It’s no secret that DEMO, the launch event owned and operated by IDG and programmed by Guidewire Group, has faced stiff criticism for its practice of charging selected companies an $18,500 fee to participate in its program, which is as much about go-to-market and after-launch support as it is [...]
Continue Reading →A couple of days ago, Carla wrote a post about why she is part of the DEMO team. Forgetting for a minute the overt flattery (sorry, Carla, but I told you a raise was out of the question this year), she is in this game for much the same reason I [...]
Continue Reading →My brain is beginning to melt from all of the deep-tech conversations here at SemTech. During the DEMO Road Show in Austin last week, I tweeted, “Just when you’re feeling smart, you meet a guy who built a server farm in his basement.” (That’s a story we’ll have to [...]
Continue Reading →The honor of announcing the winners of the Israeli Venture Association’s Startup Competition, a business pitch event co-sponsored by DEMO’s partner in Germany.
Sixty-nine Israeli startups submitted plans and 11 finalists were selected by a panel of judges to present during the conference in DEMO’s tried-and-true six-minute format. A few of the finalists [...]
Continue Reading →I firmly believe you don’t find really great innovation by sitting at your desk and waiting for it to come to you. You’re not going to find it consistently by doing the Silicon Valley party circuit, either. You have to get out into the world and meet entrepeneurs where they live. And that’s just what [...]
Continue Reading →WE INTERRUPT OUR NORMALLY MEASURED INDUSTRY ANALYSIS . . .
Good morning, all. How’s everyone out there in peaceful-happy-go-lucky-tech-land? Everyone good? Anyone received a death threat recently? Oh that’s right. We have! Well, I supposed it’s good to be noticed. What is that old saying? If you’re not pissing people off, you’re [...]
Continue Reading →About a week before DEMO, I was talking to Pat Kenealy, managing director of IDG Ventures/San Francisco, about the success rates of startup companies that launch first products at DEMO vs. the average venture portfolio. I posited that while DEMO is really about products rather [...]
Continue Reading →I never blog as often from DEMO as I plan to. My writing goals are always lofty going in, only to be thwarted by the presentations onstage and conversations off. Trying to blog while watching a start-up bank its future success on one six-minute presentation – well, it’s distracting. So as I [...]
Continue Reading →As I’ve mentioned before, I’m one of the many obsessed with the semantic Web. It’s a catch-all term for anything, really, that makes Internet content more intelligent. But recent favorites of mine involve connections; tying together seemingly disparate entities online can produce insight heretofore impossible. Two companies here at DEMO have [...]
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