polling, shared videos and even file sharing. While the Web site features competition from other established group sites (like Yahoo! Groups and Google Groups), this should still appeal to people who might not be on those sites.

Blinkx finished off the event with a good demo that gives blog creators and other sites the ability to add context-relevant videos to their posts. The system looks easy to use and can only add to the number of videos that users consume.