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DemoCamp8 Presentation Review

DemoCamp8 took place last night at No Regrets. The usual crowd was all there with the addition of Amber Mac and Leo Laporte from the Inside the Net podcast and their TV show Call for Help. The venue was improved by the rental of an audio system to help everyone hear the presentations. One big advantage of the No Regrets venue is that beer is served during the demos. The demos this time were:

1/ WildApricot.com

WildApricot recently launched their product to public and I have been setting it up for a small golf tournament I’m organizing. Its a great tool for organizing informal groups and has a capability to track memberships and special event costs. Its a very slick product and Dmitry did a good job showing off the product. I was surprised that the product is written in .NET as there are a lot of features that it could quickly inherit from open-source projects, like forums and web chat. It would be interesting to see if it can evolve at the same pace using the .NET platform.

2/ Jobloft.com

Jobloft is an employment site focused primarily on the retail employment sector with its high transient employment base and location specific needs. Jobloft has integrated an a job list with the Google maps API to provide location specific listings from a variety of retail employers. By targeting retail they hope to avoid Workopolis and some of the bigger employment sites. They have also built the ability for partners and schools to include jobs within a proximity to their location. This makes it easy to partner with schools looking to help their students.

3/FileMobile.com

Filemobile.com provides the ability to upload and host media files from a variety of sources, including your picture/video phone. The service seems to be heavily dependent on flash and has a very good visual interface. The system provides the ability to schedule large files transfers in the background. I thought one of the most impressive parts was the ability to automagically publish to a variety of blog services. Its not really clear what this business model is and how they will be able to scale to the massive amounts of bandwidth required.

4/ Languify

Languify provided a demo on a tool to manage multiple language files. With many languages and sometimes different maintainers it can be difficult to administer all the different language files. Languify provides a defined tool set to provide a web interface for managing these files. The tool has some potential and could be extended to use automated machine translation services or pool from existing translations for the same english phrase. I’m not sure the commercial potential for this sort of application but its very interesting.

5/ How to Measure the Success of Your Web Service

Mike McDerment cheated and did a presentation, using a webpage instead of power point, on web metrics. He focused on explain a conversion funnel which was kinda painful for anyone in marketing but I think was well suited for the developer heavy crowd. It would have been good to see the Google Analytics funnel, even with fake date, though instead of the static webpage.

Overall it was great to see Toronto based start-ups succeeding and the quality of the demos shown was extremely high.

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Tips for Your Investor Presentations and Due Diligence Visits

When you create your power points or walk over to the nearby diner or coffee shop for a quick informal chat with an investor, remember the following:

1. Focus and niches are still very much in. Broad brush and shot gun approaches are out.

2. Your strategy needs to relate to your competition. If you differ dramatically you must have a defensible reason for doing things differently and it must be supported by customer validation.

3. Depth in all areas – technology, domain, implementation, business development and recruitment – is required. Miss one and you will have some tough questions to answer.

4. Your sales pipeline needs to be well defined and well presented. Other than strategy and focus, investors need to understand how your cash flow projections tie back to actual proposals sitting in front of customers.

5. You need to maintain a balance in presenting the soul of the firm and your cash generation function.

For us a typical investor visit takes two full days from the entire team. The follow up, if and when it occurs takes another week of serious bandwidth. Will it be worth it? I don’t know.

Conclusion: If you run a business that makes money and has the promise of keeping on making money, finding investors is not difficult. Finding the right color of money with the right term sheet is.

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New Way of Negotiation

Think back to a recent negotiation that you were involved in. Were you apprehensive that your counterpart in the negotiation would be better prepared or more skillful? Perhaps you were hopeful that the facts favored you and that your alternatives were much better than those of your counterpart. Were you nervous because your processional possibilities were tied to the outcome? During the negotiation, were you surprised by some new facts you didn’t know or made angry by the patronizing attitude of the other negotiator? And at the end, were you thrilled at the outcome.

Don’t let them get to you, good advice for negotiating? But what is the way to become the expert negotiator? I have experienced the new way of negotiation, which is very intrinsic, primary and fundamental part of human experience. We often negotiate under the influence of emotions, it plays many important roles: it motivates us to act; it provides us with important information about ourselves, the other party, and the negotiation; it helps organize and sharpen our cognitive processes; and it enhances the process and outcome of a negotiation when used strategically. While the emotion we experience provides us with information, the emotion we display provides information to others that can be an incentive or deterrent to their behavior. 

Initially, emotion was considered to be an obstacle to a good negotiated outcome and a foe to an effective bargaining process. Emotion in negotiation is a very common thing. Yet, many people suggest that being emotional is a sign of a weakness or is the behavior of an unsophisticated negotiator; some say that emotions must be repressed. 

There are many advantages to being an emotionally intelligent negotiator. For example, an emotionally intelligent negotiator is able to gather more and richer information about the other side’s underlying interests and reservation points; can more accurately evaluate risk, which leads to better decision making; can better perceive opportunities to use negotiation strategies and tactics that involve emotions; and can more successfully induce desired emotions in negotiation opponents. 

Negotiations often suggest a variety of emotions, especially anger and excitement. Angry negotiators plan to use more competitive strategies and to cooperate less, even before the negotiation starts. However, expression of negative emotions during negotiation can beneficial: legitimately expressed anger can be an effective way to show one’s commitment, sincerity, and needs. Excitement provides the high charge of negotiation.

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