"The iPhone is going to come into businesses whether businesses want them to or not," Shipley notes.

Businesses looking to improve collaboration may be interested in Cc:Betty, a DEMO company that aims to make e-mail conversations more productive by sorting through messages and parsing "conversations, files, images, media, dates and places, in the spirit of saving time while collaborating and coordinating with groups of people."

"We're conducting more and more business dialogs via e-mail, a tool that is great at delivering information, but not so effective when it comes to parsing and organizing it," according to DEMO.

Cc:Betty turns e-mail messages into Web-based collaboration spaces, and be useful "across a variety of business and personal productivity applications," DEMO organizers say.

Businesses having trouble organizing legal documents may want to check out Document Depository Corporation, which has made a hosted service that handles storage, tagging, sharing and retrieval, while giving companies the benefits of disaster recovery.

"It's a really clean, easy way to do document management," Shipley says. "It really resonated with me because we were ripping through file drawers at DEMO."

Speaking of disaster readiness, a DEMO presenter called Transformyx is unveiling RallyPoint, a Web-based crisis communication system designed for businesses in hurricane-, earthquake- and terrorist-prone areas.

"By combining all modes of standard communication with the Web and a touch-tone-based phone system, RallyPoint can quickly and accurately provide secure communications and accountability between management, employees, clients, vendors and even the media," DEMO says.

Another business-focused product to be unveiled at DEMO is Pixetell, an online software platform that lets you deliver mixed-media presentations that combine screen recordings, voice, Webcam, rich text and attachments, through existing channels such as e-mail, blogs, wikis, instant messages and Twitter.

DEMO will feature several technologies designed to make e-commerce easier, including Zipadi, a software-as-a-service platform that helps integrates digital publishing, e-commerce and CRM. The idea is to make online shopping interfaces more attractive by combining "rich media publishing with back office management that allows merchants large and small to make their catalogs truly interactive," according to DEMO.

In a sign of the economic times, this week's DEMO features only about half as many presenters as DEMO 08. Many start-ups are cutting back on engineering and lengthening development timelines, Shipley says. But there is still room for new, innovative ideas, particularly those that enable people to be more efficient and do more with less.

"Even if it's only 40 companies, we want to make sure it's 40 quality companies," Shipley says. "I am really optimistic about this class of 40 companies because they're so focused on delivering customer value and building businesses around these products."