Posts filed under 'Events'
September 1st, 2008
I checked out some software demos on Youtube. There are all types. But here are a couple I want to talk about.
First the bad … Nokia N800 Internet Tablet … Reggie Suplido of Internet Tablet Talk takes a look at the software that comes pre-installed on the new Nokia N800 Internet Tablet
Next the good … Bling! It Photography Software … A quick look at how to use Bling It to remove unwanted backgrounds in your photographs by Cindy Shebley.
A couple of difference worth talking about.
- The bad, even worse than the quality is the litany of features. Reggie starts at one end and just goes with no thought to his viewers. Also, while the side by side comparison was interesting, instead of holding the tablet, why not down lay it flat and get the focus fixed and steady.
- The good: Cindy spends time up front on who should watch the video and why. Then she walks you through how you would use her product to get something done. She does not list product features because she understands that customers are buying her product to get something done.
Before you make a software demo for YouTube, check out Peter Cohan’s Great Demo Webinar If you are interested in an interactive class with him, space is still available for the class on Saturday September 13, 2008.
August 18th, 2008
Last week I attended Marketing Strategies in a Down Economy by Steve Moore. Steve stressed the importance of why you are different than your competition. One key differential can just be the reason why you started your business: what is the passion you bring to this business?
Following that meeting, I updated our website home page. Here are the questions I hope our home page answers:
- Who we are?
- What we do?
- What type of clients we work with?
- What type of projects we take on?
- Why we started this business?
- Why existing clients use us?
This should be a good list for most businesses.
August 17th, 2008
I am always surprised by how many basic mistakes CEOs make when giving demos. Learn to avoid them at Cohan’s Great Demo workshop.
- Starting the demo with your company history … who cares?
- Too many bullets on one slide. See Guy Kawasaki’s 10/20/30 Rule of Powerpoint
- “Why I should care about your product” is left to the end of the presentation (long after the high level execs have left the room).
- Live demo that does not work.
- Detailed explanation of every product feature. Regardless if the audience want to see them or not. Gear it to your audience, ask them if you don’t know.
This is an interactive workshop with Peter Cohan geared especially for startup entrepreneur. If you bring a copy of your demo, we will review it in the workshop and provide you feedback on how to improve it.
“SKMurphy’s partnership with the Second Derivative has allowed entrepreneurs at smaller firms access to the same world class sales training normally only available to Fortune 1000 companies. In the class my team developed a presentation that allowed us to explain our offering much more clearly to our prospective customers.” said Miles Kehoe, President at New Idea Engineering. “We have also reshaped how we help our clients present results to their end users. The temptation so often is to start at the beginning of the story and tell them here’s what we did first…then we did this…and really the only thing the they care about is the results, the improvements they will see.”
Postscript Aug 18: I struck a chord with Chris Edwards, who saw parallels between poor demos and poor press briefings, causing him to ask the question “Does Anybody Enjoy Presentations?” Some excerpts follow:
Basically, all these presentations are done backwards. Point three in the SKMurphy list is the most important one for me: “‘Why I should care about your product’ is left to the end of the presentation.”
Many briefings are like some ghastly cross between company brochure and time-share sales. Most presentations make you feel like you’re being set up for a con. There is slide after slide of selective evidence, all meant to make you think that the thing to be unveiled at the end is the answer.
[…]
People really need to think about the thought processes that their intended audience are likely to use. A journalist is, in the case of a briefing, looking for a story. They may well not take away the story you presented but if you start off with what you think the story is, things might at least unfold in the right order.
So, make the claim early. And then provide the background for why this claim might be true. And then you can move onto the background. Why this way round? Because it’s a structure that fits the inverted pyramid of news; it fits the thought processes that journalists are most likely to use: what’s happened; how it happened; evidence to back it all up.
This is the reality of most demos as well, you have to convince the prospect in no more than a few minutes that you can help them in a meaningful way. And the first part runs more reliably on PowerPoint as a platform than Linux, so hold off on the interactive portion until you have established very clearly what the value for your audience is.
August 6th, 2008
Len Sklar joins us in Milpitas this Friday, he will make a short presentation on “The Check is Not in the Mail” and answer questions on effective approaches to getting paid in full, on time, at less cost and without losing valued customers. Len came to our March 7 breakfast and facilitated some very well received interactive exercises: several bootstrappers in turn took the role of a delinquent customer and Len demonstrated a variety of low key techniques to move beyond a current deadlock.
