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: Innovation (Page 6 of 7)

Final Thoughts on DEMOfall…

Well, two days since my return from San Diego, let me summarize my take on the latest DEMO event and share some random images and opinions. First of all, everything was extremely well run. This is *the* most crack conference team on the planet — logistics, food, press support, absolutely flawless wi-fi, the whole nine yards — even great bumper music. Demofallstagecolors_1 I just wish theyda told me the hotel had two towers, and that if you were unlucky enough to make your reservations a bit too late, you’d get stuck in the West Tower and have to hoof it three-quarters of a mile to where the event was held, in and around the East Tower. For the prices, there has to be a better venue in the San Diego area.

But, more importantly, what was the tenor of the event, and what were the takeaways? I touched on a lot of that in my report published on event-review site Conferenza.com the other day. But let me ramble on a bit more, now that I’m two days removed from it all. DEMOfall was definitely an upbeat affair — exhuberance was in the air at every turn. [Even if sunshine wasn’t. Now, if someone could demo a technology that would remove fog, haze, and overcast from the San Diego climate, that would really be something!] Demofallpavilionscene It was reminiscent of the pre-crash conference scene for sure — and I wondered how many of these people were experiencing this “high” for the first time. My guess would be a large percentage, because there were many, many young faces in the crowd.

The mix of technologies — consumer tech vs. enterprise IT, business vs. home, widgets vs. software (including another kind of widget!) — was excellent. There was something here for everybody. Almost too much — but that’s always the case at DEMO. Trying to cover it all is essentially impossible for any one reporter. Which is why outfits like Ziff Davis/CNet send multiple people — but they have separate media entities, too, which is how they can do that. Demofallpavilionside_1 The press policy is a very democratic one, I learned: it allows only one reporter from any one media outlet, even including the WSJ, NY Times, USA Today. But let me apologize now for not covering all 67 presenting companies. Nothing against any of you that I didn’t — just not enough time. It’s flatly impossible to do, with any depth, anyway. [I did manage to blog some 37 of them, though!]

Would I recommend DEMO as the launchpad for a new startup? Absolutely, positively — if you can handle the rigor and the preparation. It’ll make a better company out of any fledgling startup, I assure you — just going through the process (starting with getting accepted). The next event, which will be #25, is in Palm Desert, CA, January 30 – February 1 (where the weather is guaranteed to be much better). It’s at the Desert Springs Resort & Spa. How does one apply to present? Read all about that here.

Let me share a few more pix I shot at DEMOfall — these with my new little HP Photosmart M425. That’s the one with the new “pretexting” feature… 🙂 Five megapixels, very compact, 3x optical — not bad for a hundred bucks. [More proof of The Cheap Revolution, as Rich Karlgaard calls it.] I’ve included a shot from the demo of the wi-fi bunny, from Paris-based Violet, a product Ed Baig of USA Today called “easily the silliest Demo product.” Demofallwifirabbit Another of my shots shows the two presenters from Eluma on stage, including VP marketing Joe Lichtenberg on the right, who just told me his firm got one of the coveted “Demo God” awards that were handed out at the final evening’s dinner (which I had to miss). Demofalleluma That’s two Demo conferences in a row where companies I’ve run into early and blogged about became Demo God winners. [Just lucky, I guess…]

A funny scene near the end of Wednesday’s closing session was Chris Shipley strutting out with the surfboard giveaway, replete with shades, to the sounds of The Beach Boys’ “Surfin’ USA.” Demofallchrissurfboard I was so hoping to win that nice stick (donated by sponsor Qualcomm). But, alas, the guy in front of me did — and he didn’t even seem excited about it. Dude?

One final ranting bitch about the show, which I just have to get in, is exemplified by my final photo, which is of the CEO of Moixa Energy presenting. [You’ll remember this outfit, if you’ve been reading my blog, as the one that got my vote for the worst name — though I’ve since decided it’s a tie with PrefPass.] His “USB Cell” may be cool — though it certainly isn’t the most visually elegant product I’ve ever seen. Demofallmoixa But could the guy conjur up something better to wear than the most god-awful pair of jeans I’ve even seen? I look better than that when I’ve done lumberjack work for three hours in the woods behind my house, for kee-rist sakes. In his defense, he was just one of several presenters who were dressed shabbily. And, sorry, anything including jeans fits that category for me. Please, Chris, can we have a dress code for presenters? It’s the least they can do for us. Hey, if Steve Jobs is coming on stage — fine, he wears what he wants. But these guys, they ain’t no Steve Jobs — okay? 🙂 Certainly not yet… And having them pretend like they are is just too hard to stomach.

