The plan was for a Day 2 recap when I returned from DEMO last Thursday, but this was delayed thanks to a detour to Long Beach to check out Topaz client Evans Cooling Systems (exhibiting their waterless engine coolant at a convention for the waste management industry — a perfect market), some red-eye reaction (rolled in at 5 a.m. Thursday in order to make a new business meeting) and a busy final few days of the week (including negotiations with a new Topaz client). I’m hoping all of this — DEMO Day 2 and happenings late last week — point to a turnaround for tech. Cool companies and lots of activity is something we all need more of.

Now about more about those cool DEMO companies. The DEMO People Choice Winners were Emo Labs (a company I wrote about in my previous post) and Liaise, a Day 2 presenter with a solution that automatically captures and manages “key points” inside emails, helping those of us who still use email to guide our work lives, A few other companies that stood out for me: LeapFILE, which wants to make it easier and safer for us to manage files in the cloud; I.ndigo, who have an interesting collaboration tool; 80legs, which is changing the way we crawl and process Web content; Scientific Media, which has a new mobile publishing platform that promises to unleash the power of mobile messaging; Weels Corp, a company founded by a bunch of Massachusetts high school and college kids out to improve our web browsing experience; and Zorap, which is working to monetize social networks by enabling live social interaction around content.

These are just a few highlights. There was much more that impressed me, including the energy and enthusiasm I saw among many who attended — again, something we need more of in a tech space that has struggled along with the rest of the economy for too long.

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