The afternoon session at the DemoFall '05 conference featured 21 demonstrations of wildly varying quality. Many of the worst ones suffered at the hands of the conference's completely unreliable network; one can't help but wonder whether Michael Brown has been made Demo's network admin.

Best product: With an admitted bias toward consumer hardware, my favorite product of the afternoon was the 205 Pro keyboard, made by San Jose company United Keys. Instead of that row of mysterious function keys found on virtually every keyboard, the 205 Pro has 12 small 20x20-pixel keytop displays--little, monochrome LCDs that can display an icon or an animation of your choosing. Did you know that the F12 key shortcuts to "Save as..."? Me neither, until I pushed it two seconds ago. Wouldn't it be better to have Windows' little Save disc icon pictured on that key, instead of F12? Wouldn't it be even better to pick what F12 does and choose an icon to match? The 205 Pro's included layout editor software lets you quickly and easily customize your keyboard with icons for all of your favorite Web pages and applications. At $299, it's a bit pricey, but you can get it for $199 until the end of the year.

Best joke: Beefy Rick White, of Realm Systems, showing his Mobile Personal Server, one of several products at the conference designed to make it easier to work on multiple PCs: "I'm not one of those slick, good-looking marketing guys; I'm like two of those guys stuck together."

Best Windows add-on that highlights the superiority of Apple's Tiger OS: Three-way tie between EverDesk, an e-mail, contacts, and file manager; InSors, a conferencing and collaboration solution; and Memio, a document-linking app. While Tiger doesn't come with all of the features offered by these three programs, between Spotlight and iChat AV, you get a lot of 'em.

Company name that most sounds like a type of pasta: Rotani.

Most confounding concept: Tendril Networks cofounder Tim Enwall posits that the physical world is becoming increasingly tied to the computing environment through the use of cheap wireless sensor widgets (a.k.a. microcontrollers).

Most Machiavellian software: SuccessFactors and, to a lesser extent, GreenArray, two corporate performance management solutions that threaten to turn executive management into a giant game of the Sims.

See previous CNET reports from DemoFall '05 here, here, here, and here.

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This afternoon's Demo demonstrations focused on the enterprise. Sound like a yawn? A little. But consider the two main goals of the presenters (as I see it, anyway): making life easier and controlling/corralling/otherwise tracking human behavior. I'm not so sure these two goals can coexist. Take the following demonstrations.

Trimergent Personal Information Networks, with perhaps the most boring name ever, at first seems like just another desktop search product like Google's. But it does a little more: It also searches and aggregates corporate databases, streaming media, and e-mail (of course) on one screen. Now, here's the cool part: you can capture that screen and those links, then e-mail them to friends or colleagues, who can then see the same screen. The goal here is to create a more seamless search environment for corporations, but since this product is still in beta, I'm wondering if it won't find its way into the public space. I'd love it for my personal life, too.

On the other hand, take a product with the code name Workshare "Hygiene." Built for large corporations, this software watches all documents on an enterprise network and actually prevents users who aren't approved from e-mailing out--or even saving to a keychain drive--documents deemed too sensitive to leave the building, so to speak. Of course, compliance departments will love this. But it's not going to make the free flow of information easy, à la the above-named Trimergent software.

Even creepier/cooler, take the final product of the day, Eschelon Corp's Pyxos Embedded Control Networking Platform. Another dry name, but this sensor-tracking technology comes to live in the "smart carpet," which tracks movement. This carpet can alert a central control to thieves and potential accidents, as well as light up when pedestrians walk on it. Hello, 1984.

The Demo stage introduced a number of other products for enterprises--most intended to control or at least better aggregate documents and information. Weirdly, they were almost all software based. Not a gadget in sight. We'll see tomorrow whether the trend continues. Check back then.

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Of particular interest are support for crazy resolutions such as 2,560x1,600, the ability to display 64 times as many colors as current hardware, and all kinds of comb filtering and analog-to-digital converters for primo video display--things to keep in mind for when we all switch to next-gen formats like HD-DVD or Blu-ray.

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Without further ado, my favorites from the first 25 percent of the demonstrations. (Check out Justin Jaffe's blog for his highlights so far.)

LightZone, from Light Crafts
OK, I admit, I've seen only a six-minute demo of this Java-based software. But as a (quite) amateur photographer who's struggled with Adobe Photoshop for years, this software-as-service looks damn attractive. The concept: LightZone automatically identifies and snaps to areas of light and dark within photographs, then lets you quickly edit those areas. It does other photo-treating stuff, too, but the demo focused mainly on all the "pixel painting" this software helps you avoid. I want some. Unfortunately, looks like I can't have it yet, since Light Crafts has built this software for only Mac OS X Tiger. No word yet on availability dates, but I hope to find out.

Callpod
This one is tough to describe. Callpod is a conferencing technology that lets a number of people synchronize their Bluetooth headsets and simultaneously listen to and participate in phone calls, share streaming tunes, and otherwise hear the same sounds. The demo convinced me that the service really does avoid any noise-canceling blackouts. Imagine the possibilities: You could talk to five friends at once at the same time, then stop to play all of them your favorite new song.

