Well the TechCrunch party at August Capital was last night. I lost my voice giving demos of the new Wink for 6 hours. To be honest my expectations weren't that high. I've been to things like this before and usually people are more interested in the booze than what anyone has to say. But this was different. There were tons of folks curious and excited about what we were doing. I think that speaks to how well the open guest list works.
I gave demo after demo of our new search engine and the other features that we're building. Even though we're about half way complete, people really seemed to get it. They could see right away the difference and the benefit of "people powered" search.
There were many familiar faces... several from Yahoo!, several others from another life, and then those guys whose blogs I read or books I've read. Funny thing. The first Wink demo that I gave was to Robert Scoble with his PodTech video camera in my face. I was a bit unprepared... I hoped to warm up with a few solitary geeks first, but no. I jumped in and have no idea what I said.. I'm sure I stammered and flubbed my way through. Plus the room was so loud. All the new code hadn't been pushed yet and the network was slow... not the best way to get the evening off the ground. After a short while, I got it down. I was in demo mode. I wished that Scoble came back for a do-over.
So I had a great time. I was feeling a bit misanthropic on the drive up to Sand Hill. I wanted to keep working on the product, not socialize. But that feeling quickly faded away. Hanging out with the Wink team and the enthusiastic response to what we've been doing was the remedy.
