icarebiz.com

(Note #2: I have replaced one my original picks due to a press embargo error on my part.)

The DemoFall and TechCrunch50 conferences launch Monday. Demo’s posted its list of it 72 presenting companies. TechCrunch will post a part of its list, we’re told, at 6 a.m. Monday.

The DemoFall companies:

Rafe’s Top 10 previews from Demo
(Please note that I haven’t talked to all these companies yet, so my understanding of these pitches is incomplete, and my post-conference Top list will likely be different.)

The DemoFall lineup is after the jump…

See full Launch Week coverage of DemoFall and TechCrunch.

You can see the full Demo list at the end of this post. But here are the top 10 companies I’d be paying the most attention to if I were going to Demo (I’m going to TechCrunch with Josh; CNET News writers Elinor Mills and Daniel Terdiman will be at Demo). I’ll do a list, or lists, for TechCrunch too, time permitting.

Clintview by Clintworld: This is a financial analysis tool primarily for mobile phone carriers. It simulates customer behavior related to pricing and helps create pricing tiers and plans that generate the most revenue. It brings a disciplined approach to pricing services, which I think is smart. Might be applicable to paid Web services as well. CrowdSpring Private by CrowdSpring: The company is not new, but I still love the idea. It’s a new twist on the open marketplace for intellectual work. At Demo, the company will unveil CrowdSpring Private, which lets companies create their own, closed markets, so creativity doesn’t leak out onto the Web, heaven forbid. Infovell: Very interesting new search service. It lets you type in arbitrarily long queries, and then ranks results based on importance and frequency of word clusters. Also lets you use entire Web pages as queries, generating a “more like this” function that doesn’t currently exist. Could be great for researching complex medical or legal topics. Avego by Mapflow: Adds intelligence to casual carpooling with a
car-service-like gizmo that tells drivers where riders are that want to go where they are going. It’s hitchhiking 2.0: Scary but cool, and very green. PaidInterviews: Pays job candidates for going on interviews. Totally whacked economic model, if you ask me, but that makes it interesting. Plastic Logic: New science for electronic books, possibly competitive to existing e-Ink technology. Real chemistry at a start-up conference. What a breath of fresh air. SpinSpotter: Claims to spot bias and inaccuracies in news stories. Helpful, if it works. Although it will probably expode if pointed at the blogosphere. And who watches the watchmen? .tel by Telnic: One of several new companies that lets users create personal calling card Web sites using a new top-level-domain. I am highly skeptical of this model, but I want to see how it develops. WebDiet: Location-based diet helper. Gives you food advice based on what’s close to you. Unknown if it gives you an electric shock and shrieks, “Keep walking!” when you pass a McDonald’s. Xumii: Makes a service that access all your social sites from your mobile phone. Could be very useful for the younger, multiply-connected set.

Accordia Group, LLC
Adapx, Inc.
Alerts.com, Inc.
Arsenal Interactive, Inc.
Asyncast Corp.
Awind Inc.
beeTV
Best Buy
BizEquity Corp.
Blue Lava Technologies, Inc.
Cerego
Cinergix
Clintworld
CoreTrace Corp.
CrowdSpring, LLC
DesignIn, Inc.
Dial Directions, Inc.
DocCenter
Enterprise Informatics, Inc.
Familybuilder
ffwd.com, Inc.
Fortressware, Inc.
Fusion-io
G.ho.st
Green Sherpa Infovell, Inc. Intelius, Inc. Invision TV, LLC iWidgets, Inc. Kadoo Inc. Koollage, Inc. Mapflow, Ltd. Maverick Mobile Solutions, Pvt. Ltd.. MeDeploy Message Sling MeWorks, Inc. Microstaq, Inc. MixMatchMusic, Ltd. Momindum OpenACircle.com Paidinterviews, LLC Paragent, LLC Photrade, LLC PlanDone, Inc. Plastic Logic, Ltd. Qtask, Inc. Quantivo Corp. Radiant Logic, Inc. RealNetworks, Inc. Rebus Technology, Inc. RemoTV, Inc. Rudder, Inc. Semanti Corp. Sim Ops Studios, Inc. SitScape, Inc. SkyData Systems, Inc. SpinSpotter Telnic, Ltd. TetraBase LLC The Echo Nest Corp.. Tikitag, an Alcatel-Lucent Venture Toolgether TravelMuse Inc.
Trinity Convergence Inc. TurnTo Networks Inc.
UbiEst S.p.A. UGA Digital, Inc. Unity Solutions LLC Usable Security Systems Inc.
WebDiet Inc. Xumii Inc. Zazengo Inc.

The Amazon event, taking place at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York, is widely expected to feature the unveiling of a next-generation Kindle e-book reader. On Monday, The Wall Street Journal reported that Amazon also will say it has acquired a new work by King that would be exclusively for the Kindle.

An earlier Internet-publishing foray by King, Riding the Bullet, was a case study in Internet piracy.