What were the takeaways of DEMOfall 2006?
• The tech economy is strong. But we’re not in a bubble, according to the show’s producers. [How could we be when the Nasdaq is still 55% down from its high in the year 2000?]
• Money is flowing. Many of these startups-you’ve-never-heard-of have already raised substantial funding, as reported in their profiles. And a person can only wonder how so many of them get such amounts, based on what appears to be a sketchy or risky plan. I can only recall a few presenters who said they were bootstrapped — that is, surviving just on their own funds at this point. Whatever happened to the raw, truly undiscovered startups getting a chance? Must they all be VC-backed already?
• Consumer tech continues to influence enterprise IT. And Web 2.0 type services are leading the way here. The center of gravity is now on the consumer or individual user side of things. Internet apps are where the most energy is these days, not in computers, operating systems, desktop apps, and the corporate IT power base of old.
• The tech economy, and really the entire economy, is going global faster than you think. This Demo had the largest number ever of non-U.S. presenting firms. And who knows what percentage of all the firms that pitched are relying at least partially on offshore technology expertise to develop their products. Either that or on immigrants who now call the U.S. home.

One final thing: links to a couple of excellent recaps of the event by some of the good press people covering it. First, a story from CNet with several contributors, including Rafe Needleman, Daniel Terdiman, and Dan Farber, all of whom I chatted with at the conference. And another good story is from Thursday’s edition of USA Today, by Ed Baig.

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Kicking Off My DEMOfall Coverage

You say the event hasn’t started yet? You’re right, it’s September 25-27. But that doesn’t stop me. I blog pre, during, and after such major conferences that I attend as a press registrant. [See my coverage of DEMO ’06 in February in Phoenix here.] Demofalllogo This is just my first post of what will be many for DEMOfall, and I’m looking forward to it.

So, what’s the buzz on this one as I sit here in Minneapolis, less than two weeks from my flight to San Diego? Well, not much that’s hit my radar so far. The DEMO folks like to keep a lid on things till it’s closer to showtime. [And why would they compete with all the Apple media hype going on right now, anyway (peaking today)?] These folks do know how to build the buzz quite well as they approach their conference dates, however, to hype both attendance and media coverage — which is considerable.

Coolest thing I’ve heard so far is the Widgetbox Competition, sponsored by one of the presenting companies at DEMOfall, one of about 70 chosen from hundreds of hopefuls. Demo06widephoto Haven’t seen the official list of all the presenting companies yet from the DEMO PR folks (and it may actually still be getting finalized). But if you search on “DEMOfall 2006,” you’ll see some companies are already promoting their selection to pitch at this event — names such as 4INFO, Simple Star, Add Me, MyPW, Headplay, Koral, Scrapblog, Mvox, and SiteKreator, to name a few.

How does DEMO select companies? Check out this recent series of podcasts from the show’s producer.

Watch this space for much more soon…

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Bill Joy: Quackery Alert

On Tuesday morning at PC Forum, the kickoff session was Esther Dyson’s interview with Bill Joy, one of the legendary founders of Sun Microsystems and longtime CTO there. “Big Swings at Big Problems” is how the session was advertised. Esther said the last time Bill spoke at PC Forum was 1995, and she 031406billjoy_1 wore the sweatshirt from that event in honor of the occasion. A lot has certainly changed in those 11 years, for Sun and everyone else. In recent years, Bill made the move to VC-land and joined Kleiner Perkins — where his former Sun colleague, Vinod Khosla, has been a partner for many years.

Bill said there are still 15 years left on Moore’s Law, and that the smaller devices that will result from these contunuing technology advancements “will enable many more people to have computers and get educated — if they can figure out how to get courseware on those things.”

But what else is Bill focusing on at KP these days? “We’re looking for innovators who can get more clean water and better energy — and get everyone driving efficient cars. And I mean electric cars, not just hybrids.” [Just an aside: Bill, please call me when the torque on those things equals that of my Turbo Passat, would ya?]

Asked about recent investments KP is making, Joy said “it’s a wonderful time to be working with innovators.” One example, he said, is a still-stealth company KP has backed that’s “putting everything needed for a cheap (computing) device onto one chip.” And [yawn] they also recently did two public company investments (PIPEs). “How much is KP leaving the Valley behind?” asked Esther. “We’ve always had a life sciences group. We still have an IT group, including green tech. Vinod just announced a new fund yesterday. He’s a big ethanol advocate. And I’m working with him on biofuels initiatives.”

Joy continued: “Nanoscale technology is driving the development of new materials. The breadth of proposals is very wide these days. The great stuff always sounds like quakery. I get all those.” Bill also said that a lot of what’s happening today reminds him of 1999, except “there are bigger opportunities worldwide.”

