DEMO

We originally profiled Iterasi back in January when they launched at DEMO. The name Iterasi comes from the Portugese from iteration. The idea of the service is simple: save pages in their exact state for later use. The example is easy: you do a search on a site with an embedded Google map. You want to save the state of the Google map but currently if you favorite the page, you lose the actual map locations in the results. Iterasi saves the exact state of the page making it easy to come back to. It's not saving the live page, rather the current page at the time of the save.

The saved page is called a "notarization" and monetization comes from very specific ad targeting since the page is saved. They have also released a new widget. The widget gives people the ability to use iterasi to embed clickable thumbnail images of the pages they are saving.

The other announcement the company is making is Alex Williams is joining the team as the Director of Product Marketing. Alex most recently worked for SplashCast Media.

If you would like access to the public beta, sign up here.

This post isn't about all the mudslinging between Techcrunch/Mahalo and DEMO. It's not about who wants to kill who, who wants cement boots for the other. It's not about which conference is better for you to attend. It's not about which conference is better for a startup to launch at. That discussion is not for now.

I am sure that both conferences are considered successes by the respective participating companies. Startup visibility is a great thing that so many of us work on daily. This post is about one issue we are now faced with: overload. As many of you know by now, Techcrunch 50 (my bet is 80 as a final count) is now going heads on with DEMO. Both conferences have one day "off" and then the other two days now overlap. MORE »

Standout Jobs is a Canadian company presenting their service at DEMO this week. The service allows companies to create recruitment portals to help publicize their openings along with offering a better process for applicants. Having been through integrations with some of the largest HR systems, Standout Jobs is a breath of fresh air.

Standout Jobs positions themselves for startups and companies small enough to not need a full back-end system. Most startups just use an emailbox for resumes and applicants which can cause many issues down the road. The Standout Jobs system named RECEPTION includes the following:

• full career site - the typical career site with job listings, company information, benefit information, etc. There are also social media tools and principles, including video, blogging and widgets
• candidate management - this could be the best piece of the service as it allows you to pass the applications internally and add comments, rating, etc. It will keep the records for you
• job marketing - allows you to publicize the jobs in the system on other boards, offer feeds, etc.

The service is free for the first 90 days then it's offered starting at $149/month. I'd suggest they look at a lower price point for small startups - if they get in the door while the startup is small, they can grow with the startup and move them up in price point along the way. They might also look at partnering with the job boards that blogs offer to display jobs - would be a good way to beat Monster and the other large job boards/recruitment management services.

There are a few companies already signed up to use the service including FreshBooks and Jangl.

I've spent a good bit of time speaking with co-founder Benjamin Yoskovitz over the past few weeks and he is committed to making Standout Jobs the best career recruitment service. The difficult part will be in selling the service over not just using an emailbox for candidate management, especially for the smaller companies.

Iterasi is one of the presenting companies at DEMO this year. The name Iterasi comes from the Portugese from iteration. The idea of the service is simple: save pages in their exact state for later use. The example is easy: you do a search on a site with an embedded Google map. You want to save the state of the Google map but currently if you favorite the page, you lose the actual map locations in the results. Iterasi saves the exact state of the page making it easy to come back to. It's not saving the live page, rather the current page at the time of the save.

The saved page is called a "notarization" and monetization comes from very specific ad targeting since the page is saved. I immediately thought of delicious as I was going through the demo. But it's pretty different as delicious is about saving links to share and come back to later on while Iterasi saves a point in time. There is an open on a notarized page to visit the live site.

One of the cool features of Iterasi is the ability to schedule page saves - so you could look at your favorite sites, and save them every day our hour. I could see this being the cornerstone of their offering as it would be great for competitive research. The execs showed me their use case of people saving receipts as they make online purchases or travel; I don't see this as the true use for this tool.

My suggestion to Iterasi on the demo call was to look at creating public "notarizations" -- this could become the viral aspect to Iterasi and draw in new users. Currently pages are saved behind your login and can't be shared nor made public. I believe this is a mistake as it doesn't give a prospective user a chance to see what's inside nor does it give Iterasi a chance to leverage social media to get ahead.

The Iterasi team is made up of eight employees and eight contractors, and so far they have raised $1 million from angel investors.

We originally covered DEMO-presenting company Eyealike last November when they launched what I call the "hottie search". This was the tool that let you upload a photo of the hottie you want to date and Eyealike went out and found matches on the various dating services. Today Eyealike is back with a copyright tool called Eyealike Copyright which they claim will help media content producers quickly eliminate massive amounts of online copy infringement that result in losses of millions of royalty dollars everyday.

Greg Heuss, Eyealike president said, "Our goal is to help make copyrighted material 'scarce' to benefit producers like Viacom and offer 'insurance' to content expediters like YouTube/Google that need to more quickly determine 'fair use' content and distinguish between what's legal and what's not."

The Eyealike solution they say is unique in its ability to automatically analyze every aspect of video content simultaneously by image, motion, and face. Could this type of functionality be added to the image protection that Keibi currently does?

Pricing is based on a variety of factors and is available now. We need tools like this to help people maintain the works they create. It would be great to see a tool like this for bloggers, writers and journalists to find copied content along with photos and videos.

