NEW YORK TIMES --- February 15, 2001
STATE OF THE ART: Technology's Ultimate Road Show
by David
Pogue
PHOENIX -- IN 1990, Stewart Alsop, the technology analyst,
noticed that the real fun of computer conventions wasn't in the marketing mania
at the booths on the show floor. Instead, he was far more intrigued by the one-
on-one demonstrations of coming technologies conducted in hallways and hotel
rooms during the off hours. Imagine how exciting it would be, he thought, to
attend a computer show consisting exclusively of those sneak peeks at the near
future of computing.
The result of his brainstorm was Demo, an annual
two-day conference attended by 800 analysts, executives, reporters and
investors, their belts clanking with pagers, cell phones and Palms. The
highlight of the event is a show that resembles a traditional computer show
turned inside out. Instead of milling around booths, the spectators watch in
comfort, with water and peanut M&M's on the hotel-ballroom tables before
them, as nervous presenters on a stage demonstrate their works in progress.
Each audience member has paid $3,000 for the chance to spot industry trends,
get a preview of the next big thing or find a brilliant start-up worth
investment dollars.
They're almost guaranteed a good show. Each year,
the show's producers, Chris Shipley and Jim Forbes, screen applicants from 800
technology companies. Only 76 are invited to set up kiosks (for $10,000 each)
in the Demo exhibition pavilion. Of those, 32 are offered the coveted chance to
strut their stuff onstage, in the fervent hope of winning press coverage,
business deals or investment money. Demo, in other words, is a digital version
of "A Chorus Line."
For those lucky 32 presenters, the rules are rigid:
No PowerPoint slide shows. No previously announced products. And no
demonstration lasting more than six minutes. A timer facing the stage ticks
down for the presenter's benefit; if the allotted time is exceeded, music
swells, as though cutting off a droning Academy Awards acceptance speech.
(There's a good- natured rule for spectators, too: if a cell phone rings during
the demonstrations, the producers get to keep it.)
Over the years,
plenty of products unveiled at this show have become household names (at least
in the households of geeks): Java, the Be operating system, Etrade.com and,
most famously, the original Palm Pilot.
Elite shows like Demo serve as
useful barometers of the technological culture of their eras. In its first
incarnation, in 1991, the trend visible at Demo was personal productivity
software; in 1996, it was Internet tools; in 1999, of course, it was
e-commerce. At this year's Demo conference, which took place here Feb. 11-13,
the theme seemed to be "Picking Up the Pieces."
After a year in which
high-tech stocks plummeted, flimsy Web sites shut down and investment dollars
evaporated, Demo 2001 featured fewer Silicon Valley celebrities in the
audience, a greater ratio of established companies to start-ups, fewer senior
partners from venture capital firms and, among the showcased companies, not a
single consumer Web site.
"With the chaff blown away, what we're left
with is a real foundation on which to build the industry," Ms. Shipley said in
her opening remarks. "You won't see a lot of companies here with `dot com' in
their names. All of the companies here have real and reasonable roads to
revenue."
That may be, but some of those roads appear to be little more
than dotted lines on the map.
For example, a company called 2ce
unveiled what seems to be the answer to a question nobody has asked: a browser
that shows six Web pages simultaneously, distorted to fit the inner walls of a
virtual cube on your PC screen. You can read only one of them (on the cube wall
facing you); to switch Web pages, you rotate the cube - a system that will
appeal primarily to people who haven't discovered the Favorites menu of
Internet Explorer.
Another product not coming soon to a store near you
is iRobot, a three-foot-tall, self-propelled machine that could be the weird
out-of-town cousin of R2-D2 from "Star Wars." (Estimated price is $20,000; a
smaller consumer model for $2,000 is planned for 2002.) You can operate this
robot by remote control from any Web browser, guiding it by watching the video
from its nose-cone camera. There's plenty of ingenuity on display - the fancy
model can even climb stairs - but when describing the machine's practical
value, the iRobot presenter cheerfully suggested that you could use iRobot to
check in on elderly relatives or inspect storm-damaged vacation homes.
