Some of the Awesome People I Met at DEMO 07

Now that I’ve been back from DEMO for a week, it’s time to go through my humongous stack of cards again and say-hey to all great people I met at this very upbeat event. I’ve been sorting through all these cards on my desk today….

Once again, the whole conference came off very well — the logistics, the networking, the program, everything was great (even if the weather was a little iffy at first). Though it’s always hard to break away to attend these things, I’m really, really glad I did and would wholeheartedly recommend DEMO conferences to anyone in this business, whether you’re new to it or not.

Normally, I’d have done this “people post” a little sooner, but it’s been the busiest post-conference week I can remember for a while. It seems the startup business is booming everywhere, and I’m hustling to follow up with a lot of blogging and consulting work, now that I’m a free-agent again! On top of that, I still have some blog posts I’d like to do on companies I met last week…which will make this a record in the elapsed time between the conference ending and my final posts. But there were just so many interesting companies and stories at DEMO 07, I really could blog about it for weeks.

DEMO remains the best venue to see all the new innovative ideas coming out in the tech business, year in and year out — actually twice a year. And it proves that innovation can come from anywhere — even, I’m out to prove, Minnesota (if not this time). In that regard, I volunteered to help Chris Shipley connect with promising startups here in my adopted home state in the future. I’m hoping she can do one of her “Innovation Day” meetup events sometime soon in the Twin Cities, and hear pitches from a bunch of our local startups. Though we didn’t have a Minnesota-based company presenting this time, there was one from our neighboring state of Wisconsin — Jyngle, which gets my vote for one of the best, most memorable brand names to come out at DEMO 07. These things are important, people, when you have to stand out and be remembered amidst the information-overload of 68 startups all hyping their wares! (Just a taste of what such startups will face out in the real world.) Smart companies take the time to get this naming thing right. Now if Jyngle could just have a memorable tagline to go with its cool name. As Guy Kawasaki says, you have to “make mantra” — meaning boil down to a few words how you make a difference in the world. Again, not easy, but if you can’t do it, how do you expect your users or buyers to “get” what you’re doing? Without mantra, you can just slowly drown in all the hype of the marketplace. I would describe mantra as “messaging on steroids.” [Hey, Guy — there ya go. As a marketing/branding/messgaging dude, that would be my three-word-mantra wrapup/takeaway of your great talk in Minneapolis a few weeks ago.]

I don’t mean to pick on Jyngle — they’re hardly alone in this. And Business Week liked their service enough to include it in a post-DEMO story. But I sit here looking at their cards again and see a huge missed opportunity — no tagline, no mantra ringing through to me (pardon the pun). Sure, when you go to their site, you see the words “Mobile Group Messaging for the Real World” — but that doesn’t do it for me. Now, a tagline like “Message Your Group, Fast” sure would. What’s cool is the Jyngle service lets you do this group-messaging with either voice or text.

Time savings — it’s ALL about saving time today. That’s a major investment theme of one of the smartest, most successful guys in tech investing, Roger McNamee of Elevation Partners. He wasn’t at this DEMO, nor was his partner Bono (though there was a sighting of the latter at the last DEMO, which turned out to be the most masterful PR trick of that event). So, here’s a lesson for startups: when Roger (the Man) McNamee talks about stuff like this, listen!

But I digress. How did I get off on this tangent? Such is blogging. Back to the people I met. First, I’ll list some of the people I already knew but renewed friendships with (no particular order, just as I kinda ran into ’em). I’ll start with the former Minnesota people I talked about in my opening-reception post, noting where they are now…

