One place the glass is always full

SCOTTSDALE, ARIZ. - When you attend Demo, you check your pessimism at the door.

You root for the start-ups that promise to revolutionize the industry. You see a new gadget and pray that your company will buy one for you (check out my favorites here). You watch a demonstration that merges real-time video with virtual 3-D objects (from Total Immersion SA) and write "WOW!" in your notebook. In other words, it's very hard not to get bitten by the Demo optimism bug.

If that makes me sound like a cheerleader, then I plead guilty. I truly believe that optimism is needed in this industry, especially after the past few years, when IT trade shows were quieter than a college library on a Saturday night. If a show like Demo and its enthusiastic crowds can give start-ups the adrenaline they need, then that's a good thing.

For start-ups, performing a 6-minute demonstration might seem like the hard part, but it's really the easiest. The tough part is the long road ahead as they try to launch their product, get customers and build revenue, to go from a start-up to established company. It's even harder for companies that want to take away a chunk of Microsoft's desktop application market share.

But Demo is more than just new products. It's a chance for start-ups to rub elbows with venture capitalists and journalists from all over the country. It's a chance for industry leaders to do some social networking and talk trends (as well as drink and play music together during the late-night "jam session").

"We come out here to meet, talk with and walk around with a bunch of smart people," said Fred Felman, vice president of marketing at Zone Labs (now a division of Check Point). In fact, Zone Labs' officials got their first venture capital deal based on people they met at Demo, Felman said. And they've been coming back ever since.

Sure, lots of cool consumer products were launched at the show, but so were several products that should make enterprise network managers sit up and take notice. Turntide launched the first-ever anti-spam router that attacks spam at the network layer. Trend Micro announced hardware that detects virus worm outbreaks, helps companies limit the damage and then cleans up the aftermath quickly and efficiently.

After seeing some scary demonstrations that made me want to never shop online or open another e-mail, I met with MailFrontier, which has added anti-fraud capabilities to its anti-spam and anti-virus e-mail platform. The MailFrontier officials calmed me down a bit by showing me their product, and my optimism and faith in the tech industry returned.

And how else to explain the optimism surrounding blogging? At a morning panel, a bunch of companies that make blogging software enthusiastically tried to convince the crowd that blogging was here to stay, was more than just someone writing about the cheese sandwich they had for lunch and that it was beneficial for companies, both as an internal and an external communications tools. SilkRoad Technology actually launched an "enterprise blogging" software system that adds alerting, role-based permissions and other features to let large companies communicate with each other. The crowd ate it up.