And now, for the weirdest tech I've seen so far:

Schmartboard
Now you can build your own circuit board. Seriously. Schmartboard is, well, a circuit board that lets you solder and create your own integrated circuits with absolutely no experience. Prerequisites? A soldering iron "with a pitch smaller than the pitch of the component that you are soldering." Oh, and you should probably know what those words mean.

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Sony's T series laptops have built-in cellular radios. The new ThinkPad Z series will offer a cellular option. Now Verizon has announced that Dell and HP will also build access to the carrier's EV-DO data network into select laptops starting in early 2006.

At this point, given the cost of the cellular feature and the data subscription rates, the primary adopters of wireless WAN will be frequent travelers who would otherwise rack up a bunch of fees tapping into Wi-Fi networks at cafes, hotels, and airports. But as costs come down and data transfer speeds increase, cellular just might follow the path of 802.11 and move from optional to standard even in consumer laptops.

Is cellular the next Wi-Fi? Leave a comment and let me know what you think.

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Having said that, the fundamental idea behind the conference is great. In contrast to behemoth shows, such as CES, Demo brings together a digestible handful of innovative companies--this year, 65--and gives most of them six minutes apiece to pitch their products to a few hundred entrepreneurs, investors, and industry bigwigs. The result: an early look at some cool technologies and products, along with some hideously awkward moments when demos go awry.

A quick rundown of the most interesting demos so far:

U3: Packs your desktop into a USB flash drive, including software and settings; lets you use any computer as if it were your own. Rafe discussed this type of technology last year, with particular attention to a seemingly very similar product, the Migo. U3 is giving attendees a trial version of the product, and as Windows' Remote Desktop is giving me spotty performance at the moment, I'm looking forward to checking it out.

H3: A "referral-hiring tool that uses cash rewards to unleash the power of your trusted network to identify relevant job candidates." Behind that jargon-filled mission statement lurks an interesting alternative to career-focused social-networking services such as Jobster. Going to put this in front of my wife, who's a career counselor, to see what she thinks.

UniPrivacy: I'm a little freaked out by Zabasearch, the self-proclaimed number one "Free people search and public information search engine," which amasses "personal" information about people and puts it online. So I was heartened to hear about Uniprivacy's DeleteNow service, which hunts down and deletes personal information from hundreds of Internet search engines and databases.

On tap for this afternoon: file management solutions, process management solutions, and wireless infrastructure solutions. I do hope it stops raining soon...

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Yep, I'm impressed. Save for the crazy-loud, 1:30 a.m. thunderstorms in Huntington Beach (not what I signed up for after a summer of San Francisco fog), the DemoFall '05 conference is high class. Good food, including warm scrambled eggs. Fancy conference center. Great schwag. Well, except for one more thing: overloaded Wi-Fi. I'm not quite sure why big venues aren't able to get it together on the Wi-Fi front, but when a conference that's meant to predict the technology success stories of the next 12 to 18 months can't quite conquer the technology of 2004, I have concerns.

I'm probably not quite as peeved as the numerous presenters at the show who had six minutes--or in one notable case, only three--to present products that depended on a Wi-Fi network. With data inching along the slow road in the Hyatt Huntington Beach ballroom, their demos flopped and not for lack of a compelling product. Or that's what I suspect. Me, I just had a hard time checking my CNET e-mail.

Now, should we blame the Demo organizers? Maybe. But maybe the Wi-Fi itself was a flop of a demonstration. My colleague just got this pitch from the show:

"One of the key enabling wireless technologies of the future will not be unveiled at DemoFall while you're there this week, but it has been installed behind the scenes to ensure that the wireless gadgets launched at the show work well. Spotwave is providing enhanced 3G wireless coverage for this year's Demo Fall location, the Hyatt Huntington Beach, as a contributing event sponsor. While this is not a new product launch for the company, I thought you might be interested in knowing more since coverage is a critical story in profiling the emerging wireless device and application space. How will subscribers use the latest, most advanced 3G data services if their devices don't work indoors?"

Hmm. Good question.

Luckily, not all the demos this morning--the first set of four at this conference--died the slow Wi-Fi death. Many used the plain-old wired Internet and did just fine. A couple really got me curious--more on those to come. But in the meantime, I'd be most impressed by Internet infrastructure that actually works seamlessly.

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Opera: "Man, we are just getting killed by Firefox, IE, even Netscape. What are they doing that we're not doing?" Chorus of consumer voices responds: "They're FREE." Opera: "Oh, hmm. Good idea. Let's do that." And they did. And now I'm downloading it. See how easy that was?

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Despite our weepiest pleas, cell phones are coming to planes (in Europe). A company called OnAir is testing in-flight cell phones and will release its service in 2007. Great. Now I can never go to Europe again. Just like I can't go to restaurants, movies, funerals, preschool, or bathrooms here in the States.

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Steve Jobs says record labels who want to charge more for song downloads are simply "getting greedy," and he's skeptical that people will pay more to download music directly to their phones. Wow, understanding that consumers don't want to be stripped of every last cent just so companies can make obscene profits? I think I love him.

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