DEMO: The big Silicon Valley launch extravaganza set for Oct. 1-3

Here’s why you need to come to DEMO, the big product launch event set for Oct 1-3.

Whether you’re a company launching a product or an executive wanting to stay on track of the latest big technology trends and conversations, DEMO is the place to be. This is one of the best places to get deals done. Entrepreneurs can sync at a single event with dozens of tech writers, investors can find promising teams to back, and business development and IT officers can see what’s coming next.

DEMO is just eight weeks away, and our class of presenters is already taking shape. Some awesome companies are lined up and ready to go, but we’re always looking for more. So if you’re working on a new tech product or service that will be ready to launch in October, we want to hear form you now.  The deadline to apply is Friday, August 17.

This upcoming DEMO is going to be a big one. Thought-leaders like Ray Kurzweil and Evan Williams will be just part of the full roster of experts who will address the biggest opportunities in technology today, what’s coming up next, and how best to go after them. They’ll also offer tips on how they they saw earlier trends and built great companies around them. Kurzweil, one of the most the most respected tech futurists, has invented things such as the CCD flat-bed scanner, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, and the first text-to-speech synthesizer. He was founder of the company that became Nuance, the $7 billion market-cap company that drives much of the speech recognition technology today and which powers Apple’s Siri.

Williams was at the forefront of some of the biggest web technologies of the past decade, little things such as blogging (he founded Pyra Labs, which was bought by Google and became Blogger), podcasting (he founded Odeo, one of the earliest podcasting companies), and microblogging (he cofounded Twitter).

But the main star of the event is still you, the entrepreneur. DEMO has an unrivaled history of launching companies (Salesforce, Netscape, Tivo, Fusion-io, VMWare, WebEx, Sun’s Java: The list goes on), and we’re continuing that tradition this fall.

One of the biggest draws is that launching at DEMO is incredibly efficient. The word’s tech press is highly represented at the event (many of the leading technology reporters are based in SF, a short drive away from the event), and so a company can save time by hitting them all up at the event, either at its station during the breaks or in the hallways during the show. And then, of course, for companies coming from outside of Silicon Valley, it’s a great time to schedule a trip up to Sand Hill Road to raise funding from the big venture capital firms here. Many venture capitalists attend the event. Many deals are started on the spot, at the event. And, of course, if you’re a company launching at DEMO, you can use the pending event as leverage with partners or investors to make the move faster (they’d better move to invest you in, because after DEMO, your product will be known to the world). It gives company engineers a nice deadline to work toward: Get that product out now, or else!

If you’re interested in coming, fill out the online form, and we’ll be in touch with more details.  If you’re selected to present at DEMO, we can get start getting your company ready for the event right away.  We do a lot more to make sure everyone has a successful launch: We have a great DEMO speaking and presentation coach, Nathan Gold, who works with all of the companies leading up to the event (he’ll help you devise a sizzle-reel that you use to blow away investors, partners and others), a PR team that can offer PR support, social media advisors, and the best A/V team in the business.

The deadline to apply is August 17.  Hope to see you on stage in October!