The Journal says a Kindle-like device is a factor in the story. The work by King might later be published in physical book form by Scribner, King’s current publisher. (Scribner is an imprint of Simon & Schuster, which is owned by CBS, whose CBS Interactive unit is the publisher of CNET News.)

This wouldn’t be King’s first tech-related effort. During the dot-com boom, the best-selling author posted chapters of a serial novel, The Plant, on the Internet in a bid to see if readers would pay voluntarily for what they were reading. He suspended the work in late 2000 after the sixth installment.

Click here for more stories on Amazon’s Kindle.

When Amazon.com hosts its anticipated Monday morning e-book event, one of the highlights could be an exclusive deal for the Kindle with horror story master Stephen King.

All of that makes a lot of sense, providing a virtualized infrastructure with the software and hardware running separately but creating a complete environment.

I spoke to Barry about how 3Tera works and got a demo of the service. My overall impression is that this is a very powerful tool set that is way ahead of how people are utilizing cloud-based resources today. I’m just not sure that the approach is the right one for the masses.

Of course, the biggest question is if the cloud is anything more than “mainframe in a browser.”

Applogic provides a browser-based Visio-like UI that lets you create these “applications” by dragging in resources that create a definition file that describe the overall package. You don’t need to know anything about the infrastructure that an application or service is running on; you just need to define the level of resource availability and service level required.

3Tera’s CEO Barry X. Lynn wrote a guest post on ZDNet that got me wondering about how software companies can leverage tools that make the cloud more consumable for users and, specifically, enterprises. Lynn takes the view that operations will be abstracted completely from data in the future, which affects both enterprises and the software that they run their businesses on.

3Tera’s Applogic allows you to abstract the hardware from the software and adds a management layer. Anything that can run in a physical data center can run in an Applogic cloud without having to change any code.

With few reference points for enterprise cloud computing consumption, many new and interesting companies are popping up to make cloud resources available, with the aim of simplifying the processes.

While enterprises are growing comfortable with applications in clouds and realizing the upside of dynamic provisioning and scaling, they will be developing new applications and replacing/changing existing ones. They will start building the new applications in clouds and as they change existing applications, will consider migrating them to the cloud in the process. This will afford them the advantages of much faster time to market, the ability to run applications on demand in multiple data centers (globally if appropriate) creating their first truly complete disaster recovery abilities and concentrate on their core businesses which may be financial services, health care, manufacturing, etc., but certainly is not data center operations. (They will leave that to the companies whose core business IS data center operations.)

Applogic encapsulates all the virtual resources as “applications”–OS, apps, servers, etc., and let’s you superimpose the combined components as an image on a cloud or grid. Applogic will then consume the appropriate the resources from the underlying hardware and software.

The question in my mind is if this “virtualized layer” is what enterprises want. The other question is if cloud consumers will be interested in this type of Visio-like approach or will they just want to “mount” cloud resources that are managed from behind the firewall.

In an elaborate robbery scheme that’s one part The Thomas Crowne Affair and one part Pineapple Express, a crook robbed an armored truck outside a Bank of America branch in Monroe, Wash., by hiring decoys through Craigslist to deter authorities.

“I came across the ad that was for a prevailing wage job for $28.50 an hour,” one of the unwitting decoys, named Mike, said to the NBC station. As it turns out, they were simply placed there to confuse cops who were looking for a guy wearing a virtually identical outfit.

It appears to have unfolded this way, according to a Seattle-based NBC affiliate: around 11:00 a.m. PDT on Tuesday, the robber, wearing a yellow vest, safety goggles, a blue shirt, and a respirator mask went over to a guard who was overseeing the unloading of cash to the bank from the truck. He sprayed the guard with pepper spray, grabbed his bag of money, and fled the scene.

It gets better: He then escaped in a creek headed for the Skykomish River in an inner tube, and the cops are still looking for him. “A great amount of money” was taken, Monroe police said, but did not provide a dollar value.

But here’s the hilarious twist. The robber had previously put out a Craigslist ad for road maintenance workers, promising wages of $28.50 per hour. Recruits were asked to wait near the Bank of America right around the time of the robbery–wearing yellow vests, safety goggles, a respirator mask, and preferably a blue shirt. At least a dozen of them showed up after responding to the Craigslist ad.

Craigslist founder Craig Newmark was not immediately available for comment.

Authorities eventually found the getaway inner tube (a getaway inner tube!) and suspect that accomplices may have picked up the robber in a boat. According to the NBC affiliate, police hope to track him down by figuring out who posted the Craigslist ad in the first place.

A handful of standout new products have emerged from this week’s launch events in California: TechCrunch50 and Demo. Webware editor Rafe Needleman identifies the top five that could have what it takes to become popular and financially successful.

Listen now:

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Today’s stories:

The
CTIA Wireless show in San Francisco is in full swing and CNET editors have gotten their hands on lots of newly unveiled hardware like the LG Logic and HTC Touch Pro. Hear CNET senior editor Kent German’s assessment of the offerings and new trends in the mobile world.

