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.

Tag: DEMOfall 07 (Page 2 of 3)

DEMOfall 07: Day 2 – BatchBlue Does Contacts…Even Your DEMO Ones!

September 27, 2007 / / 0 Comments

Here’s yet another cool online app for small businesses: a customizable contact organizer called "BatchBook." It’s a sleek new way to upgrade your people network, from BatchBlue Software. Customization is the key, the company points out,  because no two small businesses are the same, and requirements vary widely by industry. The contact management needs of the hundreds of thousands (millions?) of micro-businesses out there (meaning fewer than 25 employees) are all over the map. And most are simply not being served by the usual CRM suspects.  Batchbluescreen
BatchBook has a simple address-book interface (a very clean, simple UI) that you tag and categorize, and you also customize it for your unique business needs. What may be the best thing of all is you can "build relationships between these records." BatchBook is actually a contact manager, a communications manager, and a task manager all in one. This online app is available now on a free trial basis, then it’s only $9.95 per month. Again, I say well worth it — bring it on!

But get this, DEMO fans: just for kicks, over the past few weeks, the kind folks at BatchBlue built an account for DEMO, populating it with contact info from the past three conferences! So, if you’re a DEMO alum and weren’t at the event, shoot me an email and I’ll give you the special code…  🙂 You’ll not only get access to all these DEMO presenters, press, and event organizers, but a free one-year BatchBook account for yourself!  You heard it right here, friends, from your buddy Graeme. As a DEMO alum, your own account will be populated with "all this juicy DEMO data," as the company told me.  You can then log interesting conference conversations, track new business leads or investors, send thank-yous to the event organizers, and much more.  Let’s hear it for the power of community, huh?  Especially the awesome DEMO community.

DEMOfall 07: Day 2 – CashView…So Your Cashflow Won’t Suck

September 27, 2007 / / 1 Comment

On-demand, hosted apps for small business is just such a HUGE opportunity. I love this space. And one of the very coolest things I saw at DEMOfall was CashView, an online cash management service that simplifies the way you send invoices, receive payments , and pay bills. Cashviewlogo
Remember that advice you heard from some wise, old guy when you started your business — "Listen to me, watch my lips: cash is more important than your mother!" ? Well, assuming you’ve been managing yours manually via the paper method up till now, with all its attendant problems — then, wow, is this a service for you.  I know I’ll be signing up myself as soon as I get back home.  It’s even free till the end of the year, and then only $10 a month. [Are you kidding me? I pay more than that for my blogging platform service!]

Did you know that 97% of invoices are processed manually? Hello!?! Why, friends, are we doing this to ourselves?  We have the Internet, we have hosted services, we have smart companies like CashView — why are we letting paperwork weigh us down? Here’s the way CashView nets it out: "We stop the paper madness, so business owners can focus on growing their businesses." Cashviewscreen
They even cite a recent survey that found businesses spend twice as much time on administrative financial tasks than on growing their business.  WTF?  That’s insanity!  It’s funny, I was just discussing this topic a few weeks ago — telling somebody that it seems I have to spend half my time on marketing and selling, and another quarter on collecting — so, when the heck do I do all the work?

Anyway, so I told these guys my cash flow sucks [and you who are responsible for that know who you are out there 🙂 ]….and i figure I could justify using this thing just for the automated notices it sends out to remind clients to pay my bills!  But the app will even make electronic payments for me, too, if I want, eliminating the need for me to write checks when bill paying time comes around. And, of course, it schedules payments for me, via a dashboard that lets me see my cashflow in real time, anytime — from any computer anywhere.

When I saw this app up close in the Pavilion area, I kid you not, I felt like hugging the guy giving me the demo — the CEO, Rene Lacerte (who’s a guy with a lot of great, relevant experience). The investors like this company, too, because it just announced a second round of financing for $6.5 million led by Emergence Capital — and I chatted with partner Brian Jacobs about the big opportunity it represents.

So, if you’re a solo practitioner like me, or a small biz of any kind (they even say up to 500 employees), go sign up now at www.CashView.com — and tell your accountant to do it, too. And let’s both spend the time we save doing more productive things and growing our businesses, huh?

DEMOfall 07: Day 2 – Hello, DimDim…Bye-Bye WebEx?

September 27, 2007 / / 1 Comment

I love it when a presenter confidently struts onto center stage and does a big, bold shout-out to get people to sit up straight and listen. "WebEx is history!" D.D. Ganguly, DimDim’s CEO, yelled to start his presentation — which brought applause from a lot of people. And DimDim just might be a credible challenge in the web conferencing or screen-sharing space, with its free, open-source, hosted service.  It already has 125,000 customers, I was surprised to learn. Dimdimscreen
There’s no software to download, and anyone who uses a browser, said the CEO, can very easily show their slides and/or their desktop, plus talk, listen, chat, and broadcast via webcam. The service is free to consumers, though the firm will sell an enterprise edition — but at a fraction of the cost of other web conferencing apps, the company said. What’s more, since it’s an open-source app, it can easily be customized and enhanced by developers. To date, DimDim has raised $2.9 million from the founders and VC firms Draper Richards, Index Ventures, and Nexus India Capital. The CEO played a video of Draper Richards’ Howard Hartenbaum saying that, after investing in HotMail and Skype, this was an "obvious next investment."  That’s some pretty heavy endorsing he’s doing there! Makes me think we should be paying attention to DimDim.

DEMOfall 07: Day 2 – Tungle & Vello Make Meetings Easy

September 26, 2007 / / 2 Comments

The first presenters this morning are aimed at small business users, focused on making your life a lot easier to manage when it comes to meetings and conference calls.  Tungle calls itself a "fast and easy meeting coordinator." It’s a lightwieght plug-in, currently for Google Calendar (others coming). Tungle
It uses "the magic of P2P," said the CEO Marc Gingras, to share your data only with your contacts. It has a feature called the "Tungle space" so you can easily see the availability of others to schedule a meeting.  The demo was impressive, with a great UI. "It’s free and will remain that way," said Gringas. Use promo code "DEMOfall" to get it in limited release. Full launch is later this fall.

Vello is the conference that calls you. You just select the participants, hit send, and everyone’s phone rings and the call begins. Imagine that!  No more stragglers calling in five or ten minutes late… The COO, Mark Dzwanczyk, invited the audience to turn on their ringers and did a demo, and multiple phones immediately rang. The service boasts high-quality audio, Outlook integration, flexible billing, and a true business-class solution.Vello

DEMOfall 07: Fusion-io Puts Power of SAN in Your Hand

September 25, 2007 / / 2 Comments

The afternoon session is focusing on infrastructure and enabling technologies. Fusion-io was one of the brashest presenters, saying its silicon-based ioDrive "will turn disk drives into boat anchors." It has a capacity of 640Gb and does 100,000 seeks per second! Demofall07fusionio
The CTO and cofounder, David Flynn (on right), said a disk drive only does about 100 IOs per second — so, his ioDrive is 100x of that. "We talking about the equivalent performance of 1000 disk drives," echoed CEO and cofounder Rick White, pointing out the mechanical drive is just  inefficient. The solution, he said: "Put it on silicon!" With this product, "we can now put the performance of a SAN onto every server."  And, holding up the product, he said it "puts the power of a SAN into the palm of your hand."  For more details on what Fusion-io is up to, check out the press release.

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