Coverage of the venerable startup-launch conference DEMO will begin on blogs and traditional press early tomorrow morning, but here at ReadWriteWeb we're taking a different strategy. This post is the first part of that strategy. Instead of racing other journalists to cover the best of the 77 companies launching, we've assembled a body of resources that anyone can use to track and participate in the event as it unfolds.
From Monday through Wednesday you can read our unorthodox coverage of DEMO here, but for now we'd like to offer the ReadWriteWeb Toolkit for DEMO08.
]]> Background resourcesIf you're already familiar enough with DEMO you may or may not want to skip this part and go to the next section.
The just redesigned DEMO.com website includes a wide variety of media you can check out to get a feel for the event and a good about page. The event schedule is here. There's a lot of good stuff off-site too, though. Believe it or not, there's no Wikipedia entry for DEMO!
For an in-depth peek into the mind of DEMO Executive Producer Chris Shipley, check out our 20 minute podcast interview and transcript at ReadWriteTalk. You can see the RWW coverage of DEMO 2006 here. Our DEMO 2007 preview is here and DEMO Fall 2007 Top 10 Companies to Watch here.
John Cook's Venture Blog has a good series running about one Seattle area company's preparation to go to DEMO. The GigaOm network's blog for startup founders, FoundRead, has an interesting post called Presenting at DEMO: 12 do's and 5 don'ts. That's a fun read just to see how many of the "don'ts" get done on stage.
If you're interested in the Enterprise angle, WindowsITPro ran a good interview with DEMO's Chris Shipley about her thoughts on the Enterprise market and DEMO presenters.
Much of what goes on at DEMO is that startups seek an audience with big companies in the mood for acquisitions. Valleywag's got the names and faces of the three representatives from Google, Cisco and Microsoft who are believed to be headed for DEMO with an appetite for deals.
Blog coverage
We won't be providing a lot of product profiles, but many other top blogs around the web will be. For that type of coverage check out GigaOm, Webware, CenterNetworks, VentureBeat, TechCrunch, SomewhatFrank, the B5 Technology Channel and presumably Mashable.
We've created a spliced RSS feed from those blogs and RWW, filtered for DEMO coverage, that you can subscribe to here: http://feeds.feedburner.com/RWWDEMORoundUP. If you'd like to get notification of any of these big blogs writing about DEMO via Twitter, you can follow this user http://twitter.com/RWWBigBlogsDEMO.
That's still a fair amount of content to keep up with, so if you want only the "best of" coverage from the above top blogs, here's a feed of just the 25% most popular items in that spliced and filtered feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/RwwsDemoCoverageRoundUp-BestOf Thanks to the good folks at AideRSS for offering a popularity filtering service that's so useful at times like this.
Search the DEMO presenters' sites
There are 77 companies presenting at DEMO and no one but Chris Shipley is likely capable of keeping track of them all. If you find yourself wondering, "who here does enterprise software?" or "which of these companies are releasing mobile software?" then here's what you can do - just go to the ReadWriteWeb DEMO08 custom search engine and all your questions will be answered. It's a Google CSE that searches just the 77 sites belonging to DEMO08 presenters. I've added that link to my toolbar favorites and to my mobile browser bookmarks. Feel free to do the same.
In addition to the above automatic feed of top blogs covering DEMO, I'll be tweeting my little heart out throughout the event and you can search to see who else is doing the same using a search engine like Tweetscan or Terraminds.
Live multi-media
I expect that there will be people at DEMO doing live video and audio reporting. Some may use Mogulus, which despite its otherwise excellent service does not offer an RSS feed for live shows. Other places worth checking out are UStream.tv, QIK and BlogTalkRadio.
If you'd like to sign up for automatic email or IM notification of any live DEMO08 coverage on UStream, click here and for BlogTalkRadio live audio click here. Some Nokia users have been using QIK to do live mobile video broadcasting and though QIK doesn't publish an RSS feed of recent live shows - I scraped one using Dapper that you can sign up for automatic email or IM notification of DEMO coverage on via this link. You'll be told when the words DEMO OR DEMO08 show up in the title of a show and you'll see who the producer of the show is. Notifications are provided via Zaptxt.
In all likelihood you'd probably want to monitor all three of those at once. You can get email or IM notifications for any DEMO media on any of the above services here.
Participating companies
Graeme Thickins of GT&A Strategic Marketing has put up another of his annual posts listing all the DEMO participants, their locations and links to their sites. Graeme also summarizes some of the most interesting looking products on his blog, but I'll leave that for readers to click through and check out. Thanks to Graeme, below is a list of names and links to the 77 presenting companies with links to see who will be there.
See you there!
I'll be at DEMO starting Monday night and look forward to meeting some of you there. In the meantime, if you've got any thoughts about how the above resources could be improved, please let us know.
And now, a list of the companies ready to launch their products next week.