One notable tweak is that the selection of an application by category on the iPhone will become easier, with wider fields for each category, such as Entertainment or Finance. Apple is also expected to add a “Report a Problem” button to the preview page for a single application.

(Credit: AppleInsider)

The newly detailed tweaks aren’t expected to arrive until 2.2 is fully baked, which is expected to take place at some point in October.

The iPhone 2.2 software is expected to come with a tweak to the App Store category fields, shown here.

Hot on the heels of the crucial iPhone 2.1 release, Apple appears to be getting ready to release another software update.

We’ve known that iPhone 2.2 has been coming for a while, with the primary change expected to involve making
Safari on the
iPhone look more like Safari on the
Mac. But AppleInsider has some details on how the interface for the App Store–perhaps the best thing and worst thing about iPhone 2.0–is expected to change.

Apple is making a few other subtle changes to the App Store, such as requiring that all reviews come from people who have actually purchased the application and listing “New” applications according to their original release date (instead of by the date of their most recent update).

But both reports note that a hook-up between the companies wouldn’t be a bad idea.

In an interview with All Things Digital, the Demand Media founder said: “There is a lot of potential here, and I want to build a big company for the long-term.”

Says TechCrunch:

Despite a hectic past two months fighting off a proxy battle with investor Carl Icahn, Yahoo is rumored to be sending out buyout feelers for social-networks company Demand Media.

It just so happens that what Demand Media is good at–generating lots of advertising impressions and creating niche social networks for media sites, may be a perfect fit for at least some of what ails Yahoo.

Yahoo’s Hilary Schneider, who was recently promoted to oversee the company’s U.S. go-to market operations, traveled to Demand Media’s Santa Monica, Calif., offices a couple weeks ago to gauge Demand’s interest in a $1.5 billion to $2 billion buyout, TechCrunch reports, citing unnamed sources.

But Demand Media didn’t bite, TechCrunch notes, adding that company founder Richard Rosenblatt is said to be seeking a price in the $3 billion range.

A post in All Things Digital casts a different perspective on that meeting.

All Things Digital also cites Yahoo sources as saying there has been “no offer floated” to acquire Demand Media.

But should Yahoo want to make a play for the company and force a deal, Demand Media doesn’t have the same pressures as Yahoo, which is in its own fix with Icahn. Demand Media isn’t publicly traded, at least yet…

Those stories and more in today’s podcast.

One analyst thinks the connectivity trouble some users are having with the
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A caravan of 11 vehicles kicked off the Hydrogen Road Tour in Portland, Maine, on Monday to educate U.S. consumers and policy makers about hydrogen and fuel-cell vehicles. Reporter Martin LaMonica checks in to explain how hydrogen-powered
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Today’s stories:

With the U.S. presidential election approaching, Tokoni (which means “help” in Tongan) has partnered with WomenCount.org to provide a forum for women to discuss political issues.

“We created Tokoni to fill the distinct need for an online community where individual stories of life’s experiences have a voice and are valued, and where the collective wisdom of the community is celebrated,” Kazim said in a release. “The growth of social media has enabled people to control how they create, consume, and share content and personal experiences online; however, participation in the social Web is still daunting to the mainstream. Tokoni makes sharing your own story easy.”

Indeed, as an adult-focused “community” site rather than a social network, Tokoni’s target audience is one that hasn’t caught on to the blogging and Twittering craze, and offers a more Luddite-friendly forum for conversation by encouraging the posting, reading, and discussing of personal stories and experiences. Another site with a similar slant is Gather.

Tokoni, a community site for “sharing stories,” has formally launched after nearly a year of public beta. It has taken investment backing from eBay as well as the auction giant’s founder, Pierre Omidyar, and was founded by former eBay executive Mary Lou Song and Alex Kazim, former president of the eBay-owned Skype. Kazim serves as Tokoni’s CEO.

“The Democracy Video Challenge asks budding filmmakers, democracy advocates, and the general public to create video shorts that complete the phrase, ‘Democracy is…’,” the contest’s official Web site explains. While they don’t require entrants to be professional filmmakers, it’s pretty clear that they’re looking for something more high-end than sitting in front of your Webcam and waxing philosophical about Barack Obama.

Called the Democracy Video Challenge, the contest encourages the submission of three-minute videos that define the concept of democracy.

There are very few rules: entrants must be 18 or older; the videos must be under three minutes long, “suitable for a general audience,” comply with YouTube’s terms of use, and either be in English or subtitled in English.

To mark the United Nations’ first-ever International Day of Democracy, the U.S. State Department launched a YouTube-based video contest on Monday.

Submissions will be accepted through January 31, and a jury will select semifinalists and then finalists. Seven winners, each one from a different global region, will be chosen by a public vote sometime in June. The winners will receive trips to New York, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles for screenings and meetings with film industry representatives and “democracy advocates.”

Partners in the contest include NBC Universal, the film schools at New York University and the University of Southern California, and the Directors Guild of America.