In Toronto, I had the opportunity to go to DemoCamp, which was an event that provided 5 products “airtime” to the greater Toronto area tech community. Each presenter had the chance to demonstrate their products (a few broke the no-Powerpoint rule) and by in large, I wasn’t overly impressed.
There was one product, Firestoker which aims to bring conversation and collaboration to enterprise. Good concept but the product lacked anything compelling for a Web 2.0 community. It looked like a blog or a forum which is hardly earth shattering. That said, those kinds of products serve a need for conversation and collaboration and for that, the concept is a good one.
I probably had one of the most critical comments during the event. It’s my way, right? None of you are surprised by that. It was not my goal to castrate Firestoker as much as bring some much needed clarity to the conversation. Some called it jealousy. Some thought that presenters held back because b5 was in the room. Not sure what all that is about as we don’t compete in the same space as any of the companies in the room.
That said, here is my response:
Stumble it!
About the Author: Aaron Brazell is the lead editor of Technosailor.com and a social media expert. His passion is to see companies and individuals use the internet and web technologies wisely and effectively to promote their brands and companies. He served as Director of Technology at b5media from 2005-2008 and is currently an independent consultant.
Thanks for you comments Aaron!
to someone like yourself (and other campers) with long experience in blogging and other web2.0 stuff, nothing we’re doing should be tremendously surprising. What should only be surprising to all of us, however, is how all these tools like blogging, social media and web2.0-ish media that are so clearly useful and familiar to us have still yet to penetrate organizations and business outside of our world of web2.0 communities. We know that the potential is there for tools like these to help alleviate bureaucracy, make better/faster decisions and generally make large organizations more human.
But to get there the tools themselves still need more work and organizations need help too to manage change and it’s in these combined challenges that we specialize in.
We’ve been doing this for almost 3 years now and even working with some (previously) very traditionally-minded organizations. And all that experience we’ve now been putting in to the design of our newest rebuild - though the build we showed was only a matter of weeks into development. Of course like new parents we were/are fiercely proud of even these early ultrasounds and anxious to show the world – even though there’s still a lot more to come.
So from the pure tech perspective, you could be right. Maybe it was too early to introduce ourselves at DemoCamp or, this time out, maybe we just didn’t explain ourselves so good (or both could be true!). Nonetheless we absolutely welcome your commentary. We’re excited that you and others who’ve written share our passion for the ultimate potential of what we’re trying to do.
And this stage we are eager for all the criticism and feedback we can get
Cheers and continued best of luck to all of you on the B5 team
(and next time you are in town, drop us a line, we’d love to grab a beer and talk some more)
Thomas Purves
Co-founder, CEO Firestoker
http://firestoker.com
http://thomaspurves.com
Will do, Thomas. Apparently I’ll be in Toronto fairly regularly since that’s where b5 is HQed. Next time won’t eb until sometime in 2007 though.
Criticism is much better than no comment at all.
If someone constructively criticises something, they have taken the time to evaluate what you have to offer.
If everyone was a “cool” groupie, web applications would never have an incentive to do anything better.
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