Demo Day 1 Reflections

After some time to reflect, here's my highlights from yesterdays action:

Best demo definitely went to Serious Magic for their video blogging tool and powerpoint juice up. In terms of goto market, it looks to be a tough slog for the company but a few relationships with the right partners could slipstream this company nicely.

Mission Research's Giftworks product is a niche, but a frickin big niche IMO. I really liked the products design and user experience, very nicely done. I would like to see a hosted delivery model but the company does make a good point about a recent scandal involving a payment processor (I can't even remember the name of that company... Pipevine?) tarnishing the concept of hosting a nonprofits data. It's a lesson for the entire software industry... this isn't just data, it's a businesses underpinnings that are at stake. The price point is really low, which is ideal for nonprofits that rarely spend funds on their own infrastructure. I'm recomending this to all the nonprofits that we work with through SAP's community giving program.

iControl was impressive, but I share the comments that Stewart Alsop made on stage (much to the dismay of the company who were sitting in front of me) when he said that it is probably going to be tough going for this company just because so many have tried before. It's true, the promise of home automation has been made every year I've been in this business, which is why I'm partially skeptical of the digital home meme making the rounds in current times.

The afternoon choked full of security products reinforced my view that security is boring and their are far too many companies going after the market. I don't question the requirement for security, but the fact remains that the overwhelming majority of these companies are attacking with point solutions. I did like Metavize a lot, their approach of virtualizing the security stack is very clever, and fits well with IT departments efforts to virtualize the data center.

Rounding out the afternoon, the XFire service is killer. The Novint device for simulators and gaming is also a very interesting piece of hardware, I can see them doing very well if they target their sales efforts appropriately.

Rounding things out, the Sonaptic technology, 3D audio for cell phone handsets is an awesome concept.