Demo at Small Business Summit

I live by the Boy Scout motto: Be Prepared.  And today I reinforced the value of that motto during my "live" demo of Response Point, broadcast during the SB Summit web cast.  I say "live" (in quotes)  because although the demo was real, recorded in real time, and what you see is completely unedited, I had to take a few setup liberties in order to make the demo fit in the short amount of time available.

I arrived extra early for the broadcast, which was a good thing because at the last minute I discovered that I wasn't getting IP from the ethernet cable they brought to the stage!  This was in spite of all the prep I did a week before, on site with the producers, making absolutely sure everything would be there.  Since a live internet connection is an important requirement for showing off the coolest new feature of Response Point SP1 (VOIP service that doesn't require a phone line), this almost prevented the entire demo.

I still don't know what went wrong, but no matter: Boy Scouts always keep a backup, in this case, an extra DHCP router that would let me do a standalone demo if necessary.  But my router wasn't working!  Fortunately, even then I have a Plan B: yet another extra router in my car.  Anyway, I managed to get the whole thing to work without much additional trouble.

I originally planned to do a true, "live" demo from start to finish, plopping unplugged phones onto an empty table and then setting up and provisioning everything in real time.  But when we did the rehearsal it ended up taking way more time that was available, so at the last minute we changed it to have the system already plugged in and ready to go.

Even that, unfortunately, was too much for the time available. I had hoped to be able to show off the external calling experience -- dialing from my cell phone into the system -- but we just didn't get to that part before my host, Chris Cashman interrupted me to ask about pricing, which was my cue that we only had one minute remaining.

Anyway, take a look at the broadcast and let me know what you think.  Although the demo was more condensed than I had hoped, hopefully you still get the sense of how quick and easy it is to set up a small business phone system with Response Point.