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: Venture Capital/M&A/Angels (Page 22 of 53)

DEMO 09 – A Closing Conversation With Some Buddies…

March 5, 2009 / / 0 Comments

Graeme Thickins of Tech~Surf~blog has an impromptu, rambling, fun discussion with Steve Larsen, Erik Haus, and Chris Gammill, on the Pavilion showfloor of the DEMO ’09 conference as it winds down. The event was held March 1-3, 2009, in Palm Desert, CA.

Talk about an impromptu podcast!  This is kind of a “DEMOgang” thing, as it were…with my longtime buddy Steve Larsen, a serial starup founder and former CEO of Krugle Inc. (just acquired), which he debuted at DEMO ’06 … Eric Haus, a product manager at Zuora … and another buddy, Chris Gammill, who’s a startup advisor in LA and had previously been with a DEMO presenting company, in ’07; he was attending DEMO this time with TechZulu.com, which did video coverage.  The four of us just happened to converge to the same table in the midst of some of the Pavilion stations to unwind with a glass of wine — and we ended up having a very fun, weird, rambling bull session on everything from startups, to chemistry experiments, to motorcycles — totally ad hoc stuff, and the discussion ended up being my longest podcast recording of the whole event!  Yikes — a 10-meg MP3!  At one point, one of the guys asked if I was going to edit it, and I said, hell no, I don’t have time for that.  So, here, friends, the full, uncut version…  (In the photo, left to right: Chris Gammill, Erik Haus, and Steve Larsen.)  What a way to end another great DEMO!

ChrisErikSteve-DEMO09

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DEMO 09 – Closing Interview With Chris Shipley

March 5, 2009 / / 0 Comments

Graeme Thickins of Tech~Surf~blog interviews Chris Shipley, executive producer of the DEMO ’09 conference, which was held March 1-3, 2009, in Palm Desert, CA.
Before I called it another DEMO, I just had to grab a moment with longtime executive producer Chris Shipley. Chris had been struggling with a bit of hoarse voice for most of the event, but held up remarkably well through till the end, when she introduced the seven “DEMOgod Award” winners (Coveroo, Silverstone, PureWire, Gwabbit, Ontier/Pixetell, Skout, and Avaak/Vue), and the People’s Choice award winner (SmartyCard). I wanted to get her take as she wrapped up this second-to-the-last DEMO of her marvelous 13-year career with this event (she’s co-producing the DEMOfall ’09 event with Matt Marshall).

ChrisShipley-OnStage

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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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