DEMOfall 05 - Standout Treonaut Companies

Although there was undoubtedly something to get excited about in pretty much all the companies presenting at DEMOfall 05 there are however four that stand out because of their direct and immediate relevance to Treonauts – it also helps that two of these companies specifically used a Treo for their demo

TalkPlus Mobile Call Manager (www.talkplus.com) is a service that provides calling features typically only available with VOIP offerings and makes these available to _any_ cell phone including our Treo (available in a few weeks).  With one simple application installation on your Treo combined with IBM’s Java Virtual Machine, Treonauts will soon be able to enjoy such powerful features as multiple phone numbers and caller identities on a single phone, 10-way conference calling, and low-cost international dialing – promised to be below the lowest rates currently offered by existing VOIP providers.

This is probably one of the single most exciting new telephony services that I’ve come across and I’m willing to bet that a very large percentage of Treonauts will soon subscribe to their services.  It was also interesting to coincidentally meet one of China Mobile Soft’s (the company recently acquired by PalmSource) founders who is an advisor to TalkPlus.

Jingle Networks (www.jinglenetworks.com) offers 1–800–FREE411 (www.free411.com) which completely eliminates directory assistance charges – instead nicely offering it for free.  The company is able to provide this free service because it relies on revenues from sponsored advertising messages of no more than 10 seconds which are inserted just before you receive your number.  To experience how well and simply it works just call their 800 number and ask for ‘pizza’ in your local area.  You will then hear a message from Domino’s Pizza which is their national sponsor for this category.  I personally feel that this company has the potential to become huge and will undoubtedly soon be yet one more company acquired by Google…

EasyReach (www.easyreach.com) is an application that enables Treonauts to search, securely access and share any email or file on their work and home PC’s.  This will prove particularly useful for people frustrated with Blazer’s 2MB download limitation when trying to retrieve large personal and business files while on the go.  With EasyReach you’ll now be able to access any file that you need and forward it to your own email address or that of others.  I am hoping that the company will soon add the possibility of direct downloads to the Treo as well – a feature wich it currently lacks.

The SCO Group (www.sco.com) has developed an extremely robust enterprise-class yet simple solution called Me Inc. which consists of a suite of applications that allow remote workers to access voting, delegation, status, follow-up, real-time access to any Web service, database and other data.  I was so impressed with their solution that I may actually work with the company to build a customized version for the Treonauts blog.  To demonstrate their strong support for the Treo, SCO will be giving away one Treo 650 smartphone a week each Monday from September 26th to October 31st.

Treonauts are always looking for new solutions…