Respectance.com

We had our official launch on Friday at the Next Web Conference event in Amsterdam. As I mentioned earlier, I thought it might be kind of a techie venue for us; but in fact it was really interesting. We got to meet with a lot of people, see what’s going on in the European scene and enjoyed a number of presentations—including our own!

That’s a photo of Richard on the main stage at the illustrious Tuschinski Theatre. A mixture of Art Deco and Amsterdamse School, the Tuschinski was a great choice for this conference. It made for a cool contrast between contemporary and bygone avant-garde.

In addition to be being chosen as one of twenty companies to appear with a table in the Startup Arena, we were selected as one of the six most promising web startups, and were asked to present Respectance to the conference. All presenters had ten minutes to make their pitch to the crowd and had to deal with Marc Canter and Jeff Clavier acting like the grumpy old men from the Muppet Show, playing devil’s advocate after each pitch. There’s a good write up of the conference on Read/WriteWeb.

We had a prepared an impactful one-minute video to lead the presentation, followed by some finely-timed slides. Unfortunately, the a/v system chose that moment to melt down and Richard was left on stage trying to pick up on a tone we hadn’t been able to initiate. He’s a professional though and remained cool and eventually we got back the electronics and got to do our pitch in its entirety.

We got to see some cool concepts, including a Swedish project called Polar Rose that’s doing image recognition and contextualization from jpegs. The speakers were also good: Saul Klein from Index Ventures gave a pretty accurate talk about the state of innovation and investment in Europe. Dick Hardt gave a good presentation, pretty similar to his keynote at the Identity 2.0 Conference.

I didn’t see all of the speakers since I was helping David, Marcin and Richard man the Respectance booth. I did speak again with the day’s MC, Scott Rafer, who had given me some good advice a couple of months ago. Richard, Marcin and I had a fun chat with “evangelist and rabble rouser in the Relationship Economy”, Deborah Schultz, who was a guest speaker. All in all, it was a good conference. Congratulations go to Boris and his team for the organization—and thanks for inviting us!

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Posted by Todd Wilkinson

2 Jun