On the other hand, many of this year's Demo prototypes show distinct
commercial promise. Using software called FileFish, for example, a traveler can
open and edit Microsoft Word files on the PC at home or at work - from a Web
browser, a Palm VII wireless organizer or even a cell phone. SmartMusic (from
Net4Music) is synthesized orchestral accompaniment software that follows the
changing tempos of a rehearsing musician. And Majestic, from Electronic Arts,
is sure to be the "Survivor" of computer games when it is released later this
year: It's an immersive technothriller whose fictional characters reach out to
touch you, the player, with real e-mail, faxes and even phone calls. (Links to
the Web sites of all Demo 2001 presenters are posted at
www.demo.com/2001/onsite.html.)
Not all the Demo 2001 exhibitors were
unknown, garage-based companies; for example, a self-described "wireless
start-up called Microsoft" unveiled a e-mail tool that will forward urgent
messages to wireless gadgets. Jeff Hawkins, inventor of the Palm Pilot and
chief executive of Handspring, demonstrated two new snap-in cartridges for his
company's Visor palmtops. One, called EyeModule 2, is a camera that takes
high-quality photos and low-quality silent movies. The other, Presenter-to-Go,
is a tiny module that you can load with PowerPoint presentations from your PC.
By attaching a projector to it, you can then conduct a slide show by tapping
the screen of your Visor. ("You can leave your laptop back at the office," his
co-presenter noted. "It's the quickest way I know to lose five pounds.")
But seeing the prototypes of new products is only half the value of
Demo; after all, if history is any guide, many of them will never see the light
of day. For the spectators, there are bigger lessons to be gained from watching
these wannabes exploit their six minutes of fame.
First, it's clear
that engineering talent and showmanship are sometimes mutually exclusive. Most
of the presentations were polished, if not especially entertaining. But despite
free preshow coaching by the Demo management, several other presenters forgot
their memorized lines, freezing in mid- sentence like sixth graders performing
"The Wizard of Oz." Some completely forgot to say what their products do.
Other demonstrators may have known the purpose of their prototypes but
weren't able to communicate it in English. One talked about "a framework that
delivers a platform." Another said his product was "a next-generation content
distribution and caching infrastructure that allows co-location providers and
managed hosting companies to optimize bandwidth utilization."
A second overarching lesson of events like Demo - as
though we needed reminding - is just how difficult it is to make technology
work flawlessly. Crashed computers, error messages and even dead microphones
are part of the game at shows like this. It's a standard joke at Demo that you
should never go onstage without first making the proper sacrifices to the Demo
Gods.
One year, Ms. Shipley said, the inventor of a cell-phone
speech-recognition product barked commands into his phone for several agonizing
minutes, but the system never did recognize his voice. "It's not unusual to see
a tech guy on hands and knees behind the podiums, unbeknown to the audience,"
she added, "rebooting systems and shutting down embarrassing screen
savers."
But the ultimate lesson of Demo is one of inspiration. The
technology landscape is littered with the ashes of the tech boom. Venture
capitalists no longer fling certified checks at any 22-year-old senior vice
president they meet (maybe because there aren't any left to meet). And perhaps
a third of last year's Demo presenters have already disappeared.
Yet
despite their dwindling chances of striking it rich, here they are, designers
and engineers from all over the world, doggedly pushing ahead with their
inventions. There's something uplifting about the way they pitch their visions,
even the obviously flawed ones. It's easy to believe that with so many people
using technology to hammer away at the problems and inconveniences of modern
life, some will sooner or later succeed.
Even if there are no robots or
cubed Web browsers in our future, there will always be good ideas bubbling to
the top, with passionate entrepreneurs behind them - and that may be Demo's
most successful demonstration of all.
Copyright 2001 The New York Times
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