2Win Solutions, Ltd.; Raanana, Israel; www.2win-solutions.com
800 PBX, Inc.; Fremont, CA; www.800genie.800pbx.com
Acesis, Inc.; Mountain View, CA; www.acesis.com
Asankya, Inc.; Atlanta, GA; www.asankya.com
Aternity, Inc.; Westborough, MA; www.aternity.com
atlaspost.com; Taipei City, Taiwan; www.atlaspost.com
Avistar Communications Corp.; San Mateo, CA; www.avistar.com
BitGravity, Inc.; Burlingame, CA; www.bitgravity.com
blist, Inc.; Seattle, WA; www.blist.com
Buzka, Pty Ltd.; Subiaco, Australia; www.buzka.com
Capzles, Inc.; Culver City, CA; www.capzles.com
Catalyst Web Services, LLC; Alexandria, VA; www.catalystweb.com
CellSpinSoft, Inc.; San Jose, CA; www.cellspin.net
Celsias, Ltd.; Wellington, New Zealand; www.celsias.com
CHALEX Corp.; Grasonville, MD; www.chalexcorp.com
Circos.com, Inc.; San Mateo, CA; www.circos.com
Citiport, Inc.; Taipei City, Taiwan; www.citiport.net
Citrix Systems, Inc.; Ft. Lauderdale, FL; www.citrix.com
Cozimo.com, Inc.; Berkeley, CA; www.cozimo.com
Delver, Inc.; Herzliya Pituach, Israel; www.delver.com
Ecrio, Inc.; Cupertino, CA; www.ecrio.com
Education.com; Redwood City, CA; www.education.com
Eyealike, Inc.; Bellevue, WA; www.eyealike.com
Fabrik, Inc.; San Mateo, CA; www.fabrik.com
Flypaper, Inc.; Phoenix, CA; www.freshbrew.com
GoldMail, Inc.; San Francisco, CA; www.goldmail.com
good2gether, Inc.; Melrose, MA; www.good2gether.com
Green Plug, Inc.; San Ramon, CA; www.greenplug.us
HealthPricer Interactive, Ltd.; Vancouver, BC; www.healthpricer.com
Hubdub, Ltd.; Edinburgh, Scotland; www.hubdub.com
Huddle.net; London, England; www.Huddle.net
Iterasi, Inc.; Vancouver, WA; www.iterasi.com
iVideosongs; Alpharetta, GA; www.ivideosongs.com
Jodange, LLP; Yonkers, NY; www.jodange.com
Kaazing Corp.; Mountain View, CA; www.kaazing.com
LeapFrog Enterprises, Inc.; Emeryville, CA; www.leapfrog.com
LegiTime Technologies, Inc.; Westport, CT; www.legitext.com
LiquidPlanner, Inc.; Bellevue, WA; www.liquidplanner.com
LiquidTalk, Inc.; Chicago, IL; www.liquidtalk.com
Liquidus Corp.; Chicago, IL; www.liquidusmedia.com
Livescribe, Inc.; Oakland, CA; www.livescribe.com
MANDIANT; Alexandria, VA; www.mandiant.com
MOLI, LLC; West Palm Beach, FL; www.moli.com
Movial; Helsinki, Finland; www.movial.com
Nirvanix; San Diego, CA; www.nirvanix.com
NotchUp, Inc.; Los Altos Hills, CA; www.notchup.com
Notebookz.com, Inc.; Berkeley, CA; www.ileonardo.com
Pathworks Software Corp.; Mountain View, CA; www.pathworkssoftware.com
Redux, Inc.; Berkeley, CA; www.redux.com
Review2Buy, Inc.; San Francisco, CA; www.review2buy.com
Ribbit Corp.; Stanford, CA; www.goribbit.com
Rove Mobile, Inc.; Ottawa, Ontario; www.rovemobile.com
Santrum Networks, Inc.; Taipei, Taiwan; www.santrum.com
SceneCaster; Richmond Hill, Ontario; www.scenecaster.com
Seesmic; San Francisco, CA; www.seesmic.com
Silobreaker, Ltd.; London; England; www.silobreaker.com
Skyfire; San Jose, CA; www.dvclabs.com
SpeakLike, LLC; New York, NY; www.speaklike.com
Sprout, Inc.; Honolulu; HI; www.sproutfusion.com
Squidcast; San Francisco, CA; www.squidcast.com
StackSafe, Inc.; Vienna, VA; www.stacksafe.com
Standout Jobs, Inc.; Montreal, Quebec; www.standoutjobs.com
STEP Labs; San Jose, CA; www.steplabs.com
Sterna Technologies, Inc.; San Mateo, CA; www.friend-ltd.com
support.com; Redwood City, CA; www.support.com
SupportSpace, Inc.; Redwood Shores, CA; www.supportspace.com
Symantec Corp.; Cupertino, CA; www.symantec.com
TimeTrade Systems, Inc.; Bedford, MA; www.timetrade.com
Toktumi, Inc.; San Francisco, CA; www.toktumi.com
TubeMogul, Inc.; Berkeley; CA; www.tubemogul.com
Vidyo™, Inc.; Hackensack; NJ; www.vidyo.com
Visible Measures Corp.; Boston, MA; www.visiblemeasures.com
Voyant, Inc.; Austin, TX; www.planwithvoyant.com
xtranormal, Inc.; Montreal, Quebec; www.xtranormal.com
Yoics, Inc.; Palo Alto, CA; www.yoics.com
YouChoose, LLC; Thornton, PA; www.youchoose.net
Zodiac Interactive; Valley Stream NY; www.zodiac.tv