RSVP and bring your questions Friday August 8 to the Omega Restaurant in Milpitas.
July 27th, 2008
Getting More Customers (a Do-It-Yourself marketing and self-promotion workshop) leads SKMurphy’s fall workshop schedule. SKMurphy workshop combine lecture, written exercises, and interaction with a roomful of entrepreneurs. We guide you through your one-page plan and provide time dedicated to your business. You leave with a one-page action plan that’s based on sound principles, reflection, and review and feedback both from us and peers..
- Thursday August 21, 2008 8:15-1:00pm Getting More Customers Sunnyvale CA
- Saturday Sept 13, 2008 8:15-1:00pm Great Demo San Jose CA
- Wednesday Sept 24, 2008 11:30-1:30pm Financial Modeling for Start-Ups Sunnyvale CA
- Tuesday October 14, 2008 8:15-1:00pm Engineering Your Sales Process Redwood Shores CA
- Dec 2008 Idea to Revenue (TBA)
This workshop has consistently enjoyed very positive feedback and the last couple have sold out, so register early.
July 21st, 2008
I spent most of Saturday July 19 at “Cloud Computing-the New Face of Computing-Promises and Challenges” which I have already blogged about on last Thursday. There was a large turnout for a Saturday morning in July: Cubberley holds about 400 and it was between half and three-quarters full. There were a number of excellent presentations from practitioners in both industry, commercial research labs, and academia. Many of them are now up on http://www.ewh.ieee.org/r6/scv/computer/
The slides from the keynote by Dr. Hamid Pirahesh, an IBM Fellow in their Almaden Research Center, on the “Impact of Cloud Computing on Emerging Software System Architecture and Solutions” are not up yet, which is a shame because it was an excellent overview of cloud computing. One thought to take away: Dr. Pirahesh postulated breakpoints in computing architectures and methodologies at 20, 300, 2,000 and 10,000 processors. Certainly the first, and possibly the second are amenable to multi-core techniques, but the last two are going to rely manycore approaches.
This isn’t Web 3.0, this is something else. Mano Marks, the Google Developer Advocate who talked about the Google App engine made an offhand remark that brought me up short: “ten years ago was the late 90’s.” We’ve moved beyond the web boom (and bust) and fiber build out and are getting a glimpse of a new kind of application that I believe will be as transformational as the initial rollout of the Web was. But it will be used to solve different problems.
Several of the speakers talked about using cloud computing models for processing log files of all sorts, in particular web site clickstream logs and system error logs. The Hadoop project is one example of a ground up re-examination of how to leverage a low cost computing infrastructure composed of fast but unreliable (because they are low cost) processing units. Ashish Thusoo’s presentation on how Facebook is using it to track user activity recorded in web logs is a representative example of this new approach to computing.
My challenge is moving beyond my mental map of existing computing paradigms. I blogged last August about Robert Pirsig’s afterword to the 10th anniversay edition of Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintenance where he describes the Ancient Greek perception of time. Time carries you on the back of an oxcart, facing the road you have already travelled:
They saw the future as something that came upon them from behind their backs with the past receding away before their eyes. When you think about it, that’s a more accurate metaphor than our present one. Who really can face the future? All you can do is project from the past, even when the past shows that such projections are often wrong. And who really can forget the past? What else is there to know?
It’s difficult navigating by an outdated mental map of a landscape that is undergoing radical transformation. It’s hard to believe but Salesforce is also a decade old. I was disappointed that Jim Rivera, VP of Product Management at Salesforce.com, misjudged his audience and spent an unfortunate 30 minutes giving a sales pitch that stood in contrast to the rest of the speakers on Saturday. He managed to mention “multi-tenant hosting” so many times that I thought I had taken a wrong turn after the coffee break and ended up at a different event. It’s unfortunate when a company misses an opportunity to engage a technical audience as effectively as the other speakers did.
If you missed the event the presentations are quite detailed and worth a look.
