Your Hosts for DEMOfall 09
Chris Shipley Co-Executive Producer
Fortune Small Business Magazine named her in its “Top 10 Minds in Small Business.” The San Jose Business Journal calls her a “Woman of Distinction.” She has often been cited as a leading influencer by Marketing Computers magazine. We call her our Executive Producer.
Covering personal technology since 1984 as a writer and editor for a variety of technology and consumer media, Chris Shipley is also co-founder and chairman of the IT market intelligence firm Guidewire Group, Inc. As a leading technology and product analyst, she has been instrumental to the success of many technology entrepreneurs.
Today, Ms. Shipley focuses exclusively on identifying market opportunities and accelerating the most promising companies and products to market. As the executive producer of the DEMO Conferences, she has helped technology companies bring more than 1,500 new products to market.
Ms. Shipley meets with about 500 companies each year, logging a lot of air miles and even coming to know the names of the flight attendants she frequently comes into contact with globally. With a critical eye, she examines how the product affects market dynamics, its unique value proposition, and how the company is positioned for success. Then she invites just a fraction of those companies to launch at DEMO.
Is it difficult to find 70 significant technologies every six months? “In a word, no,” says Ms. Shipley. “I look at technology not with an engineer’s zeal for elegant code, but with a human eye for usefulness, practical advancement, and social change. I prefer the most human aspects of computing—user interface, social impact, business dynamic. But I can still get jazzed by significant technical innovations that simplify and enhance the lives of corporate, mobile and personal users.”
Ms. Shipley holds Bachelor of Arts degrees in Literature and Communication Arts from Allegheny College, and pursues knowledge and understanding relentlessly. You can learn more about her at www.guidewiregroup.com or e-mail her at chris@demo.com.
Matt Marshall Co-Executive Producer
Matt Marshall is the editor and CEO of VentureBeat which he founded in 2006. He covered the venture capital and startup beat for the Mercury News from 2001-2006. Matt significantly expanded the newspapers coverage of venture capital and startups during that time, in daily articles and a weekly column called the VC Insider, and then online with his blog SiliconBeat from 2004.
Matt was awarded Journalist of the Year by the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists in 2002, and the James Madison Freedom of Information award in 2003. These awards were for a series of articles he wrote in conjunction with two successful Mercury News lawsuits, in part instigated by Matt, against California’s public pension fund (CalPERS) and the University of California. The lawsuits sought disclosure of the financial performance of venture capital and other private equity funds that CalPERS and UC had invested in, arguing that state taxpayers and retirees had a right to know these results. As a result of these laws suits, public employees now have full access to information on the performance of their retirement investments.
Matt was a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Bonn, Germany from 1995 through 1998. In 1999 he wrote a book while in Germany, “The Bank: the Birth of Europe’s Central Bank and the Rebirth of European Power” (Random House, 1999). He has also written for the Washington Post and several other publications.
Matt has a PhD in Government and an MA in German and European Studies from Georgetown University.
