Today we’re at Innotech at the Convention Center liveblogging some of the cool stuff going on downtown today.

Andres Carvallo is hoting the Beta Summit, which is a forum for showcasing beta technology from Austin companies. Each company gets 8 minutes to demonstrate some software that is currently in beta release at their company. There is no Q&A, just a rapid fire back-to-back presentation environment.

CloseReach Communications
We’re talking about mobile marketing. We start with a show of hands to see who might be afraid of getting spam on their mobile phone? Pretty much everybody raises their hand. CloseReach is creating interactive business applications for cell phones. We’re getting some powerpoints about mobile marketing facts, but so far nothing is being demonstrated and these guys only have 8 minutes. He’s talking about things like how you can text "athh" to msgme (67463) to get the latest info on the Austin Tech Happy Hour. With 3 minutes to go, we’re seeing a mobile simulator on the compter screen with the interactive conference guide for the Innotech conference. Unfortunately the free public wi fi downtown isn’t strong enough for me to download it to my iPhone, and my Edge network connection isn’t strong enough either.

Phurnace Software
The folks from Phurnace were at the Porter Novelli 7 Year anniversary party last night. Phurnace is creating tools for J2EE web application server administrators (Websphere, Weblogic, coming later JBoss/Tomcat). Configure and deploy web servers easily (like from the development environment ot the test environment, or from test to production). Phurnace can help you:

• Migrate from websphere 5.1 to 6.0 in minutes not weeks.
• Rollback installs immediately.
• Get rid of your jacl scripts.

Again we’re a long way into the 8 minutes and we have yet to see a demonstration of something. Finally! We’re seeing Eclipse RCP and we’re moving a Java app from one environment to another. The application is querying a server to figure out how it is configured (which takes 4-5 minutes) then we can see how the app is configured. It’s a snapshot of the config. Then you can select an application, grab a configuration, and then install the app on the target server environment.

OK, so you’ve got to be a J2EE guy to fully appreciate what these tools do, but there are so many of you out there!

Pervasive Software
Pervasive is well known for it’s database applications, and built a huge market with built-in databases (B-trieve) for vertical market applications. They are publicly traded. We’ve got hardware with multi-core processors now, and you can put 3-4 quad core CPU’s into a $20K server and get great performance. DataRush (pervasive.datarush.com) is filling a market need for a database that can support 4 or more cores, java, gigabytes of data, long running batch jobs. Jim Falgout is showing us Eclipse (again) where we are seeing the DataRush SDK. Pervasive is building a graphic editor for Eclipse to make it easy to visually create and build data processing applications on their Java-based database.

I think this is the first time most of these people have seen Eclipse! Not really a techie crowd.

Sentient Services
No Powerpoints from Sentient! They’re a market research and branding firm. Makes me wonder what they are going to demo? Paul Janowitz is talking about virtual worlds and what a great PR machine Second Life is, even though there are 60 other virtual worlds out there on the market. He’s talking about how people don’t want to have 20 different profiles, avatars, etc, on all the different virtual worlds. He als mentioned that Google announced yesterday that they’ve opened up Google Earth to enable virtual worlds to build upon the Google Earth map. Interesting stuff, and probably worthy of its own session at the conference, but we’re not seeing a demo of anything unfortunately. Thanks for no Powerpoints Paul!

SpiceWorks
Jay Hallberg is telling us how 140,000 IT professionals are using the Spiceworks platform today. The company is targeting the IT professionals in the small and medium business market, which is an incredibly lucrative, yet hard to attack, market. The Spiceworks app lets the IT pro monitor the network, inventory the network, see when a printer is low on ink, etc. And it’s free! Well, it’s got some advertising built into the desktop interface. Jay jumps into the demo really quickly. You can view the network, create trouble tickets, and there is a help desk integrated with the inventory aspect of the system. There are alerts on disk space, unauthorized software, if machines go on/offline, or low ink. Then there are widgets for integrating external things into the environment. There is a digg-like interface for requesting features.

This is really a great concept. IT pros get a free tool, and advertisers can get a really targeted message out. Think about it, you can take out an ad in Information Week, or you can advertise on Spiceworks and hit just the IT pros in the SMB market who have HP printers in their environment. Now that’s targeting!

We recently wrote about their infusion of $8M in capital. This was a really great demo and presentation. Thanks Jay!

BoxCloud
Ever had a problem sharing large files via email? BoxCloud lets you do that without uploads. Boxcloud has an address book, so once you add someone you can then share a file with them. Looks like you can tag the file, track revisions, and even get notified when it gets downloaded. Ash Maurya jumps into the demo right away and shows us how easy it is to use. It looks like if you are sharing graphic files, BoxCloud will let you make comments and version the files. I would guess that it does the same thing with Word docs or spreadsheets. So more than just large file sharing, we’ve also got some workflow with it as well. Simple and effective — the best kind of web-based app.

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