Well, we’ve wrapped up the Enterprise 2.0 conference and officially launched!

We got covered by a buncha folks. TechCrunch wrote a little piece about our online project management solution. We also got some love from Kristen Nicole at Mashable who was one of the people I talked with at the DEMO conference back in January who really seemed to “get it”.

Liz took off to fly home a couple of hours ago and Jason and I finished the last few demos then broke down the booth. Just as we were wrapping things up and getting ready to shut down the computers Ameed Taylor from the OnDemand Beat Blog showed up. He asked really good questions and I’m looking forward to see what he writes about LiquidPlanner.

Overall this conference was pretty good. We launched our public beta at the DEMO conference and that set a really high bar for conference quality. But overall I feel pretty good about this one. We had good exposure to enterprise customers and what they are looking for in the next generation of project management tools.

The big take away for me has been the desire for integration between tool sets. Yeah, I know, people have been saying this forever so it ain’t any great revelation. But more than ever before I heard people being really specific about what they meant by integration. How they wanted each of their tools to play together.

Like many other venues the “2.0″ness of this conference tended towards the “we’re building social applications” and “employee genereated content” ends of the spectrum. But there were a few other folks who were doing things that didn’t (on the surface) look too 2.0-ish. Atlassian for one was there with a great integration story that included more than just their great tool set but “in the cloud” hosted stuff too. If you haven’t taken a look at JIRA Studio you should.

Anyway, I’m off to bed. We’ve an early flight tomorrow and I am still wrestling with the internet access in this darned hotel.

(Note: I had to post this later because of the Westin’s damned internet. Internet should be free in a business hotel just like the lights and the heat. Oh, and it should work too.)

After a relatively late night we got up and headed down to the booth.

While setting up the computers we lost internet connectivity. Turns out, many people had lost connectivity. Poor internet connection at a conference where cloud computing and SaaS is at the heart makes for very nervous, irritable exhibitors.We got things up and running though and then did lots and LOTS of demos.

I ran into several people that we met before at DEMO and at Under the Radar.

Jive’s booth is beautiful! The Blogtronix folks (that seem to be everywhere we are) were gracious and friendly as always. The more I work with tech people (particularly startups and small companies) the more impressed I am with just how nice and genuinely interesting most folks are in this crowd.

On the note of meeting lots of people… I need a better way to organize and process all the damned business cards I collect. Want a great startup idea; make a device that does this for me. I don’t care how, just make something cheapish that works and that is quick that I don’t have to think about. Please make it plug into my iPhone. That’s all I ask. Oh, and I want it yesterday.

Anyway, we wrapped up the day and then pretty much skipped dinner and went straight to the drinking. After spending the early part of the evening on a lovely downtown rooftop deck courtesy of Liz’s friends (who also fed us tasty snacks) we retired to the hotel bar.

After several hours, several drinks, and several interesting tales from some new Swedish and Norwegian friends we retired to our rooms to hydrate and prepare for the morning.

We’ll be up and at ‘em early tomorrow for the last day of the conference.

(Note: post publication delayed by Westin’s crappy internet access)

“Round here, we eat our own dogfood.”

“You, uh… what?”

Interviewing for my job with LiquidPlanner late last summer, I was feeling a little over my head. I’m relatively new to the software industry and was meeting with really smart people who have years and years of software experience. And now they were talking about eating dogfood?!

What they were really referring to, of course, was using LiquidPlanner to build LiquidPlanner. And now, with a few months at the company and a successful product launch under my belt, I know why this is so unique, and so valuable.

There aren’t many industries in which you can use the very product you’re developing to inform the development process. Doing so has enabled us to find bugs before our users do, to test new features, and to see how changes to the UI appeal to different users. Not only are we capitalizing on the value of our product but we’re improving it at the same time, a very tasty proposition.

Since we launched our beta program at the DEMO conference in January, we’ve been thrilled to see thousands of people sign up for LiquidPlanner accounts. Many of them are already actively managing projects using LiquidPlanner, but of course, as with any new service, some of the new accounts are not yet in use.

This past weekend, we sent out a brief survey to a few of the folks who signed up for LiquidPlanner but weren’t yet using it to manage their projects. Could they not figure out how to use it? Were we missing critical features? Or were they simply too busy to try it out? The answers were varied, with the majority responding that they haven’t had time since signing up to really see what we were all about.

Interestingly, the answers to another question in the survey validated an assumption we’ve been working against for a few months now: that most people haven’t found a project management tool they like yet. We asked these same people what product they were currently using to manage their projects, and over 50% responded that they weren’t using any formal project management software. (?!?!) Maybe they were building lists in Excel, writing milestones on whiteboards, or sending task lists around in email. This percentage is amazing, given that the SimpleSpark catalog alone lists nearly 250 project management apps. One might think that, by now, everyone would have found the tool that’s right for them.

