(Daily Deal Media)

All the tech world loves a demo, so we couldn’t leave yesterday’s Daily Deal Summit without catching the Tech Showcase. Four CEOs--slowly losing their audience to lunch--were each assigned eight minutes to sell us on new solutions. Billed as having the potential to "dramatically improve" attendees' businesses, how did they stack up?

First up and perhaps most relevant to the daily-deal-selling audience was ActivePath CEO Jeff Kupietzky, just in from Israel and ready to sell us on the merits of the company's direct marketing solution, ActiveMail. He whipped out some scary statistics about how people get more than a hundred emails a day and spend two and half hours a day weeding through them. Meanwhile, marketers are still opting for a “spray and pray” approach, often at the risk of being tagged as spam. The current solution is to strip out all the rich media, opting for a “lowest common denominator” approach. The problem, of course, is that dampens engagement. ActiveMail’s solution: Add back the interactivity, including things like video, roll-over menus, and purchase ability in the email itself.

Next up was Closely CEO Perry Evans. He introduced the audience to Perch, Closely's new small-business app. The elevator pitch: “It’s a merchant’s birdseye view of their business environment.” In short, local businesses are spending way too much time combing social check-in and daily deal sites, attempting to figure out a) what their competitors are doing and b) what’s going on around them, event-wise. Perch pulls in data from sources like Foursquare and Yipit to aggregate the answer. The app is currently in private beta, but right now they’re only taking businesses. Harel said it should open up in a couple of months.

Centzy in particular piqued our interest (though it seemed the least directly relevant to the conference). Backed by Lightbank and ffVC, the company was described by CEO Jay Shek as “a comparison shopping engine for local services.” So why bother? Apparently fewer than 25 percent of local businesses post their prices online. “Imagine if you went to Google and 75 percent of websites weren’t listed,” Shek said. “It would be like the stone ages.” Right now, if you want the cheapest oil change within three blocks, you have to pick up the phone and start calling.

Their solution: Use paid crowdsourcing, like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, to get that information. Shek claimed this approach is 97 percent accurate and 100 percent comprehensive, and he’s confident the approach can scale nationwide for a reasonable amount of money. We’ll see.

Last and perhaps most cruelly given the competition with lunch: BiteHunter, which aggregates local dining deals. CEO Gil Harel took the audience through a tour of newly released version 2.0, currently burning up the app store charts and boasting 60,000 downloads. He explained they’d learned two things with their previous iteration: People are still overwhelmed by their choices, and it’s a pain to leave the app to purchase a deal. To crack that first nut, they’ve made it possible to browse via photo grid, map view, or list. For the second, they’ve added in-app purchases.

Mr. Vacanti. (Twitter)

Concern over the industry's fate has pervaded this week's Daily Deal Summit. But if yesterday’s proceedings seemed a little glum, this morning’s keynote speaker offered a slightly sunnier outlook.

Betabeat reached Yipit cofounder Vin Vacanti’s talk just in time to hear him teasing out one possible positive scenario. He speculated that the shift from local deals to nationally distributed ecommerce might offer traditional media outlets a second chance to capitalize on the daily deals boom. He used GQ as an example: The magazine is constantly recommending products to its readers, so why not create an ecommerce list and make some money? Though granting GQ might consider the idea heresy, he explained: “With ecommerce, it’s 1, 2, 3, 10 products that can be sold anywhere in the country. The selling experience is a lot easier. It makes a lot of sense.”

Mr. Vacanti isn't one to cheerlead without cause, so afterward we caught up with him outside the event for some perspective on the state of the industry. Did he agree with David Tisch’s suggestion that the very term “daily deal” has become practically poisonous? “It’s more of a branding issue,” Mr. Vacanti said. The phrase has gotten a bad rap, he explained, but there’s nothing inherently flawed with the business model. Fab.com, for example, has managed to do quite well for itself selling discounted goods for a limited period of time. The industry “would do itself a service" by adopting the name "flash offers" instead.

Part of the problem: "[Observers] thought of Groupon as this $100 billion company, and they’re now an $8.5 or $8 billion company. So people are sort of disappointed. They think it’s been a bust. Well, on the other hand, Groupon is still worth eight times Instagram--and no one thinks Instagram is a disaster."

To be fair, that likely has something to do with differing user acquisition costs, among other things, but Mr. Vacanti’s point about overinflated expectations is well taken.

While none-too-keen on the prospects for building national businesses on local deals, he also elaborated on the virtues of a broader strategy. Pointing to the success of Fab.com, he said, “I think there’s an opportunity for companies to launch with a curated list of products that are more national distribution, therefore the sales cost isn’t as high and they’re still able to build a huge list.” Plus, local players like city newspapers could still leverage their home-field advantage into a decent (if limited) business.

That's not likely to inspire a mad dash to launch daily deal sites. Then again, that's a healthy development.