conferences

Financing News: QuickMobile Raises $2.3M

By Mark Evans in Venture Capital No Comments Tags: , ,

Company: QuickMobile
Headquarters: Vancouver
Product/Service: Develops mobile apps for conferences and special events. Its clients include the World Economic Forum, Disney, Microsoft, Salesforce.com, Dell, Hilton Worldwide, Accenture, the Sundance Film Festival, and the San Francisco Film Festival.
Investment: $2.3-million – a combination of debt and equity from angel investors. The round includes VanCity, Canada’s largest credit union. (Press release)
Quote: “We have seen exponential growth over the last year as meeting planners have moved away from traditional print-­?based media and adopted our mobile conference app to fully leverage the ubiquity and interactive capabilities of mobile devices”
- QuickMobile CEO Patrick Payne

 

Should Startups Demo At Conferences?

By Mark Evans in Startups 1 Comment Tags: , ,

For many start-ups, the opportunity to demo at a high-profile conference can be irresistible. What better way to proclaim to the world – and the people who apparently matter – about what you’re doing and why it’s just so damn exciting.

The question is whether it’s a smart thing to do.

This hit home upon reading Peter Lalonde’s account of his disappointing experience with Openera at TechCrunch Disrupt. What was supposed to be an exciting opportunity to “absorb insight, meet visionaries and explore the highs and lows of startup culture, funding and innovation”, failed to materialize. Instead, Lalonde saw Disrupt as a waste of time and money.

The problem with these kind of exercises is they rarely meet the ultra-high expectations that start-ups envision. What they see as the “Super Bowl for Startups” usually ends in disappointment because the reception is not what they expected, the opportunities fail to emerge, and it takes a tremendous amount of time, effort and money to make it happen.

Despite the harsh realities of the public demo, they can be difficult to resist because there is the chance to hit a home run. You hit the stage, tell your story brilliantly, and you’re swarmed by enthusiastic bloggers and investors upon leaving the stage. It’s like buying a lottery ticket or getting a hole-in-one playing golf – possible but highly improbable.

My advice to start-ups when it comes to demos at conferences is to spend a lot of time calculating how many resources it will consume, and whether these resources could be allocated in different ways that generate a better return on investment.

Another consideration is how much of a distraction getting ready for a demo can be for the entire organization. Rather than being focused on sales, attracting users and developing the product, a start-up’s energy is sucked up by the demo because, after all, a successful demo will – in theory – change everything.

If a start-up can justify the various costs, they should go for the demo. At the same time, it’s a decision that should be rule by pragmatism as opposed to emotional optimism.

Six Questions with…Prezi

By Mark Evans in Web 2.0, Web-based Services 2 Comments Tags: , , ,

If you’ve got to a technology conference recently, you may have noticed some presenters using a new and cool tool rather than PowerPoint. Instead of slides, these presentations look like a giant landscape with text and images on them that can be easily be accessed by roaming around. For presenters, the downside is the presentation tool attracts as much if not more buzz than their presentations.

So, what is this new and mysterious tool? The answer is Prezi, which can be used to create presentations online, and then, if you want, have them downloaded for off-line use.

Prezi is a freemium service with a free versions, and two premium versions selling for $59/year and $159/year. The company started in Budapest before opening an office last year in San Francisco. Its investors include Sunstone Capital and TED Conferences.

Curious to learn more about Prezi, I fired off an e-mail to CEO Peter Arvai while attending WordCamp Toronto on Saturday.

1. Why did Adam Somlai-Fischer and Peter Halacsy decide to start Prezi?
Adam and Peter working on Prezi in 2007 as they felt slides limited their ability to develop and explain ideas. They were frequent presenters before working with Prezi and thought that Prezi could help them in their work.

2. How is Prezi different from other presentation software and services?
Prezi works with a big canvas instead of slides. This allows users to develop their ideas in an uninterrupted way. Presenting with the Prezi canvas offers a new presentation style: you can skip the slide-by-slide approach, show the big picture and then drill down in the topic that interests the audience.

3. Do you see Prezi as a rival to Powerpoint, or complementary?
We think slideshows are good for monologues aimed a large crowd (the path walkthrough of a Prezi works like a slideshow). The canvas approach is better for smaller meetings where dialogue, questions and brainstorming plays an important part.

4. What’s the target audience? If other words, who are the people out most likely to use Prezi?
Prezi is for anyone who’d like to develop their ideas and communicate them on a single surface. We see a lot of users who are used to presenting ideas as part of their everyday work, e.g. marketers, sales people, teachers, students, project managers.

5. Are you surprised by how Prezi has been embraced, particularly in the presentation market?
We’re very happy and proud of the embrace of Prezi.

6. How is Prezi’s freemium business model been embraced.
Our model has worked well so far. Its aim is to encourage both users who can and can’t afford to pay for services. We have asked our free users to publish their presentations so that they contribute with the content they create.

Next Up: A Bigger WordCamp Toronto

By Mark Evans in Blog Services, Blogs 7 Comments Tags: , , ,

I attended WordCamp Toronto yesterday, and did a presentation on how to write and manage multiple blogs. The event, which continues today, is extremely well organized, teeming with enthusiasm and at $35 offered terrific bang for the buck.

That said, I think there’s a place for a bigger and even better WordCamp Toronto. If you were relatively new to blogging or WordPress, yesterday offered a great opportunity to get a lot of solid knowledge and inspiration, and an opportunity share ideas. But for people experienced with WordPress and looking to do more creative, innovative or sophisticated things, it wasn’t the place to get it.

In an ideal world – and something that should be seriously explored given the size of Toronto’s tech and WordPress communities – WordCamp Toronto should be a one-day, multi-stream event that meets the needs of everyone from newbies to WordPress ninjas.

There should be a WordPress 101 stream that provides the straight goods on why to use WordPress, the different ways it can be used, and basic information about the worlds of plug-ins, themes, hosting, etc.

A second stream would be for designers and people looking for insight on how to take their blogs and Web sites to the next level, offering insight into creating new themes, and rolling out innovative features and functionality.

The third stream would be for developers with sessions on the guts of WordPress MU, the development of themes and plug-ins, hacks and security.

WordCamp Toronto would become a place for the entire WordPress community to gather to meeting new people and exchange ideas – a place where the new WordPress users could talk to experienced designers and developers to learn about how WordPress can be used, and a place where experienced WordPress users could learn from peers and gain insight into the things that users are looking to do.

Toronto’s technology community has tons of enthusiasm, energy and a hunger to learn. In the right venue, WordCamp Toronto could be a much bigger event with a larger mandate that would be a roaring success.

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