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: Marc Orchant

Marc Orchant – We Mourn a Big Loss

UPDATE (12/10/07): I am extremely sorry to report the passing of Marc Orchant yesterday. Marc was a friend and inspiration to so many people. How is it he could make anyone he talked to feel like the most important person in the world? What a smile, what an upbeat person! I will really miss him. My sincere condolences to Sue and the family. When I try to understand this, I’m reminded of what Joe Gibbs said recently when he learned of the passing of Sean Taylor: “The way I’m going to deal with it is, God tells us that it will take a thousand years for us to begin to understand heaven.” Rest in peace, brother.

UPDATE (12/9/07): Oliver Starr (who, by the way, is no longer affiliated with Blognation) is regularly posting updates on Marc Orchant’s condition. The family is getting an enormous outpouring of well wishes and support, which just shows what an impact Marc has had on so many people. Keep praying.

ORIGINAL POST (12/3/07): (Note: photo is from a group shot I took at DEMOfall, September 2007.) I was really floored this afternoon to learn, via my Twin Cities buddy Steve Borsch, that our close friend Marc Orchant suffered a massive coronary yesterday. Marcorchant2
Horrible, totally unexpected news. Steve told me it was reported earlier today by Oliver Starr, Marc’s blogging colleague at Blognation, via this post. According to Oliver, Marc is in critical condition at a hospital in his hometown of Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Marc is one of my closest and best blogger friends, and just a great, great guy. He’s been a real inspiration to me, and one of the most helpful, positive, fun-loving guys you could ever want to know. I pray for his recovery, and I send my best to his wife, Sue, and the kids.  He’s too young for this!  Marc, we love you and we need you back, buddy!

DEMOfall 07: Thoughts and Images

Another DEMO event has come and gone, and it was a great one. Kudos again to Chris Shipley and team. These conferences go by so fast, but I try to capture as much as of the energy and optimism as I can from all the tremendous innovations that get launched here. It’s certainly a challenge to cover so many  interesting, breakthrough technologies, but always a great conference experience. Entrepreneurship at its finest!

Didn’t get a chance to shoot a whole lot of photos this time — too darn busy meeting people, attending all the sessions, and (of course) writing posts!  But I did get 50 pix or so up on Flickr. And I’ve included a selection of them here in this post.

Demofallstagecolors

As a recap, I thought it’d be fun to give you some facts about this conference. This year is the 17th straight for DEMO events (and two conferences per year have been held for many years now). The brand had its beginnings in 1991, founded by tech journalist Stewart Alsop, and was later acquired by IDG. It’s now run by the crack team from Network World Conferences. [By the way, speaking of Stewart Alsop, who became a VC several years ago — I was bummed that I had to miss hearing him deliver a keynote at an angel investor conference back here in Minnesota last week, because of all my travels. But I hear that event went very well, too.]

There were 69 companies pitching at DEMOfall this year, two of them public firms, and all the rest private — mostly small startups (and, in most cases, just coming out of stealth mode). Those 67 companies have amassed — get this — more than $450 million in funding to date! That’s an eye-popping average of $6.7 million each. (Of course, that figure is skewed somewhat by one DEMO presenting company, Jasper Wireless, which has already raised a cool $49 million! Its investors include my friends at Crescendo Ventures and BridgeScale.) As I mentioned in a previous post, 13 of the 69 companies were from countries other than the U.S. — quite a global contingent this year!  DemofallsunriseIt was great to see and hear these entrepreneurs from other countries, and I got to meet several of them. [My favorite company name of that bunch: Red Square Ventures, from…guess where?]  My post with links to all the presenting companies is here, and it lists where each of them is based. There were also 12 states represented — CA, as you may have guessed, had the most companies (32), with MA a distant second (6), then TX (5), and NY (4).  Sadly, none yet from my adopted home state of MN — but I’m working on that. [Chris, trust me — we have several here waiting in the wings!]  I was, however, instrumental in getting a firm from WI to DEMOfall this year, so I’m happy about that.

Attendance at the event was more than 700, which DEMO sums up as "corporate development executives, investors, influential journalists, and the most imaginative entrepreneurs in the world." I love that last bit. The press list numbered 76,  including such venerable names as the Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek, the Financial Times, The Economist, The Deal, CBS, the AP, Reuters, USA Today, the Washington Post, the LA Times, the Merc News, Wired, CNet, ZDNet, eWeek, Computerworld, NetworkWorld, InfoWorld….but that’s not all! Demofallsurfvideos Several standout blogs were reporting on site as well, including Read/Write Web, GigaOM, Mashable, TechDirt, the new Blognation (Oliver Starr and Marc Orchant) — and (ahem) your buddy at Tech-Surf-Blog, of course… 🙂

DEMO has quite a track record as a launchpad for some pretty amazing firms. Here are just some of them:  Skype, WebEx, E*Trade, Six Apart, Salesforce.com, IronPort Systems, Moobella, Kaboodle, U.S. Robotics, and new ventures from such large firms as IBM, Sony, Motorola, Microsoft, and Adobe. It’s also launched such memorable products as TiVo, Half.com, Java 1.0, the Palm Pilot, and Ugobe’s Pleo toy.

