DEMO is a really awesome show, run twice a year, with the goal of introducing cutting edge technology companies to the press, venture capitalists, corporate execs and others who attend the show.
Evidently it’s fairly selective, like 1-out-of-10-that-apply kind of selective (I don’t know for sure, cause we got invited to attend, so how selective could they really be? 🙂
It’s a great show. Unlike a lot of the typical kind of bogus slide-ware kind of companies, the companies that present at DEMO must be able to demonstrate their cutting edge technology in 6 minutes or less to an impatient crowd of 800 twitchy fingered web-blogging, web-surfing technogeeks.
Our DEMO was just barely working on the iPhone when we got to the show. Despite the fact we’d been working on our technology nearly 2 years before the DEMOfall ’08 show, the GPS iPhone had only come out in mid-July and we hadn’t been able to get our hands on the developer iPhone until then.
So we had about 6 weeks to port our application from the other platforms we’d been developing for to the iPhone… and it was kind of hit-or-miss.
On Wednesday late afternoon, we shot a video (Tanya Reihill, a Dublin filmmaker friend of mine who I’d gone to film school with at USC (Los Angeles), was DP for most of it… and she let us use her car for a prop! Thanks TR! I uploaded the footage from the airport on Thursday morning to an editor friend (Norm Anderson) in Los Angeles while Harvey & I waited to board the plane… even though Norm was working on a reality show and wouldn’t be able to edit it until Friday, I hoped he could at least have a look at the footage to figure out how it would go together.
We then flew out from Dublin to San Francisco to meet with our PR company, Schwartz Communications, on Thursday afternoon so we could give them a demo of our 6 minute demo and get their feedback. While we had a script, we didn’t have it sync’ed to the demo, and so they really couldn’t give us that much feedback! At least we finished the press release. And needless to say, the script needed fine-tuning. We flew down Thursday night to San Diego, where the DEMO show was to be held.
On Friday, while Harvey recorded routes and set-up stops in San Diego (so we could give live, in-vehicle demos to the press later), I put together a rough edit of the video and tried to sync it to the script. Saturday we had to present the locked script to the DEMO people for our run-through. When we ran it through, we realized that there was a massive sync problem (the video was like 40 seconds different than the text). Not to mention the script was about 1 minute too long.
Argh.
Well, anyway, we finished the two videos we needed to create (one of the videos was for our website, www.avego.com; the other for the live presentation). On Monday, we put the website up, and on Tuesday gave a bleary-eyed presentation that just managed to go under the six minute limit. Whew.
The good news? We seemed to be one of the “hits” of the show. We made quite a few “top 10” lists and even got to meet some heros (like Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal).
The product is still not-quite-ready for primetime. We hope to release it in several more weeks, but as long as we get it out by the end of the year, I think we’re doing fine.
Woo hoo!
— sean