• Steve Larsen, CEO, Krugle Inc., Menlo Park, CA
• Beth Temple, CMO, Magnify.net, NYC
• Charles Wilson, consultant to Mission Research (SalesWorks), Lancaster, PA
• Charles Beeler, General Partner, El Dorado Ventures, Menlo Park
• Hany Nada, Managing Director, Granite Global Ventures, Menlo Park
And these other friends I saw again, some of them just a few weeks prior at BlogHaus and CES:
• Robert Scoble, PodTech
• John Furrier, PodTech
• Shel Israel, co-author with Scoble on “Naked Conversations”
• Stewart Alsop, Alsop Louie Partners
• Renee Blodgett, DEMO PR guru, Blodgett Communications
• Julie O’Grady, another DEMO PR guru, here for Boorah
• Gary Bolles, Conferenza
• Dan Farber, VP Editorial, ZDnet
• Rafe Needleman, Editor, CNET
• Brian Ziel, PR guru, Seagate
• Becky Sniffen, who handles PR for DEMO
• Chris Shipley, DEMO Executive Producer
Plus all these new peope I met, at least the ones I got cards from:
• Christine Herron, Director of Investments, Omidyar Network (whose tagline
I love: “Every individual has the power to make a difference”)
• Tom Sly, Manager of New Business Development, Google (a newly minted Harvard MBA;
I told him he was the second Google guy I’d met a conference…the other was Larry Page)
• Aydin Senkut, President, Felicis Ventures, San Francisco (an early Googler)
• Alan Kelley, Managing Director, SJF Ventures, NYC
• Luis Villalobos, Founder & Board Member, Tech Coast Angels
• Jeff Cohn, Investment Screening Director, Tech Coast Angels
• Laura Paglione, Director, Knowledge Management/Entrepreneurship, Kauffman Foundation
• Charlie Crystle, CEO, Mission Research (SalesWorks), Lancaster, PA
• Wendy Caswell, CEO, ZINK Imaging, Waltham, MA
• Wim Sweldens, VP, Alcatel-Lucent Ventures, Murray Hill, NJ
• Andrew Horwitz, Senior Director, Market Development, Seagate
• Rhonda Shantz, Senior Director, Consumer Communications, Symantec
• Mike Bradshaw, Partner, Connect Public Relations, Provo, UT (for Symantec)
• Esteban Sardera, CEO, PairUp, San Francisco
• David Jennings, Cofounder & COO, Yodio, Bellevue, WA
• Katie Perry, Marketing, Jyngle, Milwaukee, WI
• Tom McGannon, Founder & VP Operations, Nexo, Palo Alto, CA
• Gina Jorasch, VP Marketing, Nexo
• Benjamin Levy, VP Marketing, Vringo, Beit Shemesh, Israel
• David Goldfarb, CTO, Vringo
• Michael Bates, CEO, iqzone, Scottsdale, AZ
• James Feguson, President, iqzone
• Eric Moyer, CEO/Cofounder, Boorah, Palo Alto, CA
• Ramsay Hoguet, Founder, MyDesignIn, Marblehead, MA
• Eric Sirkin, President/Cofounder, BUZ Interactive, Palo Alto
• Tamara Stone, Partner, Rainmaker Communications, Mountain View, CA (for BUZ Interactive)
• Brian Smiga, CEO, Preclick, Atlantic Highlands, NJ
• Tony Davis, CEO, TeleFlip, Santa Monica, CA
• Christian Gammill, VP Product Marketing, TeleFlip
• Julie Mathis, VP, CarryOn PR, Los Angeles (for TeleFlip)
• Brian Solis, Founder, FutureWorks Inc., San Jose, CA
• Marc Orchant, Blogger and Storyteller (the ‘Office Evolution’ blog/ZDnet), Albuquerque, NM
• Sue Orchant, artist
• Victoria Barrett, Associate Editor, Forbes Magazine

And, finally, here are some people I would have liked to meet but somehow didn’t, including the first two guys listed who were attending from a Minnesota company (how’d I miss them?):
• Mark Dunn, CTO, MakeMusic, Eden Prairie, MN
• John Paulson, CEO, MakeMusic, Eden Prairie, MN
• Marshall Kirkpatrick, Splashcast
• Michael Arrington, TechCrunch
• Oliver Starr, MobileCrunch
• Katie Fehrenbacher, GigaOM
• Barry Bonds (yes, that one), who appeared for Bling Software

That’s it for now on DEMO. More soon on some other things I saw there that I liked…