DEMObeat video: Energy efficiency, social data sharing, and productivity 2.0

Regular VentureBeat readers may still be recovering from our onslaught of coverage earlier this week of DEMO, the conference for technology companies launching products. (VentureBeat has partnered with DEMO, and editor Matt Marshall is now the event’s co-executive producer.) But we haven’t said much about DEMObeat, the panels we organized to highlight three emerging trends: New methods to improve energy efficiency, the significance of social data sharing, and new tools to increase productivity.

Videos of the three panels are now online, and I’ve embedded them below. From my incredibly biased perspective, I thought they went pretty well, and we’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback. Hopefully those of you who didn’t make it or the conference in Palm Springs and weren’t able to watch the live video on the DEMO site will find them thought-provoking; you can also think of the videos as a preview of DEMOfall, when VentureBeat will be more involved in organizing the whole event.

The first panel focused on innovations pushing us towards a smart, open power grid, and it featured Tom Sly from Google’s PowerMeter project, who showed off some early PowerMeter data; Adrian Tuck of Tendril, who unveiled a new way for consumers to communicate with their utilities; and Robert Baker of AMEE, who demonstrated the wide-ranging data about energy usage that his company collects. Matt Marshall moderated.

http://services.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f8/980795693

The second panel, moderated by Digital Media Editor Eric Eldon, explored the significance of how social networking services are rolling out ways for other sites to access their data. Eric managed to get all the big players in the room together: Max Engel, product leader for MySpace’s MySpaceID, Dave Morin, senior platform manager for Facebook, Kevin Marks, an evangelist of Google’s third-party developer initiatives and Joseph Smarr, chief platform architect for Plaxo and a pioneer in developing data-sharing technology standards. Here’s Eric’s followup article on MySpaceID, which included previously unseen samples from the product that MySpace showed off during the panel.

http://services.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f8/980795693

Our final panel discussed “Productivity 2.0,” a term that I find both incredibly gimmicky and incredibly useful. We had three presenters showing products that integrate productivity across applications, across internal and external environments, and across devices. Those demos came from Zoho‘s Raju Vegesna, Jive Software‘s Sam Lawrence, and IBM‘s Jeff Pierce, respectively, and the moderation was provided by yours truly.

http://services.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f8/980795693

Also, if you missed the conference, you should check out my colleague Dean Takahashi’s picks for the best of DEMO.

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