Why haven’t there been many of these new investments yet by KP? “We’ve been looking to invest in a water technology,” Joy said, implying he and his partners just haven’t seen a good candidate yet. “We need ones with little or no maintenance.” For example, no filters to change, he said. “Clean water is the best enabler of good health (in the third world). And electricity is an enabler of many things.”

What about the “laptop for every child” program? asked an audience member. “I’d like to see a ten-dollar computer,” Joy said, “with a roll-up display.”

Esther’s closing comment was, “Bill, you were so gloomy five years ago…” (referring to his now infamous Wired article, “The Future Doesn’t Need Us,” a line of thinking he’s since moved away from). “You just have to keep your eyes on what needs to be done,” Joy said. “It’s an incredibly exciting time.”

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Jeremy Allaire: Minnesota Boy Makes Good (Very Good)

I hooked up with Jeremy via email in advance of PC Forum, and asked him if he’d like to do a little interview at the event for my blog, which of course includes lots of readers back in the Twin Cities. And he quickly responded via Blackberry that he’d be happy to. Which I really appreciated, considering how Brightcove344x69 popular this guy is now with his hot, new startup, Brightcove. Jeremy and his company even had a major feature on page 1A of the Wall Street Journal a couple of weeks ago. So, despite being very busy at PC Forum (including as a panelist — see my previous post on business models), he graciously agreed to spend time chatting with me. What’s more, he had to endure several email attempts by me to hook up with him at the conference (thanks Jeremy!). Hey, it wasn’t easy finding a specific person in a group of 450, especially with things spread out over a large property like LaCosta.

It’s hard to believe it will be 10 years this fall that Jeremy and his brother J.J. — just a couple of years out of Macalester College in St. Paul — plus the 25 or so young employees that were then part of Allaire Corp., picked up and moved the company, lock, stock, and barrel, to Cambridge, MA, at their VC’s suggestion. (That was after first considering but passing on Silicon Valley.) Thus began the legendary status of Allaire Corp. around our neck of the woods as the Web 1.0 company that got away — but one that made it very, very big in the process. The company grew to some 450 employees before being acquired for something north of $350 million by Macromedia, where Jeremy then served as CTO for three years (commuting from Boston to San Francisco, which he admits got old).

The move worked well for the company and the two Allaire brothers, Jeremy told me. Both took a strong liking to Cambridge and settled in, got married, and now have two kids each. I asked Jeremy of he ever gets back to visit his parents in Winona, MN. He said not often, but that he sees them regulary at another house they now have in the Boston area.

I also had to ask about the latest big development for J.J. — the acquisition of his startup, Onfolio, by Microsoft. (J.J. was originally scheduled to be at PC Forum and I’d planned to interview him as well, But, alas, he had to cancel due to obligations associated with the acquisition.) Jeremy told me it was a big win for J.J., for a company that he had just self-funded over the past few years. (After Allaire Corp. was acquired, Jeremy said the two didn’t really consider teaming up again in a new business, though they remain close personally — simply because they had different interests.) All six employees of Onfolio, including J.J., are now doing yet another big move — this time to Redmond. How does J.J. feel about that, I asked? “He’s really excited about it,” said Jeremy. First Ray Ozzie leaves Boston behind, now J.J…

Meantime, Jeremy, though he’s not planning to move himself anytime soon, is still quite the traveler, regularly shuttling between Brightcove’s home office in Cambridge and three others already set up: in New York City, Los Angeles, and San Francisco (the cities that most of the major content producers and media companies call home, after all). He told me the company already has 50 employees and is heading to be double that soon.

What’s been the timeline of Brightcove’s short history to date? First, Jeremy told me, he incubated the idea at General Catalyst Partners in Boston for a year or so, after leaving Macromedia. He first presented the company and its planned business model at PC Forum in March 2005. From then through the fall, he and others at the firm began selectively getting the word out to key partners and content providers. That culminated with a presentation at the very well attended insider conference “Web 2.0” (sponsored by O’Reilly), which was held in San Francisco last fall. The company soon had a public debut via a story in the New York Times, which was then followed in February by the major front-page WSJ piece. (I asked Jeremy how he happened to choose his cracker-jack PR firm, SutherlandGold, based in San Francisco, and he said he met them at last year’s PC Forum! I had the opportunity to meet two of those folks at dinner one evening — Susan Cashen, formerly of TiVo, and Amy Janzen — where we shared some good conversation with my colleague Gary Bolles of Conferenza and Microcast Communications.)

