I was lucky to be involved in Mashup Demo yesterday. Despite its catastrophic lack of internet access (the irony of running an internet application demo event where there was only one computer in the entire room capable of connecting to the internet was not lost on anyone!), it was actually a fun and rewarding event.

There were several challenges of course. The first – and I hate to admit this – is that I had a slight hangover from a Christmas party the night before. Normally I am really confident with presenting, but with my head hurting and having such trouble stringing two words together in the morning, I panicked. I went into practising frenzy mode… convinced that if I tried hard, I could force my brain into submission. It was made even more difficult by the second challenge: the evil 5 minute limit!

Yep, we had been told we had a STRICT 5 minute limit to our presentation, and they weren’t lying. The organisers actually had a stopwatch, and gave warnings at 30 seconds, and then stood up as soon as the 5 minutes was up. I am known for my verbosity (a casual browse through my blog posts will confirm this!) so this stringent limit coupled with my brain’s inability to function made me a bit concerned.

The final panic of the day was that due to only one laptop’s ability to connect to the internet, we had to do our demo on that machine. So I had a few minutes before the conference started to install the button into the laptop’s browser, login to the necessary pages, and ensure it all worked ok, before sitting down to see everyone else’s demo.

Anyway… it was all fine in the end. I presented well (I am told), and I managed to get through most of what I wanted to cover (although when I was given the 30 seconds warning, I literally thought he was joking, and said so in a loud shocked voice mid-presentation, which seemed to cause merriment in the audience).

The best thing though was meeting so many interesting people that seemed to like Skimbit. It seemed to strike a chord with people both as potential users of the site, and by a few investors. And I met some fascinating folk that I hope to learn from and hopefully get further introductions from. All in all, a fabulous result for Skimbit!

So how did I celebrate? I went to the pub with the rest of the conference delegates, and proceeded to recover from my hangover in the best way possible 😉 Damn this Silly Season.