Personal note on my DEMOfall experience

In one word, awesome! It's a great place for product launch because the media attention is huge, and lots of great people to meet and talk to there. And then, I'm going to say something I hope my boss will not see.

I'd like to thank Shan for bringing us to DEMO, putting her own credit at risk for that we (or I) actually fell in the IDEAS Show. When we were invited to the IDEAS Show, we had no idea what it was for, nor the importance of DEMO Conference. So basically I was appointed by my boss to do a usual "demo" as we do every day, following the instructions from him and deliver what he has in mind. The only adjustment was to make it into six minutes - a rule we heard for the first time. And you should have known that I failed if you are a regular reader of this blog. However, Shan had a strong confidence on our product, so she actually talked Chris into inviting Awind to DEMOfall.

With the experience of failure, plus the fact that my boss and anyone else were extremely busy on daily jobs, again I was assigned to take care of our preparation for DEMO. But this time I have better position to speak since I was the only one who actually did a six-minute demo and knew the response of the audience. So I started writing a script based on the concept of Xiang Sheng (a Chinese duo comedian talk), similar to the Get-a-Mac Ads familiar to the western people. With the help from Shan and Chris, I finished my script and revised it like six times before my boss had any response to the scripts I sent him. Since he was too busy for this, I did all the conference calls with DEMO staff and preparing the stuff with the help of my colleagues. I became the writer and director of our demo.

Finally it was one week before DEMO, and my boss was able to work with me to practice and revise the script -in the spare time of making the demo sample ready before we depart. And, after about 10 times practice, we were on the plane heading for USA.

Then, a could-be disaster. When we arrived the Grande Ballroom for the only one rehearsal, we found the camera for mobile phone screen could not fit into our script at all. I decided to change the script at the last minute, and thanks to the help from the professional DEMO staff, we kind of finished the rehearsal, despite the mess of video transition because no one could follow the new script.

And, you know the rest. We won a DEMOgod Award. But the best part of it was that people came by and said how they liked our demonstration on stage. A guy from Boston who works in Shanghai approached me and asked me if the demo was in the form of Xiang Sheng, and I was like, "Geez! They get it!" It was unbelievable that even in the afternoon of the second day, when the audience had seen dozens of demos, people still recognized us and cheered for us. Thank you to everyone who helped me on the way to the first DEMOgod Award of Taiwan!