Coop's Corner: Demo 2000: The place to be
This marks Demo's 10th year, and the joint is jumping. Sponsors say at least 1,000 people are registered. If anything, that might be an undercount; the opening session in the giant ballroom was standing room only.
Chatting with Stewart Alsop, the journalist-turned venture capitalist who started Demo back in 1991, I asked how's business. "Hey, the money's great," Alsop beamed. "And when I talk to journalists, I tell them that it's really great."
Same people turn up here every year. Only thing: They turn grayer and grayer.
Former New York City Mayor Ed Koch made a cameo appearance today as co-founder of Thelaw.com, a Web site aimed at providing legal advice to consumers. Cute idea, but I'm not sold. Koch is the pretty face here -- he's the best pitchman of the show's first day -- but he's no Felix Frankfurter.
By the way, Koch thinks Hillary Clinton is going to outlast Rudy G. in the New York senatorial race. The word from the kosher pumpkin: Giuliani is his own worst enemy.
Don't know about you, but I don't want to deal with any more data. I'm up to here with the "information at my fingertips" shtick.
Rob Siegel of Weave Innovations evoked a fair number of oohs and ahs with the StoryBox, a picture frame appliance that lets users store and display up to 36 pictures. A lot of the bizarre stuff that gets shown at Demo winds up on the cutting-room floor, but this was one of those cool George Jetson appliances that comes down the pipe that could find a nice niche. Here's the big question: Will a large enough number of people be willing to pay $299 and the attendant $5 to $7 monthly connection fee?
The place is crawling with lots of former Apple and Netscape execs. Speaking of Apple, I heard a delicious story about how screwy things were during the final days of John Sculley. The Scull-meister got a raw deal from Jean-Louis Gassee and Michael Spindler. Anyway, it seems that shortly after a big layoff announcement, one of Apple's top execs walked into a meeting with several members of the senior brass and threw a clutch of boat pictures onto the table. Pick whichever one you want except for this one, he said, pointing to a particular ritzy model. It was meant as black humor. But believe it or not, these clowns started arguing with him, thinking they deserved a fair shot at the booty. And this while thousands of pink slips were being handed out.
Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen formally lifted the lid on his latest gig, Loudcloud. Among other things, Andreessen says his new company will "pour rocket fuel on Internet.com." Big statement, but is it just big hype? More about this tomorrow after yours truly breaks bread with Marky Marc.
Another Netscapee, Srivats Sampath, was on stage -- this time as CEO of Mcaffee.com. As luck would have it, he was on hand to preview the company's new ad server technology just as privacy fears stirred up by DoubleClick's tracking policies continue to reverberate around the industry. Sampath says his company's product, which allows for targeted ad systems, still incorporates encrypted personal advertising profiles protecting consumer privacy. So, for example, if you work with a diskless workstation, the system would detect that and include advertisements from hard drive suppliers. But your particular identifying information would nonetheless remain hidden from any and all outsiders. If it works as advertised (no pun intended), this could be big.
Ever the curmudgeon, Visicalc co-inventor Bob Frankston was on the warpath about the concentration of Internet distribution power in so few hands.
Younology CEO Bonnie Lowell displayed grace under pressure when her demo crashed just as she was introducing her company's personal network alert technology. She remained cool as a cucumber and avoided a near descent into Demo hell. Lowell later had an interesting take on the way the Internet business is evolving. "You'd be amazed at how many companies we talk with don't even have products. Now that's the first question I ask."
Bumped into AST Research founder Safi Qureshey, who is here as a reincarnated dotcommie. Every once in a while a product comes along that makes light bulbs go off in peoples' heads. Artie Wu of Vividence got that sort of reception with a technology that lets Web operators get targeted feedback and comments as they navigate around their sites.
Former Businessland bigwig Enzo Torresi is destined to make a big splash with Kerbango, according to folks familiar with the company's Net radio product.
For the Microsoft Office haters of the world, ThinkFree is peddling an interesting idea. This is a suite of software apps that looks and feels an awful lot like MS Office. Actually, this is a Web hosted service written in Java. So all you need to get going is a browser that runs on top of Windows, the Mac, Unix or Linux. All told, we're talking roughly 8MB, which the user downloads a single time.
Microsoft lawyers are surely watching, and CEO Ken Rhie made sure not to get their dander up. "ThinkFree is not a replacement for MS Office," he said. "It is a true companion service to MS Office." Ahem, sure.
Peripatetic software exec Mike Kolowich on life: "Things are good. I don't have to work."
Josh Kopelman, the mad genius behind Half.com, the company that convinced a small Oregon town to rename itself as a dotcom, not surprisingly gives good demo. The company's not smoke and mirrors either. It launched last month and already has 1.9 million items listed for resale by its customers. The second coming of Amazon? Talk to me six months from now, but it's a terrific start.
And so just how did Kopelman hit upon the Half.com publicity stunt? "We were sitting around trying to figure out how to put ourselves on the map, and that's when we hit upon the idea," he said. There were 413 towns whose names began with the name "Half." Nine weeks later, they had Halfway, Ore., in the bag.
Buzz at the show is that former Lotus CEO Jim Manzi is spending a lot of time working on behalf of Bill Bradley's nomination.
The good folks from Israel-based TeleVend finally debuted a technology that turns mobile devices into super credit cards. Beyond the gee-whiz experience of ordering a Coke from a cellular phone, the intriguing advantage here is how the technology defangs hacking. That's because the moment a hacker breaks in, what's he ripping off? A phone number -- which can be traced almost instantly. But since I saw a private demo by TeleVend about nine months ago, the company has been slow off the mark. In the interim, the Europeans have been pushing a similar technology into the market in a big way.