DemoGods and Personal Glory

I cannot report on the DemoGod Awards without basking in a bit of personal glory. I'll get that part out of the way first, then resume our regularly scheduled posting. I coached three companies for their Demo presentations.  They are Riya, the photo search engine Krugle, the open source search engine and iotum, the Web 2.0 personal call management system. All three won DemoGod Awards.  I am very grateful to have worked with such talented teams and such promising new technology.

Equally deserving were six other companies, some of whom I mentioned in earlier postings, all of whom seemed to have been favorites of the attendees I spoke with. They are:

• Network Streaming, Inc., the appliance maker who claims it can provide affordable tech support to any computer in the world over the Internet.
• Panoratio Database Images, the company that promises to bring supercomputer powers to laptop computers by allowing complex data to run in memory.
• VSee Lab-, the affordable computer video conferencing and sharing system for the rest of us.
• Ugobe, makers of the lovable dinosaur we earlier reported was named Cleo.  In fact, it is Pleo.  We met the company's CEO Bob Christopher who told us Pleo will retail for $200 and will most certainly be on toy shelves before Christmas, if not sooner.
• Kosmix, the Mountain View search engine company that attendees seemed to agree was better in many ways than Google.
• FrontPorch, Inc. of Sonora, CA, a seven-year-old security company who introduced Porchlight Security Messaging, which directly messages end users when when activities and vulnerabilities expose them to security risk. We were out of the room for this one, but word of mouth for them was strong.
• SproutIt Systems who introduced Mailroom, an email management software system that gives companies too small to have IT departments the type of prioritization and archiving that usually only large companies have. SproutIt also suggests form letter replies which can be customized before being sent out.

The night was capped by commentary by a panel moderated by the Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg, Ziff Davis Content Chief Michael Miller, Forbes Staff Writer Victoria Barret and USA Today Tech Writer Ed Baig. I'm generally not high on panels, but this one was truly outstanding for insight, candor and authentic wisdom.  Perhaps conferences have it wrong all these years.  Maybe we should just haul up veteran journalists and grill them with tough questions instead of the reverse.

There will be one or two more posts regarding Demo after I have a couple of days to reflect on the people, companies and trends that I thought most contributed to making this conference the success I consider it to be.

Comments

[TDefren]

Congratulations, Shel!!
Our team had the honor of repping Ugobe/Pleo and Panoratio, so your kind words (and the benevolence of the DEMO gods!) much appreciated.

[henri]

Shel, You still miss one at the beginning of the sentense : Ugobe, makers of the lovable dinosaur we earlier reported was named Cleo.

[Wytze B. Westra]

Hi Shel,

Did you mean "iotum" at www.iotum.com instead of iodum ? The current link sends us to a russian company.

Regards,
Wytze

[sergio]

Shel, now that Scoble has linked to you and a lot of people are coming to this post for sure, maybe you could just edit your post and correct the address for iotum: www.iotum.com

[jim galley]

Yes, it has to be iotum http://iotum.com - they were one of the demogod winners. Here's a trackback that praises Shels coaching effort @ Iotum http://saunderslog.com/2006/02/10/demo-two-days-later/