So, fast forward, how is Brightcove sitting today? Very well indeed. Jeremy gave me a rundown: it already has 200 of what he calls “broadband channels” or content partners. And, since the company started what it called a “commercial preview” in November, for video producers, it has signed up 450 companies to date. It has 700 of its video “players” deployed, and it has 7000 titles already in its library. It also has an affiliate syndication program, and one client — Reuters — has 1000 affiliates signed up to date. With this Brightcove program for Reuters, any web site or blog can simply fill out a form, put some code into their web page, and become an instant video news broadcaster. (I plan to try it out myself!) Deals with other major media firms include the New York Times, and yet others are still in the works, including CBS (as touched on in the WSJ article) — though Jeremy had no new announcements he could tell me about quite yet.

My final question for Jeremy was this: What’s it like having Barry Diller on your board? “Oh, it’s great,” he said. “He’s a remarkably intelligent guy, with a strong strategic mind for online businesses. And he’s one of the most connected people on the planet.” Jeremy said it’s very rare for Diller’s firm, IAC/InterActiveCorp, to make minority investments, which they did on the case of Brightcove. They tend to only acquire companies outright. Diller sits on Brightcove’s board, which is also quite an achievement for the startup, since he only serves on two other boards: The Washington Post and Coca-Cola.

I closed by asking Jeremy about his management team, which he said is “tremendous.” It even includes one colleague from the early days of Allaire Corp., who was also a friend of his at Macalester College in St. Paul: Adam Berrey, now Brightcove’s VP of Marketing. Where was Jeremy off to next? San Francisco, he said, to keynote at the “VON” conference. And he was going to spend some time at his offices there as well, in addition to catching up with a guy I’ve since met who was employee #4 at Allaire Corp., Ben Cantlon. (Ben recently relocated back to Minneapolis but was visiting SF this week.)

Thanks for the interview, Jeremy, and best of luck as you continue disrupting the video distribution business!

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What I’m Looking Forward to at PC Forum

Well, I arrived in Southern California last night in preparation for the big event to kick off tomorrow in Carlsbad (North San Diego County). And I was just in time for a huge cold front and mega amounts of rain! They even had snow down to 1500 feet in the mountains. Not exactly what the San Diego tourism board had in mind! And here PC Forum just relocated from Scottsdale this year, too. Oh, well, no matter. I’d always rather be here, and by Monday things are due to improve. (Plus it’s raining bigtime in Scottsdale, too, from the same storm.)

Here’s a little rundown on the things I’m looking forward to with this trip:
1) Blogging for my readers about what the buzz is at this very highly regarded conference.
2) Learning about new technologies and business models.
3) Finding out who’s funding what.
4) Taking in a packed conference agenda, with some particularly good sessions being these, in my opinion:

• Esther Dyson’s interview of Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay and now CEO of Omidyar Network, which is funding both for-profits and non-profits, but believes profitable enterprises and efficient markets are often the best way to achieve social good.
• “Behavioral Targeting 2.0”: how four marketing and ad technology vendors, Compete, Grassroots, mSpoke, and Tacoda, are moving beyond spyware to get users actively involved in controlling their own data.
• “New Business Models: Power to the Edges”: featuring the CEOs of Brightcove, Salesforce.com, Augmentum, and Microsoft’s SVP of technical strategy.
• “Search: What Are You Gonna Do for an Encore?”: a look at what comes after search reaches its natural limits, including the two trends of personalization and verticalization, and featuring the CEO of Zillow, Google’s SVP of sales and bus dev, the CEO of Efficient Frontier, and Yahoo’s SVP of search.
• And the closing panel, “New Forms of Life”: how online community is actually changing life — wherein it’s heading toward no longer being “virtual,” but part of life, just like work and play. The panel includes the CEOs of LinkedIn and Facebook, along with a producer from Seriosity, a still-in-stealth company that’s out to apply gaming culture to work.

5) And, of course, meeting lots of interesting people — including interviewing some of the speakers and attendees. So far, I have Jeremy Allaire of Brightcove, Bill Day of WhenU, Michael Tanne of Wink, and Greg Pierson of iovation on my list. And I’m also hoping to chat with J.J. Allaire of Onfolio (just acquired by Microsoft)…Adam Bosworth of Google Health…Michael Arrington of edgeio…Steve Marder of Eurekster…Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn…somebody from the Omidyar Network…David Gilmour of Tacit Software’s pre-launch (and very cool sounding) Illumio startup…Bruce Francis of Salesforce.com…and others yet to be determined.

Stay tuned. I’ll be blogging live from PC Forum, and during breaks, etc, as I can. And please do email me if you have any suggestions relating to my coverage of PC Forum, questions you’d like me to ask, or whatever…

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