This is like hearing that someone hasn’t found the right bank yet, so they’re just keeping their cash under the mattress in the meantime. For serious projects, those types of tools just don’t scale.

Edited for clarification on February 22.

Without further ado…

We survived!

Smooth sailing for the most part. I can only credit hours and hours and hours of rehearsal. The morning was spectacularly bright and clear and before we went into the green room we stood around outside with John Cook. He’s been posting like a mad man.

Anyway, things went right according to script and then we headed over to the pavilion for the real work. After all, the on-stage demo was just the teaser to get folks in to look at the in-depth demo. Jason’s been rocking the one-on-one demos. We’ve already gotten some great press.

It is now well past midnight and I’m sitting in the lobby bar. The place is still hopping. There are all kinds of tech folks chatting animatedly about all sorts of stuff. I really should be heading for bed, but hell… I can sleep when I’m dead.

The response has been really positive so far. Most folks really “get it”. We’ve even had a few converts who started off thinking of uncertainty as either a gimmick or a crutch and after a few minutes started to be receptive to the idea that it is a key part of what has been missing from project management.

Among the nicer coverage has been in PC World by Ephraim Schwartz and Michael J. Miller in his Forward Thinking blog.

Now I believe I’m going to post this and take one of the kindly folks at this bar up on their offer of wine.

I’m writing from the stage at DEMO.

Yes. The stage.

John Cook from the PI who has been following our DEMO launch experience is as bored as we are. We were supposed to have our rehearsal around 3:45 but it is now 5:30 and it looks like we’ll be going next. Stacy, a member of the staff, has been keeping us posted on the progress. She’s a sweetie!

The hold up appears to have been this weird car thingie in the picture below.

We don’t know what it is. But it seems to have kept us standing around for a while.

We’re miked now and ready to roll. So I’m gonna save this and get ready. Charles is hovering like a mother hen.

He’s bugging out because I’m blogging from the stage and we’re up in just 2:28. Yeah. Maybe I should focus on what I’m gonna have to say.

… 10 minutes later…

Okay. Well, don’t want to jinx anything but the rehearsal went alright. Not great, but pretty good.

We’re up friggen early tomorrow morning and they’ll be streaming the video live.

The demo is reset and ready to roll and I’m abandoning my laptop to the tender mercies of the DEMO technical staff (these folks are real pros).

Here we go!

Hand gestures. I’m panicking about hand gestures. Everything I’ve ever learned about public speaking is being driven from my brain. I wanted to do final run throughs in front of a video camera to find all the stupid and annoying things that I know I will do on stage. The ones that will make the video of our performance so friggen painful to watch.

Where do I hold my hands?

At my side? What looks relaxed and confident? You know, the two things that right now I most certainly am not.

What projects “this guy is not a tool”?

I think I’ll just cover my eyes. If I can’t see them they’re not there. Right?

Well, we made it. It’s now nearly midnight.

We’re checked in and fed and after wrestling with our network connections for the better part of an hour and a half I’m finally posting (thank you nameless Dell support guy)! Yay!

Tomorrow we get to dig in and polish the presentation. I’ve a bit of trepidation generated by the fact that we don’t really know what the DEMO stage setup is going to look like. We know that there’s some big video screen and that there’s a table thingie on which to put my laptop. But where they are and how the whole layout works is still causing me to have, as Hunter S. Thompson so eloquently put it, the fear.

We’re still not sure about how to fail-over in case we have trouble with the internet connection. I have brought a copy of our RoR code and our demo data local to my laptop. So if things come completely off the rails (so to speak) we can go with my laptop as both the server and the browser. The worry we have about that is that we wouldn’t likely know anything was wrong until we were in the middle of the demo. Time is tight, six minutes ain’t a lot. We’d really have to make some stuff up on the fly.

Not that we’ve ever done that before.

As I type Charles and I are on the plane flying down to Palm Desert. We’re heading down a couple of days early so we can get rehearsal time in before the big day. The DEMO demo (metademo?) is now 63 hours away.

Travel isn’t so bad. There were the mandatory uncertainty jokes surrounding Seattle traffic and the drive to the airport. Other than that it has been pretty smooth. We have now rehearsed to the point where we can spew out excerpts from our talk at randomly inappropriate times. Like some kind of presenters’ Tourette’s syndrome of inside jokes.

Charles keeps reading through Wired magazine and pointing things out. “Looks like Mint.com is doing well. Do you still use them?” Or, “Hey, we should look into using Google Gears.”

I gently remind him that in less than 48 hours our servers may very well be falling over from load. Or from bugs. Or both.

He sits back, “Yeah, I guess we’re gonna have bigger things to worry about.”

Yeah.