The best of Demo - my picks Two days, 25 hours (including evening events) and one full notebook. Demo is like drinking from the proverbial technology fire hose. I didn't get a chance to meet with all 68 exhibitors but I saw my share of cool stuff. If any conference does a better job of cluing you in to where innovation and venture capital is going in the tech industry, I don't know of it. Hats off to Network World for keeping this venerable event fresh and relevant.

Here are my picks for the best demos I saw at Demo. Keep in mind that most of these products are unreleased and I haven't played with any of them. They're organized by category. We'll start with personal productivity and I'll add others as I get my notes together.

Personal Productivity
Accomplice Software's Accomplice - This is a time organizer on steroids. It bolts onto Microsoft Outlook and PDA organizers and allows you to organize your tasks flexibly but powerfully. You can quickly move tasks around, re-categorize them, change priorities and integrate all kinds of files and clips through a drag-and-drop interface. You can also share and organize your tasks with other people.

Iotum - It's not a personal product - in fact, you have to connect it to a PBX or VOIP switch - but its benefits are very personal. Iotum does intelligent call routing, making sure the calls you get are only from the people you want to talk to. You're not bothered by anything else. If the call's from someone you want to speak to, Iotum will find you at any phone number of IM address it has. If not, it's off to voice mail land. It also learns from your past behavior and gets smarter as time goes on.

Publishing
There was lots of interesting action in this field as the personal publishing trend gathers momentum.

Blurb BookSmart - My choice for best-of-show. Drag and drop photos into a template, add text and ship off to a service that returns a hard-cover coffee table book. Think of the possibilities. Your contract is up for renewal so you put together a custom volume showing the great work you've done for the client for the last year and present it as a gift before the renewal meeting. Or create family yearbooks for the holidays. I just love this idea.

Grass Roots Software's Freepath - This adds a bunch of new tools to your PowerPoint arsenal, enabling you to seamlessly mix in multiple data types and jump quickly around a presentation.

Riya - Pattern matching and face recognition software has huge potential but the technology available to the public has never been very good. Riya can spot patterns in photos - be they faces, words, objects or something else - and then sort through databases of photos looking for the same patterns. People will initially use it to tag their photo collections and publish them for private and commercial use but the potential applications of this technology are endless.

Simplefeed - RSS is the best tool to organize the vast and growing river of data that surges over the Internet. But there are few tools that organizations can use to understand who's reading their RSS feeds or how they're acting on that information. Simplefeed has some very cool technology that make RSS a more effective and trackable medium than e-mail or even Web pages for anyone who publishes information.

More to come...  ¶ 9:12 AM