Tech Events - Silicon Valley/Bay Area

Launch Silicon Valley was held last week at the Microsoft Mountain View campus on June 4-5. I was pleasantly surprised by the turnout of both entrepreneurs and venture capital representatives.

Of the presentations that I attended, the Digital Media group was the most interesting to me. The presenting companies included - EyeJot, fix8, SnapJot, Yodio, and Catalog Data Solutions. The boom of applications becoming available for Web 2.0 and the influx of user-generated content was quite remarkable. Since working with Aplia four years ago, the model for USG has changed dramatically. This is obvious given the boom in personal network pages and You Tube, but it was compelling to see new companies continuing to emerge with alternate approaches to the market.

However, one aspect of the companies and presentations at Launch Silicon Valley noticeably absent was a clear explanation the sales and revenue models of their companies. Some companies appeared to integrate a mention of - "we are a SaaS model, charging a monthly subscription fee" - but few of them that announced this methodology provided a clear picture of how the revenue process would occur. In many cases, I found myself contemplating whether or not these companies had truly considered the revenue model aspect of their business, or were wed to a cool, new technology, excited about its creation and were operating over the assumption that "build it and they will come." It was an eerie flashback to 1999 in some cases. Of course, this outlook may be the product manager/business developer in me that is overlooking the fact that the presenting companies were almost exclusively operating on angel capital or bootstraps, but then again . . .