I’m not going to rehash all the demos that were presented because several people already mentioned them. Some were pretty nice and I think overall the quality of the demos was relatively good.

So why was I disappointed with the event if the demos were relatively good?

First of all lets start with the “barely legal” jokes that Joey was trying to crack all night. No one was laughing at them Joey. Maybe a few cackled for the first few times, uneasily. But after that people mostly looked at each other and shook their heads. Even the other people who were on the stage looked uneasy. It might be cool to crack these kinda jokes with your best buds, but it’s not cool when there’s 300 other people in the room and you’re supposed to be the representative of some sort of “community”.

The other big problem I have with the demo camp is the consistent lack of understanding of what a demo is. There’s always some people who just don’t get it. Last night two presentations failed in this way, one was from Refresh Partners and the other from Screed.

The Refresh Partners presentation was about 4 minutes of “wer’re awesome and better than X, Y and Z” and then 1 minute of flipping through some opened browser tabs. I’ve seen these guys at DemoCamp as far back as half a year ago so there’s no claiming that they just didn’t know what was expected.

The Screed presentation was a few minutes of “We’re so awesome” followed by “We know this crowd doesn’t like pre-canned commercial videos, but here’s OUR infomercial!”, the assumption being that because they’re awesome theirs will somehow be different. I don’t mean to pick on these guys because I’m sure they mean well, but really, just demo!

I think there needs to be a bit more work from the organizers in filtering proposed demos to make sure there’s some demoing involved. I don’t mean any decision on how good your product is. But just talking with each proposed demoer for 10 minutes (whether by phone, skype, or in person) would work. Ask one simple question: “tell me in less then 2 minutes what you will be demoing”. The point is just to see that people have given this just a tiny bit of thought. If someone says “I’ll go through my product and show what it does”, ask “Well what are the specific things you’ll be showing?”, and if they say “I don’t know, just something”, tell them to try again when they know.

end rant