I have been blogless for about 10 days. Lots of meetings, lots of travel and lots to talk about about! This beautiful Valentine’s day I am in Scottsdale, AZ at Demo @15. Demo is about to kick off. The room is full, lights are down, music rocking and WiFi broken. I am sitting with the usual suspects all of whom wonderful friends. To my left is Amy Wohl, to my right Robert Scoble, Andy Ruff, Shel Israel and Cameron Reilly.
Now it’s show time, and Chris Shipley is ready to rock and roll.
This year’s Demo is a celebration of 15 years od Demo, and 15 different folks are being honored.
Demo is the best produced event that I attend. Great production values, great venue and great energy.
There are probably a dozen smarter people that I who will be blogging this event. My goal is to write about the stuff that I see that grabs or doesn’t grab me. There are going to be 73 companies presenting over the next two days in one way or another. Some get a minute, and some get six minutes. Six minutes isn’t very long. When I was on stage in 2003, it almost seemed like I had a chance to take about 2 breaths.
Chris just commented that she interviewed 450 companies, to get 160 finalists to get 73 here.
Chris always gives her keynote and intro, and she always does an excellent job. I asked her about a year ago to post her speech, and I am sure she will. When she does it is always worth reading.
Nice metaphor a moment ago about “sustained” growth. Wa
First up….
iControl Nextworks
First mass market home monitoring and control solution. Three parts, motion and other sensors. icontrol box, and then a “personal” portal that you can review from anywhere. Lots of little parts that you have to install. Whenever I see this kind of stuff, I wonder as I will for everything that I see if:
a. If I would buy?
b. If I would buy it for someone?
c. Who would buy it?
Now they are showing the commercial aspects. Lots of monitoring examples. Takes a minute to install.
Nice implementation, I will be curious to see what it costs and how they plan to distribute it.
VKB…bluetooth virtual keyboard. They just turned on a sensor, and a virtual keyboard shows up on the desktop. I can imagine using this with a slate tablet. but the product just crashed, and they can’t get it to work. There is nothing like a live demo that goes bad. You die when that happens!
To be carried by Radio Shack, but again, why would you carry another box, when you could carry just a real keyboard.
MDA…Ice camera…very cool, very, very cool stuff, three D modeling in real time. Dynamite real time modeling. Showed a quick implementation of underground mining. I need to show this stuff to Dave Gallo at WHOI.
Maru Networks…cellular wireless LAN system…way too much talk, needs to be showing something. 3 minutes in starting to talk about the demo. Now is showing a video with bad sound. Surfing…not sure that I get it. I will go by their booth, because I don’t get what they are doing from this pitch.
Mission Research, Inc. …
Today’s newsflash, “Technology is too hard”…
Motorola…Very clever use of cell phone to function as an iPod!
Good news…WiFi is back, and we are back on line.
Serious Magic, Inc.
Vlog it, very, very clever. $99 this spring. Video blogging…now he is trashing PowperPoint.
Ovation…for powerpoint. Not sure that it makes a bad presentation good, but maybe better.
NTERA…pass…not sure what the point was.
NewTek…need to show to Ivanhoe Broadcast News.
Way too complex for me…makes live webcasting easy to do.
Satori Labs…
Need to look at their stuff, seems to be a great tablet application, and maybe a strategic partner for ActiveWords!
Real Time Enterprises…makes dumb terminal smart. Need to look at their stuff closer, need to show them our Outlook agent.
StreamBase Systems, Inc.
Mediabolics, Inc.
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