Slightly more than a month passed after 77 interesting companies made their pitch at Demo 2008 conference. My conjecture is that less than 10% of them will make it to the next stage and become sustainably successful companies. Therefore, I chose 6 companies as my favorites and here is the list with descending order of potential: Livescribe, CatalystWeb, KonoLive, Skyfire, Rove, Iterasi.

It is already in my Wish List. I expect a reasonable productivity increase for individuals all over the world when they start to use this sound-recording-while-writing pen. With its 150-200US$ price range, it is reasonably affordable. The innovation comes from the fact that Smartpen records what it hears while you take notes with the pen, and it syncs your hand movements and writings with the timestamp of audio, letting you to relive your lecture at its full potential. As should be, their prime prospect is collegiates, a group of more than 17 million just in US. There are numerous opportunities for distribution rights in other countries, including mine, Turkey. The risks? The pen has too many features and micro-gadgets on it (OLED screen, audio recorder, speaker, infrared camera, usb connector to name a few) that may turn out to be as fragile as first-generation ipod nano’s scratchable screen.

This will be a big life-saver for small businesses. Not all companies have their dedicated IT teams that provide them with reliable and safe collaboration & productivity features such as business e-mail, calendar sharing and appointment managing, online file storage and private instant messaging. CatalystWeb is just that. Their CatalystOffice suite is a turn-key collection of smart tools that will boost a small company’s productivity capability overnight. I would list at least 50.000 small businesses here in Turkey that will subscribe to this service if the price tag stays below 3000 US$ per month.

One of the factors that delayed my post on Demo 2008 was the big category presentation we had to build for Procter & Gamble Oral Care Review on Feb 21st. When there are eight managers supplying content to a single presentation and there is only one person providing feedback, the proper updating process of that single presentation file turns into a mess. The last time I counted, there were 22 versions of that presentation before we gave it a go. KonoLive, hopefully, will eliminate that collaboration friction. When MS Office’s "Compare and Merge" function does not fulfill its duty, which in most cases actually does not, KonoLive may present a great opportunity for co-workers to cut merge-and-edit times and boost productivity.

A free, robust mobile browser that helps you experience rich media in your mobile, almost in the same way that you would experience it in your PC screen. It is simple and powerful, if and only if it delivers its promise of seamless transformation of the website into the tiny mobile screens. The browser’s flashy feature is that it does not need a mobile version of a particular website. If it manages to create the mobile version of ANY website by itself, that browser will be a killer and I guess it won’t be long before we hear an acquisition news from Google, Microsoft or Nokia.

Let your work computer open and connect it remotely from anywhere via your mobile. Another killer mobile app. It is another productivity-booster idea coming out of Demo 2008 and I don’t think it is just a coincidence that three out of six favorites of mine turned out to be services that boost corporate output per capita. May there be a big gap there already? PCMobilizr is not the only big shift Rove did recently. It was of course another good move that they changed their former name: Idokorro Mobile. One important piece of feedback: Please bundle Folding @ Home setup file along with PCMobilizr client suite, so that work computers left open to be able to communicate remotely does not completely waste the electricity but turns some of it into medical supercomputing effort! That is exactly what every remote-access software company should do…

At last a pure surfer fave in the list. It is not very paranoid to think that some of your favorite articles on the web may cease to exist suddenly. Then you are only left with a link that summarizes the text with 6 words, and you regret not copying it to Word. Or in another case you could be travelling with your girlfriend and you just wanted to share a Forbes Most Expensive Houses List (I don’t personally recommend doing such a thing…) but you sadly see that you can’t reach it offline. Iterasi fills spots such as those two. It lets you download webpages in their entirety and view them offline. The key point is that although there are efficient ways to export content, it is quite hard to arrange the same browsing experience in an offline or isolated mode. Iterasi claims to do that, and apparently they do. On one side, we all know that not all content needs downloading. For most of the cases, links are vital, and enough. Yet, in many situations when you think you found an article that deserves mummifying and isolating for next generations, iterasi is your mate.

I also have one company that I liked, but has some questions regarding the scale, so that I didn’t put its logo and discuss it in more than one sentence. It is StandoutJobs and it is at least adding a funny side for job seekers, even if corporations fail to utilize what it offers. But I hope they do…

There is a post from VentureBeat that summarizes a subset of Demo08 companies. It is not great to have just three overlapping services, but it is still better than nothing…