DEMO and VentureBeat arrive in Austin for a reason — great tech companies
I’ve just arrived in Austin, Texas, and look forward to meeting local entrepreneurs.
I was here just five months ago (see pics of that event), and there’s a good reason why I’m returning. Austin may be merely the 16th-largest city in the U.S., but after Silicon Valley there are almost no other high-tech regions that rival its prowess.
Austin is just the latest in a bunch of stops we’re making to major entrepreneurial cities, on the prowl for the most promising technology products we can find to showcase at the upcoming DEMO conference in Palm Springs, Calif.
We’ll be at J. Black’s Feel Good Lounge, from 6pm and go to 8pm, if not later. The first hundred people to show up will receive a free drink. Join me, local entrepreneurs, investors, startup professionals, and DEMO alumni companies for cocktails and conversation. Sign up here.
Every year, we find at least four or five start-ups here in Austin that are hot enough to invite to DEMO. There’s no one ingredient that make a place become a high-tech center. But like Silicon Valley, Austin’s high-tech industry took root here in part as a result of an early focus on the defense industry. Dell is a large employer here, and chip, biotech and communication startups have been strong here too. And once you’ve fostered a critical mass of innovators, they keep coming.
Recently, we hit New York, Seattle, San Francisco (see pics of our SF event), London and Boston, and in each place we’ve had hundreds of people show up. Entrepreneurs are still building companies, even in the downturn. We’ve got at least 140 people signed up to come tonight, and I haven’t even posted about it until now.
As I’ve written before, I’ll be chatting with entrepreneurs here about how DEMO works. DEMO surely isn’t right for every company, but if a company is looking to grab market share quickly and needs a very loud bang, there are few better places than DEMO. That’s why hot companies and products from Salesforce.com, to VMWare, TiVo, Palm Pilot, Netscape, Sun’s Java, Adobe Acrobat and ETrade have launched there, just to name a few.
Why are they launching at DEMO? Professional event standards unmatched by any other, for one. The Internet works (you’d think that would be obvious, but it’s hit or miss at most other conferences, and when audio visual and Internet are down during your big launch day, well it sucks; the media can’t cover you), you get a high-definition video, coaching, PR help and more. In the audience you get unparalleled media representation, corporate development contacts, top investors and more.
I’ve already mentioned how we’re spicing things up a bit at DEMO. We’re extending DEMO’s reach to showcase very early stage companies, called alpha-stage companies, something we debuted at the last DEMO in September. Second, we’re inviting the very best business plans from the nation’s colleges and universities, a new part of the next conference in March. And we’re creating more disciplined theme areas for startups, too. See more in my recent post about this, and more.
