Following Demo07

Why go to Demo? I used to think that it was for PR. You know, getting your company in New York Times or Business Week or get blogs to talk about you. Yeah, that’s part of it, but it’s not why entrepreneurs tell me they shell out $30,000 (and go through a pretty picky process to get picked to be on stage).

Why go? Well, all the VCs in the audience here give you one clue: this is a great way to get funded. Why? Everyone on stage has been pre-filtered. Chris Shipley interviews each company, which means that everyone on stage has reached a certain bar and the $30,000 fee makes sure that entrepreneurs have some skin in the game. Some even put the fee on their personal credit cards because they know that if they do a killer demo they’ll get funded.

Another major reason? It’s a forcing function. It forces your development teams to SHIP and get the product done. I think this is the more important function. After all, your company has its future riding on this event and there’s $30,000 on the line, not to mention you had to do a lot of work just to get picked.

Chris Shipley forces you not to talk about your product until the show, either, which is why at 4 a.m. yesterday a slew of new things were announced.

Anyway, how can you follow along at home?

For one, there’s the official Demo07 Blog. But, that really isn’t showing you the live blogging that’s going on here.

So, let’s do the blog search test that I ran yesterday. Only this time, let’s do it for “Demo07.”

Google BlogSearch. (Remember to click on “Sorted by Date” on top to see the blogs sorted from newest to oldest).
Ask’s BlogSearch.
Technorati’s BlogSearch.
IceRocket BlogSearch. (no results? Mark Cuban, this sucks).
Sphere’s BlogSearch.
Which one finds you more results? Google wins again on my screen.

Oh, Google’s Blog Search recommended trying “Demo 07” instead of Demo07. So, let’s rerun the tests.

Google’s search for “Demo 07” . (Sorry for the question mark, WordPress.com is replacing closing quotes that I type with a question mark for some reason).
Ask’s search for “Demo 07” .
Technorati’s search for “Demo 07” .
IceRocket’s search for “Demo 07” . Whoa, much better!
Sphere’s search for “Demo 07” .

All four engines found MUCH better results for this query string which demonstrates something. Trying several searches will help out.

I still like Google’s Blog Search the best, which spells doom for smaller companies. UPDATE: I just did a new comparison at 10:22 a.m. and now Ask is bringing back better stuff. Why? Cause if I can’t tell enough of a difference between a big company and a small company’s services, I’m going with the big company’s offerings. And, in this case, the small companies aren’t doing as well.

That’s called a bad demo, or an unfunding event. No wonder that Technorati is trying to move its engine into other markets.