A Short History of DEMO

1991 - The first DEMO conference took place in May in Palm Springs, California. It was produced by Stewart Alsop and included the introduction of the world’s first multimedia PC (from Tandy Corp).  Alsop felt that the real "fun" of many industry conferences was the one-on-one demonstrations that occurred in hallways and suites as conference attendees showed one another the products they were working on, so he designed DEMO as a product showcase.  This spirit still thrives: companies must demonstrate new and real products at DEMO – no PowerPoint presentations allowed!

1994 – David Coursey joins Alsop as a producer of DEMO.

1995 – Sun introduces Java 1.0 at DEMO.

1996 – Jeff Hawkins introduces the Palm Pilot at DEMO, ushering in the PDA era and convincing the early adopters in the audience to use the personal organizer. 450 units were pre-sold at the conference.

1996 – Chris Shipley takes over as DEMO’s executive producer, following a dozen years as a reporter and consultant in the tech industry.

1997 – Apple Computer, Ask Jeeves, E*TRADE, Eastman Kodak and Sun Microsystems are among the companies launching new products at DEMO.

1998 –Chris Shipley establishes the following guidelines for each product that debuts at a DEMO conference. To be considered, a product must:

• make its North American public debut at the DEMO conference

• make a significant contribution to the state of the art in its target market

• change the dynamics of the marketplace into which it is introduced

• be backed by a management team capable of delivering the product to market    

1999 – TiVo launches at DEMO 99 and the world gets recordable, fast forwardable television.

1999 – The DEMOmobile conference is introduced.  This small conference took place in the fall and focused solely on mobile and wireless technologies.  Approximately 35 companies launched at DEMOmobile each year. The first DEMOmobile conference introduced such products as the HP Jornada Handheld, the Philips Nino 500, the NuvoMedia RocketWriter, the Vadem Clio, and the Palm VII.

2000 – Half.com launches at DEMO in February.  Is acquired by eBay in June.

2000 – Kerbango Internet radio launches at DEMO, as does Keen.com and Marc Andreesson’s LoudCloud.

2000 – Sergey Brin launches Google Number Search (GNS) for Web phones at DEMOmobile.

2000 – salesforce.com introduces the world to its online CRM phenomenon at DEMO.

2001 – Danger unveils its Hiptop at DEMOmobile.

2002 – Boingo Wireless Internet Service, Microsoft Tablet PC, and the Palm i705 launch at DEMO.

2003 – Oddpost launches its email program at DEMO 2003 and appears at DEMO 2004 to launch enhancements to the program.  Is acquired by Yahoo in July 2004.

2003 – Firetide introduces its HotPoint wireless mesh router at DEMOmobile.

2004 – Skype launches SkypeOut at DEMOmobile.

2005 – DEMO celebrates its 15th anniversary with a special retrospective that invited some of DEMO’s past outstanding demonstrators back to the DEMO stage. This included Marc Andreessen formerly of Netscape, Marc Benioff of Salesforce.com, Jeff Hawkins of palmOne, Mike Ramsay of TiVo, Kai Krause of Byteburg Research Lab, and Mena and Ben Trott of Six Apart.

2005 - The producers, recognizing that building mobility into a technology product had become a “given,” morphed DEMOmobile into DEMOfall.  DEMOfall takes place each September and features 70 new enterprise and consumer technologies from across the spectrum of the tech landscape.   

2006 – DEMO China, the first ever international DEMO conference, took place September 5-8 in Tianjin.

2007 – IronPort Systems, which launched its flagship enterprise spam and spyware protection appliances at DEMO 2003, was aquired by Cisco Systems.

2007 – The founders of DEMO 07 demonstrator eJamming, Gail Kantor and Alan Jay Glueckman, were named to the elite 24 Top Innovators list put out by Fortune Magazine.

2007 – Enterprise content management vendor Koral, a DEMOfall 06 demonstrator, was acquired by Salesforce.com.

2007 – The second annual DEMO China conference took place September 5-7 in Beijing.

2007 – IDG Germany produced DEMO Germany, October 15-16 in Munich.  Twenty-five companies launched new products at the event.

2007 – ZINK Imaging launches at DEMO.

2007 – Nexo Systems launches at DEMO and is acquired by Shutterfly in January 2008.