Innovative Wasatch Front companies are using the power of the Internet to offer services that range from grocery pricing to private-label online radio stations, real-time private family chat rooms, virtual tours of for-sale houses and document creation and storage online.
And that's just the beginning.
Think having an appliance warn you before it goes on the fritz would be great? Curious about how to save a bundle on insurance for your home and cars?
They're not just possibilities anymore — now that there are offerings from companies like emWare and Insurquote Systems Inc.
Those were just two of the Internet-savvy companies that exhibited in Winternet 2000, a trade show sponsored by Wasatch Ventures, which is the Salt Lake City affiliate of Silicon Valley venture capitalist Draper Fisher Jurvetson who has invested in all of them. For three hours Thursday night, investors, media and others were able to see demonstration from more than a dozen local Internet companies.
A sampling:
FatPipe Software, by Ragula Systems, creates a program that bonds together two telephone lines and two modems to offer faster data access speed. It's available for use in home ($49 for the enabling software) and in the office (up to $299, depending on configuration). It also has Web management tools that would let the boss check out where staffers are Web surfing or control access to chat rooms and news groups. And companies that would like an extra power supply or a system that offers a paging feature if there's a problem will find a FatPipe solution.
LocalBargains.com lists all the grocery items available throughout the Wasatch Front, as well as Cedar City and St. George, updating prices regularly. It also has a rating system (soon to be available for a small monthly subscription fee) that takes quality and price to come up with a super-bargain ranking.
New iDeal International can make you ruler of your own online auction house. They plan to use the technology they used to build DealDeal.com as the basis for a network of thousands of auction sites.
Airswitch Corp., born when a group of neighbors in Springville decided to "wire" their neighborhood for fast Internet access, is expanding into other neighborhoods with its "residential broadband method that will provide significantly higher speeds than those solutions currently being adopted within the marketplace."
ImageMind provides video, graphic and sound-enabled e-mail that doesn't require downloading file attachments.
Other participants in Winternet included NetDocuments, Campus Pipeline, MyFamily.com, ZZSoft, PR Newswire, HomeCase.com, theDial, Comspec Corp., Crystal Canyon, Merservy, Wing and Snapp, and the Skogen group.