Conferences Archive

This morning we noted that DEMO was now offering some amount of money in advertising to the two winners at their startup-infomercial. As I noted in an update on that article, I am no longer sure if the total amount is $1 or $2 million.

TC50 founder Michael Arrington has doubled the amount of advertising. He says whatever DEMO offers, he will double it.

Arrington notes, “Our ads will be on our various TechCrunch networks sites and via our terrific sponsors, who are going to be adding their own inventory as well. We’ll give half to the top two winners, and half to everyone else who launches.”

It seems the silly wars appear to be on yet again this year. 

I think it’s great that both DEMO and Techcrunch50 are offering bigger prizes – anything to help the startups that present past the initial buzz is a good thing. Let’s just hope Jason, Heather, Mike and Matt remember the end goal and don’t get back to last years “TC50: 1 – Demo: 1 – Startup: 0“.

Last month I discussed presenting at the DEMO and TC50 conferences later this year. In the comments, Techcrunch50 founder Jason Calacanis noted that one of the big differences between the two startup-infomercial conferences is that his Techcrunch50 offers $50,000 to the winner.

Now it appears DEMO has stepped up the prize pool bigtime by offering two $1 million dollar prizes. The prizes will be awarded to the best enterprise startup and the best consumer startup. The prizes are basically ad buys over the six month period following the conference.

Update 5:30PM: It appears that the total prize is $1 million, not two million as I previously noted. I am not sure if I got it wrong or if they changed it. I thought it read that two winners (one consumer, one enterprise) would each receive $1m.

Conference organizer Matt Marshall notes regarding the prize, “The campaign will include print advertisements, web banner placements, text link promotions, email newsletter promotions, and video ads. The package includes the development of creative content that is to be featured on IDG media properties – another huge value proposition to the winning companies.”

I assume the ads will be priced at the rack rate so the $1m is probably worth less had you bought the ads yourself and negotiated a better rate (probably 30% at best). No matter what, it’s good to see the winners get some publicity past the few posts they will get from the conference buzz.

How many of the companies that presented at either conference last year can you name? Can you name 10 of the 50 that presented at TC50? This huge ad buy should help two companies stay top of mind for at least six months and could give them a lift to build from.

The title of this column is a question I am asked a couple of times a week…”should I present/apply to the DEMO or TC50 conference?” Both conferences require applications to be turned in by June 30th so I thought this was a great time to share my thoughts and feedback I’ve received about the conferences.

Let’s get the logistics out of the way – DEMO will be held on September 21-23, 2009 and Techcrunch50 will be held on September 14-15, 2009. Depending on the date of registration, attendees pay $2,000-3,000 for DEMO and $1,500-3,000 for Techcrunch50. (as a side note, I’ve seen tc50 producer Jason Calacanis giving away bunches of free tickets on his podcast, so you might try that road to avoid the high costs).

Last year I was one of the few people who attended both pitch events. You can read all of my coverage and an in-person comparison between both events. Overall DEMO was a better run show logistics-wise.

My thoughts are based on web/Internet businesses. If you have a physical product or other IT-related service, DEMO is basically the only choice.
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This evening Kristin Maverick hosted a nextNY event, “PR for Startups”. The basic overview for the panel was, “Tools and tricks that work, what you need to know, what you can do on your own, when it’s time to bring in outside help or hire someone devoted to PR for your company.” You can read the full overview for the event on the nextNY website. There are some tweets from the event as well.

I will leave my post-event thoughts for another day. I have posted the videos (~90 minutes) from the event below. I split it into four sections for easy viewing. Here are the speakers listed from left to right:

• Rose Gordon, News Editor, PR Week
• Gillian Reagan, Reporter, The New York Observer
• Adam Isserlis, Director of Digital Media, Rubenstein Communications
• Peter Himler, Founder/Principal at Flatiron Communications LLC
• Sabrina Horn, President, The Horn Group
• Chantelle Karl, PR Manager, East Coast, Yelp
• Mary Kathleen Flynn, Senior Editor, The Deal
• Jay Kolbe, Vice President, Weber Shandwick

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CN is a media sponsor for the Web 3.0 conference coming next month to NYC. I was able to get the conference to provide us with two full passes which we can give away to our awesome CN readers. The event will be held on May 19 and 20th at the New Yorker Hotel. 

Unlike the others who make you register, tweet, friendfeed, sell your kids, mortgage your house to enter, ours is very easy. Just email me (”myfirstname” – at – centernetworks.com) with your details and on May 5th we will pick two winners.

Only send in your details if you are in NYC or plan to be. I hope to attend parts of the conference so if you plan to attend please come and say hi!

This afternoon I attended a panel discussion at Baruch College in NYC. Lots of students out and about with the summer-like weather NYC is currently “enjoying”. The audience was made up of Baruch students, staff, and others from the community. The panel was titled, “Yes We Can: Going Viral in a Social Marketing World!”, moderated by Les Blatt and featured the following panelists:

• Howard Greenstein
• Steve Rubel
• John Havens
• Peter Himler
• Ken Zamkow

They showed a bunch of videos that have gone viral including Will It Blend and Kobe Bryant jumping over a car. Howard setup a page with a variety of viral videos on Delicious. They talked about some videos from Celebrity Apprentice about ALL detergent that didn’t provide the expected results.

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There are a couple of major events coming up this month in NYC that I thought were worth a mention. We are a media sponsor (whatever that means) for both and hope to see everyone out there. In fact, if you are looking to travel to NYC, this might be a great time to do it. I’ve been watching hotel rates and they are the lowest I’ve seen in years (since 9/11) – if you need help with travel planning, let me know.

NYC Entrepreneur Week

A week’s worth of activities and events around the city and here’s the best part – everything is free! I will be speaking on Tuesday evening with a few other media people about the future of the media landscape. It looks like every facet of entrepreneurship will be covered from starting, funding, expanding, hiring, along with ways to leverage resources in NYC. There are also a few parties mixed into the agenda.

LaidOffCampNY

The NYC version of LaidOffCampNY will take place on May 1st and 2nd at Pace University. The offerings will help people with their careers and also help with entrepreneur training. The event is directed towards entry to mid-level digital media, advertising, publishing, technology and financial service professionals. This event is also free.