Day One dawned clear and sunny – much like George and me.

8:30am saw us at the opening session, presented by Chris Shipley. The first demo turned out to be by a company called Timedriver operating in a similar space to ikordo. It turns out that they actually solve a subset of the scheduling problem, focussing on one to one appointments by asking an invitee to select an available time for a website. The application works well, good luck to the team!

The demo format is tough – 6 minutes and a live demo so a high-adrenalin experience! As a sponsor we aren’t presenting but we still have the great networking opportunities that an event such as DEMO offers.

Much of the day was spent manning the booth in the sponsor area. Giving so many people a quick pitch continually helps to refine our ideas of what ikordo does best, and it also frequently throws up new ideas for what we can do next.

The evening saw us at the Demo Jam – a party where the music is provided by a scratch band of attendees who happen to be musicians. The quality of the music was excellent, we heard a sampling of 70s and 80s songs from bands such as the Rolling Stones, The Allman Brothers, Santana and the Band.

During the evening we were fortunate to spend time chatting to some great bloggers including Kristen Nicole, lead writer of Mashable.com and Frank Gruber who writes the great blog Somewhat Frank

Signing off for now….

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Well, George and I are very excited to be at DEMO 08, the conference in Palm Desert where over 70 technology companies will present their latest products in a 6 minute live demo to a packed auditorium.

We’re excited to be here because twice today we thought we weren’t going to make it.  First drama was driving up from San Jose to San Francisco airport along a very rainy US 101 during the morning rush hour.  Half way, and all of a sudden the cars on my right (I’m driving like a Brit in the fast lane) start to swerve towards each other, snaking in skids.  I instinctively hit the brakes, and… my wheels lock and we too start sliding – at 70mph – in a gentle pirouette.  Brain screams to leg – “off the brakes”.  Brain screams to self – “No ABS!!!.  How can this be, in a modern car?  Surely ABS is an example of technology that should be all-pervasive because there’s absolutely no doubt that it saves lives.

So drama behind us we’re on 11:00am Alaska Airlines flight down to Palm Springs, and the descent into PSP was one of the worst I’ve ever experienced – wind shear during the descent together with severe turbulence over the mountains resulted in a very bumpy ride.  George and I were extremely glad to be out of that roller coaster.

So – DEMO 08 kicked off with the evening cocktail party, held in the bar of the hotel.

It’s a big place, but by the time we were all packed in it was almost impossible to move.  Several people didn’t shift spot all night.

The first person I bumped into was Brian Solis, (Founder of FutureWorks PR and blogger at bub.blicio.us) who is blogging about DEMO but more importantly is this year’s official photographer.  I was trying out my new camera (a Canon Powershot G9) and it seemed only natural to photograph Brian photographing me – his picture is here.

Here’s mine:

I went around the room once, it took best of 45 minutes, then returned to find George and Rebecca of Myvu with some really cool VGA video glasses.  Ben Tompkins from Eden Ventures was keen to try them out.

We were pleased to meet up with our friends from Huddle and two guys from a very interesting Slovenian company Zemanta – more from them later.

A very full day, packed with incident, but great to be here.  Now i just want to see some of that Californian sun…..

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DEMO is a great conference, full of really exciting, leading edge software where the focus is on demonstrating software live to a packed auditorium. One of the criteria for selection is that the software must be completely new and, as ikordo has been released now for several months, we decided to go for the Gold sponsorship instead. This means we will have a booth in the exhibition area - in fact we can even offer an exciting “Meeting Pod” where attendees can visit to set up their DEMO onsite or follow up meetings with ikordo right there.

Our marketing team has been hard at work putting together some giveaways and we can’t wait to see how they’re received. For Pico Pad fans there’ll be a new version available as well.

DEMO takes place at the Palm Desert Resort, starting next Monday 28th January and runs through till Wedensday evening. If you’re planning to attend make sure you stop by the ikordo booth in the Sponsor Network Lounge, we’d love to see you!

Regards
Jim

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Happy Holidays!
On behalf of the ikordo team I would like to wish everyone the very Happiest Christmas, and a Prosperous and Peaceful New Year.

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Our plans for ikordo have always included a healthy dose of viral marketing – or as it’s known these days “Connected Marketing”.

I’ve built models that help us predict user uptake for ikordo and the dominant factor is invariably the viral spread that comes from an organiser inviting 3 or 4 attendees, a proportion of whom will become interested and try ikordo for themselves.

This isn’t really viral marketing, however, which focuses on how product awareness can be increased by generating buzz through word of mouth and other social media marketing. Since early in 2007 we’ve been working with one of the leading practitioners in the field, Justin Kirby of DMC (http://www.dmc.co.uk). Justin has been helping us shape our marketing efforts in order to obtain maximum buzz and maximum viral spread.

Justin is a co-founder of the Viral + Buzz Marketing Association (VBMA) and recently re-launched the VBMA in a more connected form as vbmaNetwork (http://www.vbma.net). At a workshop earlier this week Justin asked if he could record a short video in which I described how we saw viral marketing working with ikordo. You can see the result at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=is3No48pE0s.

Make sure you don’t miss the interjections from Wowwee the Chimp…

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