I’m covering DEMO08, which is fascinating. Lots of great launches, as well as a few really cool Montreal firms: Standoutjobs, Cosmio, and Xtranormal.

But there’s some funny, and some daft, stuff here too. So in keeping with the “we’re bloggers, we’re still cool and edgy” mantra that folks over at Gizmodo seem to believe (and my earlier observations about CES and AVN) here are some of the things I’ve seen.

Is it guerilla marketing, or litter?

The very cool Hubdub.com — predictive markets meet Digg — threw copies of a mocked-up newspaper all over the floors of the hotel bathrooms. Made for good reading, but I think by the end of the day nobody wanted to pick this collateral up.

Now that’s just cheating

One of the big attractions of DEMO is the fact that no slideware is allowed. But some of the presenters (such as Goldmail) make tools that let people build presentations. I’m calling foul on using that as an excuse to show a presentation. Just because you make slideshow tools isn’t an excuse to show a slideshow.

[Read more]

Demo’s getting ready to launch in Palm Springs today.

The restaurant was full of bleary-eyed twentysomethings, ground down by a night of trying to get their demo working in the middle of a desert. Since Big Media Pumps are a theme here — with companies showing off tech that can help today’s networks handle large files and video — there’s concern about whether the conference can handle it. To help ease those fears, organizers have put in a DS3.

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I’m out in Palm Desert this week — where it’s finally stopped raining — to cover Demo08. This revered, invite-only conference draws startups who want to show their latest, and fills the room with short-attention-span venture capitalists by keeping each presentation to six minutes or less.

I talked to four of the startups before the show for a deeper look; Standout Jobs and Kaazing, and a couple that haven’t yet been published. But the real story is going to be what topics are hot. On the newly minted Demo website, organizer Chris Shipley groups the presenters into several buckets:

• Things I want for myself (consumer tech)
• Communications for business
• Innovations in simplicity
• Content management and delivery
• Green tech
• Virtualization
• Web broadcasting
• Social web
• Advertising
• Product service and support
• SaaS
• Infrastructure
• Search

Should be an interesting conference.

The HP booth was packed with cool machines and beautiful displays. You might think they’re into lots of industries. But everything about its “digital life” program is focused on getting people to touch their personal content.

This seemed like a recurring theme this year. Most of the companies had sentences like “your content, anytime, anywhere.” Their slogans were idyllic, speculative, wonderful, blue-sky narratives that reflected how consumers are using their electronic devices for a better tomorrow.

On the way here, I fired up my little HP printer. It was low on ink, so it offered to print me a page saying which cartridges I needed.

Let me repeat that: It offered to use more ink because it was out of ink.

That’s so brazen, it’s unbelievable. But it’s damned focused.

I’m at CES this week, my first time ever. Wrote a couple of pieces for GigaOm and Earth2Tech yesterday. Definitely a target-rich environment. It’s packed and chaotic, of course. But there’s humor and irony in the crowds if you knew where to look. Here’s a quick recap of some of the things I’ve seen so far.

People taking pictures of Sony’s 27″ OLED TV

Sure, the thing is amazing. It made me feel like I was seeing something for real, but through the eyes of a child who’d just opened them, bright and astonished. I turned around and the other televisions and monitors looked pale and miserable. But really, if you’re going to take a picture of the picture and look at it on a TV that isn’t an OLED… why bother?

Showing off Formula One racecars at a green tradeshow

CES announced that it was going to be carbon-neutral. I’m not sure they bought the carbon offsets for the huge clouds of black smoke spewing from the engines of BMW’s exhibit, where drivers revved their engines and burned their tires.

People taking pictures of Phillips’ 3D TV

Same problem, different TV. Sure, those dice came rolling right out at you from the screen. But they’re not going to roll out of your camera unless it has the WOWvx wizardry the Dutch company plans to bring to market in two years’ time.

Pricegrabber.com, with a booth at CES

This is a huge building filled with two kinds of people: Those who make their money building electronics, and those who make their money selling electronics. It’s not clear why either of them would want to talk to you about how you could help customers compare prices and squeeze their margins.

Microsoft’s foray into children’s books

The brilliant “Mommy, Why is There a Server in the House?” children’s book that Redmond was giving out had gems like, “Offices are why people get grumpy and say bad words,” and “you can even share files with your uncle who smells like bark.” Not sure the MS Office group liked that first line. The book is hilarious. Gates’ swansong video was great, too.

Then again, maybe it isn’t. The fine print in the foreleaf says,

Use of Windows Home Server’s remote access features may require additional services from your broadband provider, such as access to certain “ports” that some providers may block for some customers on some service plans.

If you can get past the fact that the sentence belongs in the gallery of misused quotation marks, it’s frightening to see a concrete example of the erosion of net neutrality. And it’s scary that when you do a Google search for Net Neutrality, all the unpaid links want it, and the one paid ad is from a telecom lobby group. Sort of makes it clear who wins on each side of the argument, no?

Bitcurrent’s going to be changing a lot. I’ve started writing for GigaOm and Earth2Tech on emerging technologies and green technology, respectively, so it’s time to focus this blog on one topic — something Avinash, as usual, is right about.

And that focus will be web operations. Webops, for short, is the nitty-gritty task of running, scaling, measuring and fixing a web site. It’s a necessary part of any web operation. But it’s often the red-headed step-child of the web world; after all, designers make things that look cool and analytics reports have pie charts. So Webops gets no love.

To start things off, let me explain why I think there’s a huge need for a resource on operating web applications. Or, to put it more controversially, why I think accountants are spoiled. [Read more]