I don’t know if I like DEMO’s whole concept of “all demos, all the time”…..and that companies pay to be on the podium – apparently, $18,500 for three tickets and six minutes, per Jason Calacanis, who runs the competitive show, TechCrunch40. Jason makes the salient point that only funded companies can afford to pay the freight at DEMO. But…DEMO apparently really delivers the audience, and the press. Companies that show up think it is a good investment.
DEMO’s Fall program took place in San Diego and was well produced. At least, it looks like it was from the Website. If you go to the site, you can see presentations from a host of companies, some of them with direct relevance to the local space.
Richard Rosen’s FastCall411 is one of them. It is a service that calls the first available vendor. In the demo, I got a kick out of Richard’s longtime associate, Amy Rabinovitz, doing the Vanna White thing with the phones.
AgendiZe also appeared on the podium. CEO Alex Rambaud has just relocated from France to Texas, and shows up in a big Ten Gallon hat. Pretty funny. And then Alex and Fred Bowen, his VP of Sales, go through the whole process of how they’d use AgendiZe to cut and past info on a host of platforms so they’d be able to buy another ten gallon hat. Both demos really show the advantages of their respective services.
Thank you kindly, Mr. K…I thought my Vanna White was pretty darned good myself. Now that I have mastered the art of working with big boards and not having them crash down on me, I am hoping Hollywood will beckon.
And aside from the highlight of my 2 seconds, there were some other companies at DEMOfall that could benefit local sites: FixMyMovies cleans up/sharpens videos shot with cell phones, etc, which could produce much better User Generated Content. Another service good for sites that want UGC is Shoot & Proof, which authenticates photos taken with a mobile phone, showing that they are tamper-free and reliably date and time stamped.