Graeme Thickins on Tech

Reflections & analysis about innovation, technology, startups, investing, healthcare, and more .... with a focus on Minnesota, Land of 10,000 Lakes. Blogging continuously since 2005.

Category: The Web & Web 2.0 (Page 5 of 41)

DEMO 09 – Interview With DEMO Presenter Xmarks

March 5, 2009 / / 0 Comments

Graeme Thickins of Tech~Surf~blog interviews James Joaquin, CEO of Xmarks, at the DEMO ’09 conference, which was held March 1-3, 2009, in Palm Desert, CA.

The very last presenter interview I did was one I didn't want to miss, so I huffed and puffed and made it to their booth just before closing.  Xmarks has a free bookmark sync utility that my friends at DEMO say enables it to offer "an unparalleled recommendation system."  As I was hurriedly tweeting while they were on stage, I mistyped the number of bookmarks they manage: I had said 6 million (duh), and in fact it's six hundred million. Almost 10 million people have downloaded the company's Firefox add-on, and they'll soon have add-ons for other browsers as well. I caught up with James Joaquin, who was recruited last year to lead this startup by Mitch Kapor, chairman and founder. And the company christened itself with its new name just prior to DEMO. Listen up…

Xmarks-DEMO09-350w

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DEMO 09 – Interview With DEMO Presenter Primal Fusion

March 5, 2009 / / 1 Comment

Graeme Thickins interviews Peter Sweeney, CEO of Primal Fusion, at the DEMO ’09 conference, which was held March 1-3, 2009, in Palm Desert, CA.
Time was growing short, and I still wanted to interview a couple more presenting companies before DEMO ’09 was history…so, I pointed myself toward Primal Fusion’s booth. This company piqued my interest with its talk on stage about “Thought Networking.”  They describe their solution as a “brainstorming partner.”  I got CEO Peter Sweeney going here with a major, detailed pitch…probably more than you bargained for! (he’s showing me stuff on screen that you can’t see) … but hopefully you’ll get the gist of this very fascinating semantic solution. Peter is pictured below at left, with Robert Barlow-Busch, director of product design.

PrimalFusion-DEMO09-350w

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DEMO 09 – Interview With DEMO Presenter AppZero

March 4, 2009 / / 0 Comments

Graeme Thickins of Tech~Surf~blog interviews Greg O’Connor, CEO of AppZero, at the DEMO ’09 conference, which was held March 1-3, 2009, in Palm Desert, CA.

As the last session in the DEMO Pavilion was quickly winding down (it was also the closing reception), I finally got a chance to get up to the AppZero booth. This startup was one of the few enterprise-IT related presenters at this event, and it was all about — you guessed it, cloud computing! (Buzzword of the year.) The AppZero guys did one heck of an impressive stage demonstration, showing how enterprise apps — even real mission-critical ones — can be provisioned instantly and moved with a mouse click to run anywhere, from data center to cloud, or to another cloud service. I spoke with Greg O’Connor, who’s pictured below at left with Ed Johns, senior system engineer.

AppZero-DEMO09-350w

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DEMO 09 – Interview With DEMO Presenter Skout

March 4, 2009 / / 1 Comment

Graeme Thickins of Tech~Surf~blog interviews Ben Pollack, director of products, and Christian Wiklund, CEO, of Skout — at the DEMO ’09 conference, which was held March 1-3, 2009, in Palm Desert, CA.

One of the most talked about presenters this year was a location-based online dating service called Skout. It used to be just another dating site till the founders came up with a new wrinkle that uses large touch-screen plasma displays in bars and night clubs — so you can find and flirt with other singles in the immediate vicinity, meaning in that bar or anywhere within about a mile and a half radius. The CEO, Christian Wiklund, and VP of bus dev, Redg Snodgrass, did a high-energy stage pitch, which included the unveiling of one of their new kiosks that will soon be in 10,000 night spots all over the country in a town near you — in various sizes, some freestanding, some wall-mounted. I spoke with Ben Pollack, director of products, who’s pictured at right (that’s CEO Christian Wiklund at left). Note: Skout was one of seven “DEMOgod Award” winners announced as the final conference session wrapped up  Tuesday afternoon. Yes, it’s true: it seems the judges are really into flirting…. 🙂

Skout-DEMO09-350w

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DEMO 09 – Interview With DEMO Presenter BitGravity

March 4, 2009 / / 0 Comments

Graeme Thickins of Tech~Surf~Blog interviews Perry Wu, CEO of BitGravity, at the DEMO ’09 conference, which was held March 1-3, 2009, in Palm Desert, CA.

This interview was with a company that both presented on stage (for a second year running), and provided technology for the event — specifically, the video streaming technology behind the “DEMO Live” broadcast, which was enjoyed by a worldwide audience over the past two days. I managed to run down BitGravity’s CEO, Perry Wu, to tell us more about his growing content distribution startup.

BitGravity-DEMO09-350w

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