Suffering from PowerPoint fatigue? You're not alone. Tech conferences, including Demo and Finovate, have banned boring slide shows in favor of short, fast-paced product demos. For young companies, dissing checkerboard fadeaways and cheap gradient backgrounds does more than entertain an audience; it could make a sale. "It's not about bullet points or the company, but what have they built?" says Finovate CEO Eric Mattson.
Read More »
Now that we've fessed up, here's the explainer video from our prank Google Jail story. Kudos to FC intern Austin Carr, and filmmakers Adam Barenblat and Amanda Ligman for the great animations and editing.
’ve recently been privy to a number
of discussions about whether big launch events are “worth it”
(time, money, human capital) for a young tech company. The focus of some
of these discussions has been the twenty-year-old DEMO conference, held twice a year in
Palm Springs and San Diego.
Read More »
Cash registers may not be ringing at the mall, but for a few days this week beleaguered retailers could live in a fantasy world where not only would customers line up to buy again, but sales clerks could use a slick touchscreen to upsell them even more goods, right from the register.
Read More »
Chris Shipley has traveled the world for more than a decade now looking for great startups for launching at the Demo Conference that she runs. This year 39 companies will show their products and services for the first time. Recently Chris announced that she would be handing the conference over to Venture Beat's co-founder Matt Marshall (the handoff will take place gradually over the next year) and we talk about both that and what both of these people are seeing in the startup world.
Of all the demos at TechFest 2009, the one I'd pick to include in a future Microsoft product is the Social Views of E-Mail application. It looks like a basic e-mail tool, but it organizes and clusters messages based on social groupings instead of just time and importance.
Read More »
Steve Brodie, Chief Products Officer at Seattle's Skytap, shows off how to spin up a virtual lab and what it does for you. Later Aaron Brethorst, program manager, shows me the Skytap service running on an iPhone and how you can remotely check into your test suite on that.
Read More »
