Incremental Blogger

Tablet PC Think In Ink Contest

The winners of the DoesYourAppThinkInInk contest are out. Congratulations to the winners!

TabletPCBuzz has links to most of the winning programs here.

And here's the list of winners in PC Magazine.

I entered an engineering application that I've been working on. It's a circuit drawing application. You might have seen it mentioned elsewhere before and unfortunately, no it's not out yet. It's a huge undertaking and I try to balance working on it with other products that a wider audience might enjoy.

Update: Lora extracted about 1/8th of the frames from one of the screencapture animations I used in the original contest presentation. It's shown below. The sequence is a bit jittery, but gives a pretty good idea what the program does. You'll need to download the full 5MB PowerPoint presentation to see the full version of this animation. There's more about this later. Thanks Lora.

What was the Tablet PC contest like? Well, I only participated in the first round, so I can only give you my inside view on that part. Maybe someone that made it into the final round can give details on what that part of the judging was like.

Each person presenting a product was given ten minutes to discuss their program via LiveMeeting. You talked your way through the presentation over the phone. The judges were remote--at the Redmond campus. You could only use a PowerPoint slide presentation with up to 6 slides. Anything could be in the PPT file (I think) as long as the total file was no larger than 10 MB. After the ten-minute presentation five minutes were allocated for Q&A.

Initially I had created a PPT slide deck with a very high-level view of the app and then I was going to rely heavily on a live demo. Unfortunately, on the first day of the contest I found out a live demo wasn't allowed. You were allowed to use PowerPoint only. The idea was to make it fair for everyone. So I started scrambling to rework the presentation. My 10 minutes were to be on the fourth day so I had time. I was so glad that I had the extra time to redo the presentation.

You'd think that 6 slides wouldn't be a big deal to create. I took the whole time to do it though. I also scripted out everything I was going to say and rehearsed again and again. I knew I needed to keep it to two minutes a slide. Actually, I needed to keep it under two minutes each slide in case I deviated. I needed padding.

Normally I wouldn't have written a script. But when someone dangles $100,000 in front of you, you take it more seriously. And a script would help me in case I got too nervous during the presentation. It was my fallback.

As it turned out, the first drafts of the presentation were too close to ten minutes long. We did a lot of chopping. For better or worse, I cut out a bunch of the high level stuff. I started leaning towards techy features. I figured the program was too vertical to get a good score (a key criteria in the judging was general interest factor) in terms of market breadth, but maybe I could offset this by highlighting it's Tablet-specific capabilities. I knew the odds of winning were low, but my goal was to get to round two.

Another concern I had was over what to put in the slide deck. Should it be standalone? Or should I think of it like I would a presentation at a conference? I leaned towards the latter. I used several screenshots and a handful of bullet lists. I spent a lot of time condensing. I think as much fell out of the presentation as was left by the fourth day of editing.

On Contest Day 4 I was ready. My presentation was scheduled for 2:15 PM. I went for a walk. Walked through the final script in my head. And basically stayed calm. I decided to check in early with LiveMeeting to make sure everything was OK. Ten minutes before my scheduled time came I turned off the other phones so they wouldn't disturb us during the presentation and called in for my conference call. Ooops, I couldn't get through. I tried several times. Then Lora messaged me that the judging panel was trying to reach me via phone because their phone system wasn't working. I looked at the clock. It was now 2:15. I ran to turn all the phones on. Whew. I finally got through to the person administering the contest and so I was ready.

One deep breath and off I started. I wasn't as nervous as I thought I'd be, but if I had recorded the presentation and looked at it later, I'd probably think differently.

During the presentation you have no idea who the judges are. You just talk for the allotted ten minutes. Everything went smoothly I thought. I was pretty confident that focusing on the Tablet features was a good strategy.

Then came the Q&A and one of the first questions was breadth of market. I was ready for it. We'd worked through a bunch of potential questions and I had the points I wanted to make ready. I probably could have done better here, but so be it. I think I'd become too technically oriented at this point. That makes the engineer in me comfortable, but I figured I wasn't talking to a bunch of developers.

Anyway, my time was up. I said thank you to everyone and hung up the phone. Whew. It was over. Bryan was there the whole time and he thought it had gone OK. We both agreed: The main point was that we tried and we enjoyed the challenge of putting something together for the contest.

In the end I was glad that I didn't have to give a live demo. It's easy for things to go wrong with a beta product--or any product for that matter. I used screencapture sequences instead and placed them in the deck. As a bonus I now have an archived recording of the program as of the contest date.

Some people ask: So how come we just don't release the circuit program? Some of it has to do with competitive reasons. Some of it has to do with the fact that there's more to do. And keeping the program as a development effort helps to keep things simpler to manage.

Lots of people have asked for beta copies and initially we were going to send them all one, but our plans had to change. When will it come out, I can't say. I've been avoiding mentioning the program here because I don't want to get ahead of ourselves. But the contest was a milestone and worth mentioning. So for now, that's all I'll have to say about the program. In the meantime, here's a zipped copy of the PowerPoint presentation I gave which you can download. Realize this is a 5 MB file so please be bandwidth kind. Because of its size I'm not sure how long I'll leave it up here. Enjoy.

Posted by Loren at December 1, 2004 03:01 PM