The Internet is dying, and visitors are lost among its crumbling ruins. Sounds like hyperbole, but we are all trapped by an obsolete ideology binding most sites and keeping the Web from being all it could be.
We go to the Internet seeking entertainment, information, communication, commerce, and comfort. We find ourselves lost in a bewildering sea of boring, undifferentiated, incomplete offerings, smothered by advertising. The innovative community of Web creators who could actually meet our needs don’t know where we are or how to find us, largely because the locations where we could connect are bound by a rigid, failed ideology of search engine optimization, location-generated content, and traffic-based currency.
This is how I look at the Web and how I set up my presentation—all six minutes of it—at the semi-annual DEMO conference in Palm Desert, CA, a couple of weeks ago. It is also why I started my newest venture, DigitalScirocco, an auction-based marketplace bringing fresh and relevant content and services to Web-based properties.
The DEMO experience was amazing. We are angel-financed and only eight months old, with an initial focus on getting our product to market using a “Rolodex” direct sales model, and so we hadn’t even begun to think about marketing/PR, messaging, or even solid demos. Worse, as a market we planned to bootstrap by seeding with quality sellers, a process we had barely begun. But the opportunity was too good to pass up, so the already crazy pace of a startup went into hyper-drive for a few weeks.
Upon arrival at DEMO in Palm Desert, my immediate attention was caught by pink flamingos. My first thought was, “Tacky!” Then realized they are real, and my reaction changed to “neat!” Shortly after, I realized I hadn’t ordered a monitor for our Pavilion Station (booth) at DEMO. Our team raced to Best Buy and figured it out.
After taking care of the monitor drama, Sunday night offered a chance to rehearse on the main stage and attend a CEO dinner—both which were scheduled at basically the same time—I did both and made the most of the festivities.
I presented just after 11 a.m. on Monday. I was calm and thought of a couple things. The first: no matter how bad it might be, that it was unlikely to be as bad a performance as