I'm pumped! DEMO Spring 2011 starts on Sunday and runs through Tuesday, in sunny, warm Palm Desert, CA. And, man, am I looking forward to the break! (After suffering through the snowiest winter on record in Minnesota; they say we'll likely hit 90 inches.) You can still register here. Hope to see you there! Coolest thing of all this year? A Minnesota company is pitching: my friend Lief Larson of Workface. Really stoked about that!
New For Me This Year: "DEMO Chatter" Box
Note the latest wrinkle for my DEMO coverage at the right. It's a social-media aggregation widget from my friends at FanChatter in Minneapolis (a Y Combinator startup), which captures all the conversation about DEMO in one place! (Multiple Twitter and Facebook feeds, and mutiple Twitter Lists, are coming in to the three tabs.) You can jump in and start posting, right there, after you connect your Twitter and/or Facebook accounts! You just have to "Like" my company Facebook page first. That's the love I get for posting this great tool… :-) It's the same technology some professional sports teams are now using on their web sites, as well as such other customers as the E!Online network, for red-carpet events like the Golden Globes, the Grammys, *and* this weekend's Oscar Awards — which we'll be watching live at DEMO after the opening reception Sunday night! (That FanChatter box will be on Eonline.com all weekend.)
More Startup Pitches Than I Can Count
I've been attending and reporting on major national tech conferences for more than a dozen years, as part of my continuing passion to get out in front of tech trends, and to do my other favorite thing: network. It's really what turned me into a blogger and part-time journalist several years ago. During this time, I've heard more than 1000 startup pitches — and I've been lucky enough to write about most of them, certainly hundreds. Twitter and live-blogging tools in recent years have only added to my output. Back in October, I did a post called My Adventures as a Connoisseur of the Fine Art of Startup Pitching that's largely about my DEMO experiences.
Dubbing itself "The Launchpad for Emerging Technology," DEMO was founded in 1991 by Stewart Alsop and later acquired by IDG. It's widely regarded as the inventor of the startup pitch fest, and certainly has the longest, continuous track record. It's extremely well run — which, friends, makes a difference! — and remains my favorite conference of them all. The biggest benefit of DEMO for the presenting companies is that it attracts a large, prestigious press and blogger contingent, and generates some 200 million media impressions for the collective participants. And, of course, it draws investors, too, from around the globe (as are the companies). Startups pitching at DEMO events have collectively raised billions of dollars. Many of them are now household names, or have been acquired or gone public. The conference publishes a list of DEMO alumni companies, by event — but note this list is just for the recent years 2006-2010. It's interesting to look back and start at 2006 (when my unbroken string of 12 DEMOs started), to see names that are now quite familiar, but were just upstarts at the time.
I'll again be live-blogging the entire two-day-plus DEMO Spring 2011 program, which will include more than 50 startups pitches, with some great panels, speakers, and interviews mixed in — all hosted by DEMO's Executive Producer, Matt Marshall, Editor and CEO of VentureBeat. Watch this blog for my live-blog post, which will fire up in full force on Monday morning! (Here's what my last one looked like: DEMOfall 2010 live-blog.)
Are you coming to DEMO Spring 2011? What are you most interested in? Mobile? Cloud? Social? Consumer Tech? Enterprise Software? Enabling Technologies? (Maybe all of it, like me?) Or, come on, is it just all about the killer networking? 🙂
I stopped by late on Day 2 to chat with my friends from Minneapolis, Workface Inc. I wanted to hear more about their very successful DEMO experience. The company was founded in 2006 "to pioneer human-to-human selling on the Web." On the morning of Day 1, in the Enterprise Technologies category, the Workface guys introduced to the 
world their "Customer-initiated Engagement Platform," which connects sales professionals with new prospects that are looking to make high-value, considered purchases on the Internet. They call it a "pre-CRM solution." It's cloud-based software accessible in any modern browser (no plug-ins required). The enterprise customer has no software installation expenses, and subscription costs are as little as $25 per month per sales person. Here's the DEMO Conference video of their pitch.
The Workface profile (at left) is media-rich and searchable, featuring video, text, images, links, files, and two-way chat tools that enable prospective customers to initiate meaningful conversations (anonymously or not) with the most appropriate sales person at the company whose web site they're visiting. A key point is that these profiles are highly portable, in that they can appear anywhere on the 'Net, including on Facebook. The Workface duo showed the latter in their on-stage demo.
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