Blist is one of the companies presenting at DEMO this week and they hope to revolutionize the online database space. In the materials sent over, Blist notes: "Using Blist, non-technical users can structure and catalogue all types of information and then create communities around the public data they share. Blist is an optimal solution for creating anything from party or wedding guest lists, fantasy football statistics, and personal finances to professional information such as sales contacts, project milestones, campaign tracking, status reports, and more."

One of the features that's innovative is the ability to take columns of data that are in a date-driven format and turn them into a calendar. The tool also has some interesting advances in cell usage, but outside of that it appears to be somewhat overwhelming for the average user though less overwhelming than say using Microsoft Access.

The social features are the ability to share the databases you create along with helping you reduce redundancy by offering suggestings from the already-collected data. The share feature isn't new, Zoho offers it in their database tool and Google offers this functionality in their Docs applications.

No information on pricing has been provided yet. Founder and CEO has been sharing some of his trials and startup experiences on the Blist blog. They are also currently recruiting for a variety of developer positions.

Tomorrow begins one of the biggest industry conferences of the year, DEMO. It's like American Idol for startups in some regards as founders and CEOs get six minutes to woo the crowd and launch their products into fame and fortune. You can check out our previous DEMO coverage and we will have coverage at 7am Eastern tomorrow (there's a strict embargo in place).

If you plan to read other coverage outside of ours (it's ok, we will let ya!), Marshall at ReadWriteWeb has put together the insider's guide to maximizing your time at DEMO whether it's virtually or in person. He's got a list of the companies that are presenting, feeds for coverage from the blogs, and a custom search.

Tonight I was speaking with MTM (Marshall The Man) about DEMO and how much work it is for bloggers - it's like the super bowl of blogging in that there are about 70 companies presenting and over the past 10-14 days, most tech bloggers have been through a variety of interviews, demos, and have been hit by the PR storm.

I am guessing that CN will cover about seven companies that are presenting (the posts go live Monday 7am Eastern and not a minute earlier!). If I remember correctly, last DEMO, Rafe from Webware had the most reviews overall.

With that said, I am throwing out an idea to the tech blogger community. What if, together, we create a comprehensive DEMO reviews/coverage site. It wouldn't live on demo.blogname.com but would rather live on an autonomous URL. This way each blogger would only be responsible for reviewing a small number of startups.

Each participating blog would get logos, links, etc. and together we'd provide our whole readerbase with coverage of the entire event. We could monetize the venture by going after the bigco's including Google, Microsoft and Yahoo and split the revenue in some fashion. The best part would be that each site's readers would be introduced to other blogs and writers. If it worked, we could do it for SXSW and other events as well.

It would be similar to the All-Star game in baseball. Thoughts? Opinions?

Tubes Networks (formerly Tubes) has announced three major distribution deals at the DEMO conference this week. Check out my interview with the Tubes execs for an overview of their 1.0 release this week, also at DEMO.

The three distribution deals are:

• SaaS Platform - Fully Distributed Web Applications to the Desktop
• Floorplanner.com - Offline Access to Popular Home Design Web Application
• Edmunds.com - Automotive-Related Multimedia Content Distribution Platform

Mark Andressen talked about the importance of distribution at TC40 with each startup. These deals that Tubes Networks have put in place should help them to gain some mainstream momentum, especially the Edmunds community.

While in San Francisco I had the chance to meet with RelevantMind CEO Aaron Mann. Aaron took me on a tour of his product which he will launch live at the DEMO conference this week. RelevantMind (RM) is a tool to help you research products within communities and forums. It helps you to find collaborative product research. The team is currently organizing around verticals with sports, cooking and automobiles first up. Aaron was quick to point out that RM is not a reviews aggregator.

Aaron believes that reviews are getting overrun with company spam (i.e. positive reviews written by someone on the inside) and RelevantMind seeks to change that. Aaron said they are starting with forums first. I asked him what defines a forum and he replied with "threaded conversations". They look for passionate members on a topic and how that topic or product is being debated.

Aaron's quote around their elevator pitch is, "what we are trying to do is bring the Internet gold that the tech community knows how to find - to the average mainstream user". They employ human "gurus" in each vertical to help pull together the best possible results. This is similar to Hakia works with a combo of human and computer power. Each product creates a set of terms, those terms and the resulting queries begin to form the IP for RelevantMind. Searches become smarter as more people run similar ones and the system learns as it goes.

The concept is strong, I think the challenge the face (like many other products in the search/find space) is to figure out how to get users off Google and to their engine. If a user is already on Google and does a search for the "BigBoy Mountain Bike", will then realize the results might not be what they are looking for, then click an ad for RM on the right and do it again? RM has to get out into the communities (offline) in the verticals they serve and begin to really push why RM is better.

My other suggestion for RM is to look at improving the design. It's an average design but feels cookie-cutter and just misses the mainstream appeal from my perspective. The fonts are a pinch small on the content, the header seems dark and dreary and the gradients probably shouldn't repeat. Some small touch-ups will improve the feeling when using the search (which is quite powerful).

Their marketing is mainly in the SEO area and is targeted directly at the verticals not to the RM main site. The team is based in Berkeley, California and is self-funded.