I’ve been hesitant to post this but what the heck. I’m going to withhold any commentary and just let you watch the video. Asankya was the only other Georgia company at DEMO 2008 along with iVideosongs. Like I mentioned in that post, I think the iVideosongs presentation was very well done. Readers - feel free to compare and contrast the two presentation styles in the comments. Video below and on the DEMO site.
I’m not sure what you were getting at, Sanjay my friend, when you said you were “going to withhold any commentary” on the Asankya presentation - presumably that the presentation was not smooth? But in my experience slickness can take a company only so far. Ultimately, delivering real value to real customers will win out over slickness and PR and bluster. If Asankya’s value prop impressed InQTel then I am impressed. I’m not swayed by slick (or un-slick) 5-minute conference presentations. Call me old-school.
Sanjay,
Thanks for the coverage.
It was certainly a coup for ivideosongs to get John Oates on stage. The presenter before us, Sterna, had a trained dog on stage (http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid1127798146/bclid1396518815/bctid1392526695). Similar approach, I guess.
The real point of the event was to demo the product in operation. For an infrastructure product like ours it is tough to do. For ivideosongs it would have been easy to demo. I am not certain why they did not.
(6 degrees side note: My high school girlfriend tried to make me jealous when we broke up by briefly dating John Oates. It didn’t work.)
Wayt - you just had to call this out, huh? :-) Okay, here are my comments that I said I wouldn’t make.
You’re right, slickness can only take a company so far. There has to be real substance behind a product/service for a company to excel. Personally, I’m not that swayed if a VC thinks a company is good - the proof is in the pudding not in the accolades. Granted In-Q-Tel has some cachet that other VCs don’t so maybe portfolio companies get a bump in terms of legitimacy.
What I’m reflecting on is that if I had spent the money to attend DEMO, I’d make sure I had a well rehearsed presentation that was interesting, to the point, and displayed a compelling value proposition. Not that I’m saying the Asankya presentation didn’t do any of these - I’m just saying what I’d make sure I did. I’ll let you and others judge for yourselves to see if Asankya hit those points.
The one area of concern I did definitely have in watching the video (which is granted small in size and therefore difficult to discern details from) is the demo of the streaming video used. Clearly the video on the right came over without as many artifacts as the video on the left. But, I did notice (even at this small size) that the video on the right wasn’t fully smooth. There were jerky frames and lapses in the stream. Even if the technology is phenomenal this demo doesn’t reflect that fact.
From a techno-geek standpoint, the fact that this Hypermesh technology currently only works on Windows XP makes me think it requires some software download/install to work (I don’t know any real details so this is just my assumption). In general, that type of requirement leads to low adoption rates - see how many VRML viewers people use to explore VRML sites. What’s VRML? Exactly my point.
So there is my brief commentary. I could go on but you get the gist of what I was thinking.
Scott - thanks for following up. I have to agree that a non-consumer oriented product/service is hard to show and an infrastructure product is even more difficult (I’m not sure what I would have ever “demoed” at Digital Envoy). As I mentioned in my previous comment back to Wayt, it seemed like the demos that you did do weren’t as smooth as they should have been. That could have been due to a number of different problems but given what it probably cost you guys to go to this event (I’ve heard there are steep application fees), your bucks would have been better spent if there was a slick demo along with your presentation. Obviously my two cents and with the additional caveat that I haven’t demoed anything in front of an audience in years at this point.
Not to state the obvious, but you are watching a low quality video over a poor delivery medium. Our video was flawless in the demo and has been every time we have showed it.
Scott - yeah, it isn’t surprising that this is the case and the reason I made the initial caveat that it might have been due to the size of the video. So congrats on a cool new technology and I hope the DEMO show generated enough leads of investors and clients to make the trip and expense worthwhile!