Technology innovation was on display in many forms at last week's Demo conference, with 77 companies on the hot seat of public opinion for six minutes each. For IT managers, there was a bevy of new tools for content management, virtualization, and collaboration. And for every frenzied professional: products to help manage time.

CEO Pat Sullivan tries to make Flypaper sticky Photo courtesy of Demo.com

In some cases, "information and content" takes the form of appointments. That's the province of TimeTrade Systems, which has provided self-service appointment-scheduling software to businesses since 1999. TimeTrade introduced TimeDriver, an application aimed at individual users. It can be used by salespeople and others to automatically book appointments with multiple contacts via a single e-mail message.

Designed to eliminate tiresome back-and-forth e-mail and phone calls in search of compatible dates and times, TimeDriver presents a Web-based scheduling program when e-mail recipients respond to a meeting invitation, offering them available appointment times. "A single scheduling process allows hundreds of e-mails to flow into your calendar," says CEO Ed Mallen.

Managing interactions with dozens or hundreds of people also is the goal of LiquidPlanner's new Web-based project management software. Using ranged task-completion estimates--say, three to five weeks--coupled with probabilistic statistical analysis, LiquidPlanner lets managers estimate the likelihood of completing a task, a project, or a portfolio of projects by certain dates.