“…I am serious about the PowerPoint thing. If you need to display a graph, that’s OK, but if I see a single bullet point or a 60 point centered Arial headline I am going to be ticked. MinneDemo is about showing off your product, not marketing BS. Most of the people in the audience are going to be hard core geeks. Don’t bore them.”

Perhaps this is an “identified need” to create a showcase like MinneDemo, but focused on both the product and the business.

I’m not suggesting that Minnesota is Silicon Valley-like….far from it. But connecting the developer community here, finding ways to showcase innovation, is what Minnedemo (and our Minnov8.com) is all about.

Breakthroughs, innovation and creativity are rarely the result of some “Aha!” or eureka moment, but rather are iterative. It’s that constant improvement which makes something great and standing up in front of your harshest critics — other techies, geeks and investors who’ve seen hundreds of value propositions — creates a clarifying moment that helps fuel the next iteration and improvement.

No question that I agree with, “I may not be a techie but I do know that technology without a business model is simply technology.” I know at least four of the presenters pretty well, and they’re not in this game to be a non-profit and *do* have a business model with a revenue trendline moving in the right direction (that would be up) even in these tough times.

well, there’s nothing about the format that makes it “not good” — the DEMO conferences have been a proven format for VCs to size up mgmt, for 15 years or more…and they only allow 6-min demos!

no format like this (6 or 7 min) allows one to “clearly explain” a business model…but at least a startup could summarize it!

at this Minnedemo, unfortunately no one did that I can remember — that was a definite shortcoming, in an attempt to glorify “the code”

maybe Minnedemo will coach their startups to fix that in the future, if they expect to attract more investors to these things

Don’t deny me my 15 minutes, bro! ;=}

Great post, though, and I especially enjoyed the repost from your commenter about project management being done.

Regarding Mike Gorman’s comment, well, the Minnedemo format is not a good one for a VC to size up the management of a company. It’s about working code. Of course the demo should clearly explain the business model (which most don’t), but a VC showcase it’s not.

As far as that comment you close with: wow, that guy was having a bad day. With all due respect to “saving the children,” the computer industry should hardly stop innovating…

There’s still much room for improvement, lots of great computer apps to come. Yes, there are many project mgmt apps, but what came out at Minnedemo was beyond that: advances being made in online team collaboration, which holds great promise. Yes, it’s a market need identified, and one that is eminently fundable.

cheers,
Graeme