This year’s DEMOfall had a good mix of consumer-facing, corporate computing, and enabling technologies. So,the event reflects activity across the entire technology industry. Here’s how this crop of presenters was categorized:

• Consumer technologies … 36 (5 devices, and fully 31 software and services offerings)

• Enabling technologies … 16

• Small business software and services … 10

• Enterprise software and services … 5

• IT management and infrastructure … 2

Demofallpavilion

An interesting bunch of the small business tool companies got together the first night for beers, I was told, and decided their offerings were the solutions for "everyman," or all the "average Joes" out there. In the course of all this revelry, they coined a new term: "Web2.joe" — which is pretty funny. [Well, okay, maybe you had to be there.] They decided all their tools shared the main criteria needed by today’s small business people: affordable, easy to use, and customizable. These partying companies, a few of which I had a chance to later blog about, were BatchBlue, FastCall411, Advanta (ideablob), InstaCall, Vello, PlanHQ, and Tungle. I definitely think they’re all addressing a big need, and I’m sure we’re bound to be seeing more such small business tools, especially hosted apps, at future DEMO events. It’s such a huge market opportunity.

Demofallafterdark

And that, friends, is what DEMO is all about: unlimited opportunity.

See you down the road at the next conference!

DemofalltheinterviewDemofallpoolDemofallsunset

DEMOfall 07: What I Like So Far

The Bayview Lawn at the Sheraton San Diego Hotel & Marina was buzzing bigtime starting at 6:00 last evening to kick off DEMOfall 2007. Georgeous weather, sumptuous food, great friends, new people from all over the place, and tech talk flying in every direction. Does it get any better than this? I was so busy meeting new people and getting pitched, I didn’t even have a chance to shoot many photos. Demofall07party
Okay, one decent shot, and here it is: (from left) Marc Orchant, newly of Blognation…Aaron Fulkerson, cofounder of Mindtouch (who just who strolled over from his offices)…Shel Israel of Global Neighbourhoods…and Luis Villalobos, founder of Tech Coast Angels. [Man, I love the mixes I can put together at these events!] But if you want to see more photos, just check out these from Brian Solis, who does much better than I ever could. (Brian, you da man.)

But what new stuff did I hear about at the party that I like?  Well, for starters, Naomi Wall, content dev chief at MetaRADAR, told me they’ll be introducing a "media masher" that brings all your rich media content together, bridging the gap between websites, desktop apps, and mobil devices. And I also was glad to run into the guys from mSpoke in Pittsburgh (yes, some of those smart Carnegie Mellon dudes) — Sean Ammirati, VP biz dev (a colleague from Read/Write Web, who I’d only met online up till now), and Dave Mawhinney, CEO. They’re launching FeedHub, a whiz-bang new technology to help with your RSS information overload.  We’re talking a personalization engine that dynamically adapts to your reading habits. This is a space I’ve been following, and I just knew we’d be seeing some solutions to this problem soon. Bring it on, baby. A bloke from Manchester, UK, told me about YuuGuu, which lets you instantly share your screen in real-time with anyone, anywhere. Blimey, dude! The founder of LongJump told me about his firm’s online catalog of apps for small business, which can be customized via drag-and-drop. Then, lo and behold, I met a storage startup!  Fusion-io of Salt Lake City I learned will be introducing a revolutionary stroage architecture that puts SAN or NAS on silicon (high-density NAND), with access rates comparable to DRAM with the storage capacity of disk. DEMO says it "may prove to be among the most important products ever to launch" at their events. Yikes! Then, on the way back into the hotel bar [yes, the party continued inside, till God’s knows when], I ran into the the founder of iForem, which has a subscription-free service to store,protect and share intellectual property — an online safe deposit box for businesses and consumers, with a trust account. And then the folks from ideablob (site to
go live later this morning) caught me — we were the last ones on the lawn! — and told me their new venture is funded by
Advanta in Philly [how do all the PA startups find me?] This site is an open
community for small businesses, where members vote on new ideas and get
valuable advice and feedback from one another.  And get this: you can
actually win cash for your idea.

As the evening continued, I had a great chat with my longtime buddies Steve Larsen of Krugle and Shel Israel of Global Neighbourhoods, solving all the world’s problems. Then, it was beddy-bye time so I could get up early and write this post.  More soon!

A Bloggers Heyday in San Diego

Looks like the upcoming DEMO show will draw a ton of bloggers once again. The PR folks tell me the list already includes such names as TechCrunch, MobileCrunch, Techdirt, GigaOM, Gizmodo, Engadget, ForbesOnTech, buzzmodo, Kauffman’s eVenturing blog, Marc Orchant, Dan Farber, Paul Kedrosky’s Infectious Greed, and others…including yours truly, of course. Demofall06logo I’ll continue to post a heads up or two about companies who’ll be presenting there over the next few days, and will be blogging onsite as well — starting late Monday night or early Tuesday morning, as the opening session fires up.

Oh, many of the usual press suspects will be there, too, I’m told: AP, USA Today, Business2.0, CNet, WSJ, PC Magazine, Forbes, Computerworld, InformationWeek, ZDNet. Notice how I list them second? 🙂

Tags: