A few days ago, demoslam.com, a mysterious – but clearly Google-related – website appeared, which resulted in a lot of head scratching in the tech blogosphere. Now, Google is officially taking the wraps of the site. Google Demo Slam is a competition for tech demos – not just by startups and other tech companies, but for anybody who wants to create a video that shows others how to use a cool tech product. As a Google representative told us yesterday, the company is asking people to create the most inventive, entertaining tech demos possible.
While some of the early speculation around Demo Slam focused on the site becoming a demo stage for HTML5 demos, the mission of Demo Slam is actually far broader than this. Google wants the site to become “a place where boring tech demos become (hopefully) gotta-show-my-friends awesome–thanks to the creativity of Google users like you.”
The Demos Slam preseason starts today and will run for the next few weeks. Viewers will be able to vote for a weekly winner from the featured demos and as the competition continues, these winners will then go head-to-head until the overall champion is crowned. A group of Googlers will choose the videos for each week’s competition based on “creativity and entertainment value.”
There doesn’t seem to be any direct benefit of this for Google, though given that most tech demos tend to be rather boring, this could turn out to be a boon for the tech community as a whole.
