77 Companies and Two Spark Clients Launch at DEMO 08
February 1, 2008 | Event Report
We just wrapped up at DEMO 08 in Palm Desert and couldn’t be happier for our two clients at the show, Education.com and Skyfire.
Education.com launched its new School Finder feature, a next generation tool that helps parents explore, compare, and evaluate over 100,000 public, private, and charter schools nationwide, and took home a coveted DEMO God award. The launch of School Finder was covered in the San Jose Mercury News, Webware, PC Magazine and more. The Wall Street Journal’s, Walt Mossberg was overheard saying, “There is nothing more important that what you all are doing!”
Skyfire launched its company and product, a mobile browser for smartphones, which captivated attendees with its speed and PC-like browsing. Skyfire’s launch was covered in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today and more. PC World’s Harry McCracken said Skyfire “was spectacular—I felt like weeping with joy when I saw how good PCWorld.com looked on it, and how quickly it loaded.”
But we weren’t only captivated by our own clients. 77 companies presented and though there were certainly a few duds, there were a number of exciting new companies and products that we’ll be watching closely. Despite its undesirable second day afternoon time slot, SiloBreaker, won us over during the search category. The slick site provides a slough of features for the news junkie with a thirst for analytics. Check out the Network feature, it’s brilliant.
It has been a while since we could say we’ve been excited about a pen and paper, but two companies — Leapfrog and LiveScribe — have radically different applications for the same base technology. Leapfrog has a new line of books that use a pen interface to help kids learn to read, while LiveScribe has an audio recording pen that aims to help us adults remember what the heck happened in meetings. This is over simplified, but written words on LiveScribe’s proprietary paper act as tags for audio recorded by the pen. Tap he written word and the pen plays back the corresponding audio.
For our clients, DEMO proved a great launch vehicle this year, but it’s not for everyone. Complex Web services and applications struggled to effectively (and interestingly) showcase their product in the brutal six minute format. That said, it’s a great exercise for any company to learn how to pitch their company or product in six minutes or less.
-Nick and Marni
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