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: startups (Page 14 of 19)

DEMO: Mission Research CEO: ‘Hosted Apps So 1999’

With Prince due to perform at halftime on Sunday’s Super Bowl telecast, I guess DEMO presenter Charlie Crystle picked a timely line to get his point across. Charlie, of ChiliSoft fame, is now CEO of Mission Research, located in “that hotbed of technology,” as he says: Lancaster, PA. But I gathered that Charlie and his colleagues like it there just fine. Life’s quieter, no big city problems, less turnover of people, etc. Besides, as he said in kicking off his on-stage demo, his company is about “applications for the rest of America, not the Silicon Valley crowd.” Take that, you early-adopter, techco-weenie Crackberry freaks.

Mission Research is well known for its GiftWorks fundraising software for non-profits, which it debuted a couple years ago at DEMO. It used this year’s event to tell the world about its next big thing: SalesWorks customer management software system for small and SOHO businesses. Salesworkslogo

The point Charlie was making in his “so 1999” reference was this: in-house software is preferred over outsourced services by a majority of this market. These smaller players are more leary than you think about trusting their valuable data to any hosted platform located off in Timbuktu somewhere — platforms that we all know can, and do, go down. [Did you hear about the big problem with Google Analytics today, by the way? Oucherooo….]

Now, don’t tell this to Mark Benioff, but I know from my involvement in marketing to small and midsized businesses (“SMBs”) that surveys do back up Charlie on this one. There’s a very large market out there for easy-to-use apps with dead-simple UIs designed for the small outfits that just don’t have IT people on staff. They want the software on their own machines, thank you very much — or, more specifically, they want their data on their own machines. (And they should want it backed up, too, preferably offsite.) What’s interesting, though, is the SalesWorks platform actually features the best of both worlds. It’s a hybrid that “boasts the power and safety of desktop applications integrated smartly and safely with web-based functionality,” the company says. It integrates with a variety of online services — for e-commerce, geo, and online marketing, for example — and, most significantly for 3.6 million small businesses out there, Intuit’s Quickbooks.

SalesWorks is described by the company as “customer management software that anyone can use and everyone can afford.” A beta version can be downloaded here.

Below, I’ve pasted in some screen shots of the SalesWorks software, showing the simple, clean interface, and some of its features, such as mapping of your contacts and options for doing customer mailings.

Charlie is an interesting guy, and a damn good musician, too, by the way (he played guitar at the famous DEMO jam session, along with guys like Don Clark of the Wall Street Journal). He also has a blog, separate from his company’s blog, where he talked recently about the SalesWorks launch.

I think Charlie’s really onto something with this product, and has a great experience base to build from in GiftWorks. There are obvious similarities to extend this functionality to small businesses (not all small businesses, but certainly many). There’s no doubt the SMB/SOHO market is huge and growing. But its massiveness and amorphousness (is that a word?) are precisley what make it such a challenge from a marketing standpoint. I think SalesWorks will succeed only if it secures distribution partnerships with big players that reach this broad demographic of mom-and-pops and businesses of less than, say, 50 employees. These big partners have the clout and marketing muscle to take this to the small business masses. But Charlie knows that, and has a plan to achieve it. And he has a great bunch of people on his board of advisors, too.

I would not bet against the man.

Startpage

Newcontact

Mapping

Mailing

DEMO: Flickr Pix Up and DEMOgod Winners

[UPDATE: The last of my DEMO 07 pix are now up there. Just look here for the set: www.flickr.com/photos/graemethickins/. Most of the latest ones were shot at the closing media panel/DEMOgod awards dinner.]

And more photos are coming. Just go here and search on the tag “DEMO 07” (note the space). I’m still shooting more pix here at the media panel.

A lot of the shots from last night’s jam session, by the way, were taken by Julie Mathis of PR firm CarryOn in LA, who’s here with TeleFlip and is also one of Symantec’s consumer agencies. She highjacked my camera 🙂 …and got some darn interesting shots, I must say.

By the way, the DEMOgod winners named this evening, in alpha order, were:
– blinkx
– Boston Power
– DARTdevices
– eJamming
– Inilex
– Kauffman Innovation Network
– PairUp
– Panjea
– QTech
– TotalImmersion

DEMO: More Laptop Battery Life Coming

Boston Power didn’t give us much detail, but used the occasion of DEMO to introduce its new “Sonata” proprietary lithium-ion technology. The claim is that it’s the only battery to actually match the lifespan of a notebook computer, solving “today’s battery fade problem and delivering a 50% faster recharge time.” Bostonpower And more is on the way, said the CEO and founder of the company, Dr. Christina Lampe-Onnerud (who, incidentally, went on stage at last night’s jam session to sing!) “I’ve devoted my life to batteries,” she said, “and we’re committed to delivering a battery you can rely on.” Do I hear a thunderous roar out there? John Wozniak of HP’s PC division, who says his group “ships a ton of battery packs,” gave an extremely complimentary introduction of this presenter, and said his firm is closely partnering with Boston Power. The firm raised an $8 million Series A round last year from Venrock and Gabriel Venture Partners. Once more, the promise for improving our road-warrior lives. Can’t come fast enough for me!

DEMO: DARTdevices Makes Pigs Fly

Think ubiquitous interoperability across all your devices will happen only when pigs fly? Well, DARTdevices showed us just now that pigs can do that! Dartpigsfly We’re talking intelligence that lets any device discover, access, and share apps with any other DART-enabled device. No installing software or drivers. This is a company with funding from Motorola Ventures that’s all about virtualizing devices. Now to convince the device OEMs to adopt the technology, and our lives are bound to get simpler….

DEMO: Magnify.net, Yodio, Blerts, Splashcast

Saw four cool demos this afternoon related to consumer media distribution. The first, Magnify.net, empowers online publishers to integrate user-generated videos into their existing web offerings. [We’re talking especially about the little guys here, not the big players as Brightcove tends to focus on.] The whole idea is to create high-traffic niche vertical content sites that will attract advertisers looking to reach micro-target audiences.

Yodio has an end-to-end audio publishing system that it’s used to create an online destination community for creating and sharing audio casts. “The future of the podcast is still ahead of us,” said CEO Clay Loges. All you need is a cell phone, a camera, and Internet access. Post an audio cast, for example, about a vacation you recommend, and upload photos, too. Sharing is similar to Flickr.

Blerts, an offering from ThePort Network Inc., is riding the rapid growth of RSS consumption, which CEO Bob Cramer says now numbers more than 30 million people. “But, even for those who subscribe to 100 or more feeds, only 5-10 are really important,” he said. Sound familiar? Blerts is the first graphics based RSS alert utility that notifies users when their most important RSS feeds are updated. It’s pretty cool looking, and you can download it now.

The Splashcast media syndication platform is “the first one that’s easy enough for everyone,” said CEO Michael Berkley. Create and syndicate an online channel of mixed-media content — music, photos, video, text, RSS feeds. The key is that it’s a universal web-based media player — you don’t have to install a player for every video you put on your MySpace page, for example. In about 48 hours of having the site live, Splashcast users have already created more than 1000 channels.

« Older posts Newer posts »