I haven't blogged in a while, indeed.
Spent the last few days at DEMO, the first time I had been to that particular conference. I've been a fan of the O'Reilly conferences lately but DEMO was a blast. The entreprenuerial vibe was in full swing with the full spectrum of amazing products, amazing features masquerading as products, derivative products, and a couple of just plain lame products.
My favorite company was Krugle, but that is not a surprise given that I led the investment for Omidyar Network and am a Krugle board member. Other companies that piqued my interest included:
- Bones in Motion: A very innovative mobile application that tracks a runner (or cyclist, or walker) via GPS and is able to produce all sorts of on-the-fly reports and analysis about the particular workout in and of itself or within the context of a series of workouts.
- Panaratio Database Images: An application that somehow breaks down massive relational databases and allow the data to be quickly analyzed and imaged. The database geek in our group was wide-eyed.
- IPswap: A marketplace for software development. It's like hackers selling their services on....well, I won't say it.
- Ugobe: The best line of the event: "We built a depressed toy." This little robotic creature was amazing, and if this is the future of Target shelves I'm looking forward to my second childhood. I'm looking less forward to being hounded to buy one for each child.
- Multiverse: A game platform meant to level the playing field for those that want to create spaces for collaboration without investing the $30-50MM that folks like Blizzard do when creating WoW. Great idea, but the execution on this one is going to be a challenge.
More on DEMO later, I still want to talk about the VC mood as well as some of the themes of the conference that I thought were interesting.
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