July 18th, 2008
We have our fall workshop schedule up:
Thursday August 21, 2008 8:15-1:00pm Getting More Customers
Description: We will cover a variety of proven marketing techniques for growing your business: attendees will select two or three that fit their style and develop a plan to implement them in their business in the next 90 days. As a part of your workshop registration, we will also follow up via e-mail and brief phone calls at two weeks, four weeks, 8 weeks, and 13 weeks to help you track your progress. You will leave with a one page action plan, a workbook, and 90 days of access to a private workspace with the workshop materials to enable you to execute one or two marketing strategies to bring your business more customers.
Saturday Sept 13, 2008 8:15-1:00pm Great Demo
Description: This is an interactive workshop with Peter Cohan geared especially for startup entrepreneur. Bring a copy of your demo and be prepared to present it. As a part of your workshop registration, we will also follow up via e-mail and brief phone calls to track your progress.
Tuesday October 14, 2008 8:15-1:00pm Engineering Your Sales Process
Description: Building a repeatable sales process is key to a sustainable business, understanding how to scale your sales process is key to revenue growth. Learn how to synchronize your sales process with your customer buying process. We will look at ways to shorten your sales cycle. This highly interactive session allows you to analyze and debug your sales cycle.
December “Idea to Revenue” still finalizing date/location
If you would like to be notified of upcoming workshops you can sign up here. If these times/locations don’t work for you but you are interested in attending please give us feedback to help us picking better times/locations for workshops.
July 17th, 2008
I have become convinced that “software above the level of the device” whether it’s called Grid, Farm, Cluster, Multi-Core, ManyCore, or Cloud Computing represents a significant opportunity for application development by start-ups. The IEEE Stanford (Student Chapter), IEEE Computer Society (Santa Clara Valley Chapter), and NATEA are jointly sponsoring an event this Saturday that offers an excellent set of speakers on various aspects of cloud computing. The announcement is here http://www.ewh.ieee.org/r6/scv/computer/ it’s 8:30 to 3:45 at Cubberly Audiotorium on the Stanford Campus.
Speakers include:
- Hamid Pirahesh, IBM Almaden Research, “Impact of Cloud Computing on Software System Architecture”
- Jimmy Lin, University of Maryland at College Park, “Scalable Text Processing with MapReduce”
- Jim Rivera, Salesforce.com, “Platform as a Service: Changing the Economics of Innovation”
- Joydeep Sen Sarma and Ashish Thusoo, Facebook, “Hive: Datawarehousing and Analytics on Hadoop”
- Hairong Kuang, Yahoo, “Take an internal look at Hadoop”
- Mano Marks, Google, “App Engine: Building a Scalable Web Application on Google’s infrastructure“
- Kevin Beyer, IBM Almaden Research,“Jaql: Querying JSON data on Hadoop”
- Mihai Budiu, Microsoft Research, “DryadLINQ - a language for data-parallel computation on clusters”
- Jinesh Varia, Evangelist, Amazon Web Services, “Cloud Architectures”
This looks to be a very good overview on various aspects of Cloud Computing.
It’s only $65 ($60 for IEEE and NATEA members, $30 for students) sign-up at the NATEA registration page.
July 14th, 2008
I have netted out a couple of key suggestions I made to the three presenting companies at Monday’s SDForum Marketing SIG “Marketing Lab” so that they are more generally applicable. I was impressed: all three start-ups were well prepared, they managed their presentations to the time limits and were serious about their businesses.
It was a good format: my only change, given how well everyone managed their time, would be to allow 5 minutes of audience questions after each pitch as well. It was a very enjoyable event.
July 14th, 2008
I first met Debra Willrett, founder of Expert Software Consulting, at an IEEE Consultants Network for Silicon Valley (CNSV) when she gave a great talk on the new CNSV website in February of 2006. Later I learned that she was the inventor of the Macintosh application MacProject, an application that has defined a paradigm for interactive graphical project management tools for the last 25 years, and we asked her for an interview for our Founder Story series that we posted in April of this year.
She is coming to tomorrow’s Bootstrappers Breakfast, please RSVP as we have limited space. She has prepared a couple of remarks and then, like all Bootstrapper Breakfasts, it will be a serious discussion on growing a business based on internal cashflow. I hope to see you tomorrow at 7:30AM in the back room at Coco’s in Sunnyvale on the corner of Lawrence and Oakmead in Sunnyvale (1206 Oakmead Parkway, Sunnyvale, CA 94086).
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