At the venerable DEMO Conference this week in Palm Desert, Calif., cloud computing took center stage as several vendors showed off new business-oriented products and services.
The conference, which features extremely brief presentations of new products and services from small (and sometimes large) companies, has been the launching pad for a number of hit products over the years.
Among the successful products whose future began with a five or six-minute showcase at DEMO are some of today’s most significant players, including Adobe Acrobat, Salesforce.com, E-Trade and WebEx.
Though it was founded on consumer technologies, the conference also features technologies that have a decidedly IT orientation. In fact, this winter’s show has a separate category for cloud computing products and services.
For instance, the
Cloud9 IDE from Ajax.org provides an integrated development environment for writing and debugging cloud-based applications.
“The first-ever cloud-based IDE for JavaScript developers, supporting HTML5, Python, Ruby and PHP, Cloud9 enables Web developers to access, edit and share projects anywhere, anytime,” the company said in a statement.
Stratosphere from V3 Systems will support as many as 400 virtual desktops in a two rack unit server. The company claims that its virtual desktops use only one-thirtieth of the power and cost less than other virtual desktop systems.
Aside from the cloud computing focus, many of the products on exhibit take advantage of social media as well.
For instance, websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) launched a security package that protects Facebook users from attackers posting unwanted content on their sites.
Meanwhile, startup Kuggaa provides a cloud-based service that enables subscribers to create, edit and display mobile content across multiple devices.
“Kuggaa offers manufacturers a complete ecosystem, which offers a diverse service, relevant content, fun applications and a simple user experience across a range of device form factors,” the company said in a statement.
In addition, ApSynth focuses on providing a platform-as-a-service (PaaS), which it targets toward an audience that needs to build applications without IT talent.
ApSynth aims for bloggers, as well as Web content creators and Web agencies. “Those apps are made to be shared, embedded on websites, blogs and social networks,” an ApSynth statement said.
Stuart J. Johnston is a contributing writer at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals. Follow him on Twitter @stuartj1000.
