Going to DEMO 09, I had some strange feelings. Gone are the photo-sharing websites, and the mainly consumer-ploys of prior DEMOs. Instead, it was business. Business may mean connecting the dots of social not-working into manageable mobility profiles, or it might mean an internal twitter system.

But whether social not-working or web applications, the tone and tenor was business. No more ice cream dispensing machines, or laser machines that scanned your body and cut custom jeans for you. No, this was biz. And lots of it.

I’ve seen other columnists try to tell the DEMO organization (or their readers) how to change DEMO for the better, now that long-time producer Chris Shipley is leaving, and the regime changes over to Matt Marshall, who’s the publisher of VentureBeat. I guess somehow we’re supposed to pontificate about what DEMO should be. I’m not going to do that. The event is up to them, not me. I don’t have to pay their bills or attract their audience. They do.

What I found at DEMO was interesting in that the investment community heavyweights were there, en masse. The press wasn’t there. Many notable people were missing, although a few of the regulars came with big smiles on their faces. Has TechCrunch caused a loss of interest in DEMO? I don’t think so. Instead, publishers are very scared of revenue shortages– cutting budgets– and the press in general is in deep depression….. that is, those of us left. Reporters were missing; even the bloggers weren’t there in the droves that they have been in previous years. Nonetheless, I did an interview with Chris Shipley.

Yes, the event had a smaller head count. It’s to be expected in this economy. But I liked the focus. I liked the directness. I liked the added value. I didn’t care if a presenter was from HP with a new product, or from a tiny startup with a new product. New Products is the theme, along with the trends provided by them. Microsoft could have launched Windows 7, or Apple could have launched Snow Leopard here. They’re new products, and market-makers.

Below are Tom’s Picks as to the products that I really like. No specific order is implied.

EMO Labs: Not What You Think

Were I to predict the organizations that will get the most revenue in the next ten year, it’s likely to be EMO Labs. Why? They make a flat panel sound system that fits over the screen of LCD, Plasma, TFT, and other flat panel technologies. There’s a piezo-electric transducer system in the frame surrounding the film, making the film vibrate sound, so that the sound actually appears to be coming from the speaker on the face of the screen. As it doesn’t reproduce well below 200hz, there are micro-woofers in the design (low frequency sounds here aren’t locatable and therefore the stereo effect is lost in the ear) to complete the system. What happens? No more bad speakers in HDTV and notebook designs.

EMO’s system is ready today, but will be perfected in the next several years for truly mass consumption. Given the number of possible consumers, this one is big, and the advance while not revolutionary, completes the cure to several design problems – and benefits the ear.

HP’s SkyRoom

HP showed SkyRoom (actually they were first up at the show) for high resolution web conferencing. The video conferencing market has been around for more than a decade, and there are literally dozens of choices available for conferencing and realtime document sharing, WebEx, ooVoo, Adobe, and others have varying pieces of this market. HP’s ‘serverless system is actually more appropriately compared to Skype, and has very high resolution document and video camera sharing capabilities.

Oh, and it’s free to $149, depending on whether it came with your newly purchased HP computer. It’s otherwise operating system and application agnostic. How it will work, we’ll see.

The second set of new billionaires from DEMO Fall 09 are clever bunch of people from Micello. Micello has an easily understandable value proposition: the last mile and perhaps few feet in the online mapping world— especially when that’s connected to something like Google Maps.

Drilling down to a shopping center, as was Micello’s DEMO example, doesn’t really go indoors. Imagine viewing a map of the inside of the shopping mall– repleat with store names and so on. Further the imagination to see queries about the mall, as in “mens shoes”. Perhaps tagging might also allow an online coupon to be downloaded to a personal phone or device for incentive and use. Maybe even small commercials could be attached if desired.

The imagination goes crazy. Floor plans in schools and hospitals. Emergency exit plans. Classroom maps. Hiking trails. In all, these can be tagged with outside and satellite maps to the indoor maps.

I worry for these guys that they get the right management teams to do well. It’s nice to shake hands with billionaires when they’re still broke. Micello won’t be broke for long.

WhoDoYouKnow@

is a more dangerous app, as it connects people together and allows users to rate trust. Your contact book could be searched through. It’s ugly that way. Ugly because networks of people are like ancient Rolodexes– people guard them sometimes with their lives for their relative value. It’s more difficult to keep information ‘proprietary’ with this system.

More later…..