Originally posted on February 06, 2007
More evaluations from a remote support DEMOgod
Nathan continues – live from the DEMO conference:
Eyejot
There were several video startups at DEMO. This was the first one, but they are all starting to run together for me now. This was basically a way to send video more easily, you can embed a video in a MySpace page or send it to a mobile device. I failed to see a lot of differentiation among this crowd. I don’t doubt that each has its unique advantages, but I think that they will have to do a lot more work to communicate those differences to the public.
Honeypitch
Ostensibly, this product is supposed to help you stand out from the competition by letting you create a “pitch” online that your customer can log into and review. You can add video and other multimedia along with the standard Power Point presentations. After the pitch, you can present the customer with a contract and have them agree to it online.
The demo had multiple problems. To start with, the CEO had a gal from his PR agency help with the demo. This is a major mistake. A good PR firm is there to coach you, and to set up interviews with press targets. They should be a strong supporting role, but be invisible to the watching world. Otherwise, they are stealing the glory for themselves, undermining their purpose in life, which is to get the glory for their clients. Having the PR person help with the demo sends the message that you don’t have anyone else in your organization who is presentable enough to put on a stage. This may in fact be true, but you don’t want to advertise it.
Secondly, they did a skit…not just any skit, but one with a blond wig. Skits are almost always a bad idea. It was sort of cheesy and included a lot of hyperbole about the product from the “customer” that you would never hear in real life.
As for the product, I fail to see why anyone would be more impressed viewing a Power Point and a video of a salesperson online than they would be by a phone call or an in-person visit. It seems like automating the pitching process would reduce rather than increase close rate by taking out a level of human interaction.
Wyse Technology
The basic gist of this product is that you can use the Wyse thin client (which is cheaper than a normal pc) to do things like watching video that you normally would not be able to do on a thin client. This heralds in a future of computing where no one has to have a full PC; they can just access their computing environment from the server. The demo started out with a video of industry luminaries talking about the possibilities of thin-client computing.
I get the concept (lower cost, easier administration, greater security), but I’m not sure that people are going to be willing to give up offline access to their files and/or applications.
Adobe Apollo
Speaking of online/offline access, I thought this product and demo were great. It basically allows software engineers to develop applications using web languages (Flash, Flex, Javascript, HTML) but be able to deploy them on the desktop using the Apollo runtime environment (RTI). The result is basically web applications that can reside on the desktop for online and offline access. The demo was clean, the presenter was polished but not “stagey”, good stuff.
I think that Adobe is in a good position to enable cross-platform interoperability. They have two of the most ubiquitous standards: PDF and Flash, and seem to be working on creating a third with Apollo. A comment in the closing journalist panel was that Flash has fulfilled the promises that Java has made.. . Maybe not quite yet, but getting close.
