Expo Notes: More stuff for the business folks

If you'd just read the pre-show publicity about Macworld | iWorld, you might have thought it was all about art, music, and fun. But as I walk the show floor, I've been finding lots of Mac and iOS products for serious business use, too. Yesterday, I wrote about some announcements from Ntractive, Mindwrap, and Stellar Data Recovery. Here are three more intriguing business products I've seen since then.

Dev-Audio's Microcone is a microphone specifically designed to record group meetings. But it isn't just a mic: The small, cone-shaped device actually contains six separate directional microphones. You put the Microcone in the middle of the table, then start talking. As each person speaks, the mic closest to him or her picks up what he or she is saying. (Yes, the device is only effective in meetings with six or fewer participants.) The Microcone then relays each person's utterances as a separate audio signal to your Mac (via USB).

The Microcone Recorder app then processes and records each of those individual audio streams; they appear in the app's interface as separate tracks in a timeline. That's when some interesting things can happen. You can isolate what one person said and play back or save just that. Tracks or segments of the timeline can be tagged for later reference and searching. There's a Talk Time feature, showing how long each person spoke. You can also send tracks to the Nuance Web service for transcription. (That last one requires a separate Nuance account, which charges by the use; Microcone reps say that it's 80% accurate, which is probably good enough for meetings.)

The Microcone itself costs $359; the $5 Recorder app just went live on the Mac App Store.

Meanwhile, a company called Compsoft has an interesting solution for people who give presentations on the iPad. The problem is that you might have a couple of presentations saved in Keynote, some PDFs on Dropbox, maybe a couple of spreadsheets, and you want to show them all to clients. But with all of those materials are scattered all over your iPad in different apps, you could spend a lot of precious meeting time tapping around, going from one app to another to find the material what you want--not the recipe for a smooth presentation.