The mystery behind Google’s Demo Slam has been revealed.  Just launched, the Demo Slam is like a hot-or-not for tech applications.  Developers looking for some recognition can submit their products to Demo Slam, and hope for a showdown.  Visitors vote on the product they like best, and the developer gets some much-needed notoriety.

Demo Slam pits two products against each other, for each Slam of the Week.  You can follow the progress of each round, and learn more about the products.  The idea is to foster creativity in an environment that gets the public involved.  Google’s always on the hunt for good ideas with great engineers behind them.  This is another outlet for nailing down the best of the best, while doing a bit of market research on the side.

The featured tools seem to cover a range of services, for learning new languages, image search and real-time updates.  These will surely rotate on a regular basis, but so far there’s a number of search tools up for review.  Developers get to intro their products, and you can even see which contenders are up for next week.

The Slams are planned to run for the next few weeks, and depending on what Google gets out of this, who knows what the company really hopes for with the new site.