Meteor Monitor: Water, Douglas Adams and CNBC part of excitement at COMDEX =========================================================================== Twenty thousand bottles of water -- each one packing a label about ThoughtShare, PlanBee and a Douglas Adams event at ThoughtShare's booth -- have been distributed at the Las Vegas airport in the last two days. And that's just part of the promotion that's underway by ThoughtShare this week at the huge computer trade show, COMDEX 2000, in the desert city.
ThoughtShare president Fred Fabro says, "We've been having a great response. Our booth is humming, and every presentation we've given has been full, with people sticking around for more." Fabro, several of ThoughtShare's key staff, and some of its programming and technical people are in Las Vegas this week, where 200,000 attendees are expected to have poured through the gates before Friday's close.
ThoughtShare is doing demonstrations of PlanBee and the buzPAK concept roughly every 20 minutes, and handing out CDs of the program and a batch of prepared buzPAKs, including one prepared by author and techno-evangelist Douglas Adams, the man who wrote "The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy" and is the multimedia producer of the interactive game, "Starship Titanic". "Adams has a large following in the information-technology field, and a lot of the people who attend COMDEX know him," notes Fabro.
Adams will be at ThoughtShare's booth at 1 p.m. PDT Wednesday (Nov 15), with a presentation of his own. For details of that and what's in his buzPAK, click here:
<http://www.thoughtshare.com/douglas_adams.jsp>
Adams' buzPAK itself will be posted on ThoughtShare's web site Nov 18.
"We're expecting a big turnout for Adams's presentation," adds Fabro.
The eight-minute presentations at the ThoughtShare booth end with those in attendance urged to move up to the booth's computers to try out PlanBee for themselves, and also to see early versions of ThoughtShare's next two programs, bViewer and bSeeker, in operation. The computers have been humming in response.
ThoughtShare's Vice President of Marketing, Guy Steeves, says the entire ThoughtShare operation also got a boost today when CNBC, the website version of NBC's news, flagged ThoughtShare's web address as its "Cool Site of the Day" and described how PlanBee and buzPAKs work. <http://www.cnbc.com/cnbctv/shows/001114coolsite.html>
"Our reception here at COMDEX simply couldn't have been better," says Steeves. We simply couldn't be happier about how it's going so far. People are hearing about ThoughtShare and PlanBee from two or three different sources, and that's the best kind of impact to have."
There's more to come yet. At noon PDT Wednesday (Nov 15), Fabro will be carried live on the Internet as he talks to media about ThoughtShare and its plans. He'll be speaking at one of the famous media hangouts at COMDEX, Lunch@Piero's, which began 15 years ago. Lunch@Piero's brings together companies and the COMDEX media at Piero's Restaurant, which is located directly across from the Las Vegas Convention Center. As many as 500 trade media attend these functions.
The webcasts, produced by a San Francisco digital content and production company, can be heard at: <http://www.1WEBCAST.com> or at <http://www.patmeier.com>
They will be archived by company name so you can, at your convenience, listen to Fabro's comments later if you can't hear him live.
A couple more tidbits: PlanBee was program of the day at the Jumbo web site <http://jumbo.com/business/pod/pod.asp>
(Note: if they've moved on to another "program of the day" by the time you read this, click on the "Featured Business Archives" link on the right-hand side of the page to see what they said about PlanBee.)
And a great article has just surfaced - on CMP TecWeb ONline by Terrence Googin, called "Going On A Web Tour With PlanBee And The BuzPAKs". As he starts out:
"Despite an unusual name, ThoughtShare Communications' PlanBee is a useful new tool that lets you capture an entire Web-surfing session and then distribute that session..."
<http://www.planetit.com/techcenters/docs/enterprise_apps_systems-enterpri se_apps/product_review/PIT20001106S0016>
(Note that this long link may have been artificially broken by the Internet e-mail system. If it has, it may not work directly when clicking on it and you'll have to manually remove the invisible break.)
Meanwhile, the first issue of ThoughtShare's own free newsletter about buzPAKs is now out -- in buzPak form, of course. To get it, click here:
<http://www.thoughtshare.com/buz/buzMatters.buz>
.. and to subscribe, go to ThoughtShare's home page; there's a slot there for your e-mail address:
<http://www.thoughtshare.com/>
And version 1.1 of PlanBee is now available, which, among other things, adds drag-and-drop to the feature list. It's available here: thoughtshare.com |