Before the over six hundred avid technologists and entrepreneurs arrive at Skirball Theatre Auditorium on the NYU campus in New York City for the NYTech Meetup, the organizers prepare their ten technology presenters for their brief time on stage. NYTM President Nate Westheimer goes through his pre-event checklist with the presenters to insure that things go smoothly. His goal is to have the presenters optimize their time in front of the knowledgeable New York tech audience at the first Meetup of the fall business cycle.
The ten presenters chosen for this month’s Meetup sit quietly with laptops and cell phones in hand at the front of the auditorium listening to the organizer’s advice. Westheimer’s advice includes how to hold the microphone, where to stand, what to do and not do during the follow up Q&A. He says, “Stand up straight, pause for the sound system, wake up your cell phone in time, and repeat the questions from the audience”
He leaves his strongest advice to the very end of the prepeating it multiple times until he feels he has grabbed the full attention of all the presenters. He says, “I am disappointed in you.I am disappointed in youI am disappointed in you”, and then he says it again. When all of the presenters are focused he shares his best advice about what not to do–and then qualifies it by saying it is something that almost all previous event presenters have done. He explains that prior presenters squandered their 3 or 5 minutes by chatting about their venture, their team, their challengesbut not the technology. Westheimer tells these first time presenters that he estimates “one third of the demo time is wasted on non-demo information that is not relevant.” As Executive Director and Moderator Jessica Lawrence will later re-affirm during her audience welcome by clearly stating, “Please don’t ask what’s your business model?”. The evening is about technology.
The Meetup started off promptly and it was clear from the get-go that the presenters were not going to disappoint Westheimer. While promptly stepping up to the microphone and launching their demos, all pretty much remained focused on their technology that included sharing important information about the traction their technology was having since it was introduced.
Yunha Kim, founder of Locket, a technology that places mobile ads on smartphone lock screens, shared key data about their technology while teeing up her laptop, “We have exceeded 100K downloads within a month of launch, delivering more than 6M impressions every day, and have brought on board a number of great advertisers including Hershey’s, Amazon and Orbitz.”
Keith Meacham of Learn with Homer shared, “.over 100K downloads in less than 4 weeks in the app store and highest download numbers in US”. Off stage he later provided other stats about their comprehensive early reading app, “every 5 seconds, a child across the globe is drawing or recording in Learn With Homer’s art space, 5 star rating from Common Sense Media, top featured education app by Apple in week after launch and reached number 4 in free education apps post launch”. Just like Locket, pretty impressive numbers.
Another presenter, Miner which activates store fronts based on where you are and you are doing, has progressed thru private beta pilots with some nice metrics to go forward. Keith Fiore co-founder of Miner, touted early results they were seeing for their location-based mobile storefronts, “At the Women’s Leadership Summit Pilot, 87% of attendees visited our mobile storefront during the event, 44% signed up for an account on the spot to take an action (ie. enter a contest, take advantage of an offer, save info) with 2.5 actions per person”. One of their betas included a location based storefront at Yankee Stadium. Pretty nice results.
The other seven presentations had very creative technology. Two were video technologies: Cinematique, a platform to shop from videos and Magisto, a cloud based service for creating and sharing professional quality personal movies.
While Westheimer and Lawrence make sure all audience questions are repeated for the sound system to pick up, it is accomplished over the presenters inevitably jumping right into answering the question. The moderators must rein back presenter enthusiasm during the Q&A. But on this particular evening, this may be the only shortfall for the presenters in meeting the standards set by Westheimer in the warm up.
