Let’s check in on what Kitchener-Waterloo’s tech companies got up to in August, shall we?

Need to catch up? Here are quick links to the June 2020 Round-Up and July 2020 Round-Up.

———

Dejero Completes their Technology Marketing Tripod

Dejero introduced a new technical marketing resource, Why a resilient wireless system is critical to delivering reliable connectivity in portable devices, which examines the issues that must be overcome to engineer a wireless system that works pretty much everywhere.

This asset joins two existing documents—Dejero Smart Blending Technology and Dejero Hybrid Encoding Technology—in a growing technical resource library to complete Dejero’s technology marketing tripod.

Combined, these three resources examine major market challenges and explain how Dejero’s differentiated technologies work in tandem to deliver reliable connectivity anywhere: encoding that makes efficient use of available bandwidth to deliver high-quality video, blending technology that combines multiple network links (even with different performance characteristics) into a single reliable connection, and an antenna system that can simultaneously connect to multiple wireless networks practically anywhere in the world—all in a portable device!

Assets like these ones are great for a whole host of reasons, including:

• Making life difficult for competitors: at the very least, they have to spend time answering tough questions; more likely, they face an uphill battle to overcome the salient points Dejero makes and explains in detail
• Efficiently and effectively driving conversions through the entire sales lifecycle: lead generation campaigns can tease high-level points, detailed mid-funnel questions can be answered, efficiently, by sending over a pre-existing document or an excerpt; competitive deals can be won by convincingly showing unique capabilities; and decision makers can justify their choices by pointing to these resources
• Protecting value and reducing price pressures (i.e., discounting) by proving differentiated capabilities

We had a Q&A about this initiative with Dejero’s VP Marketing, Richard McClurg, in Building a Technical Marketing Library.

SSIMWAVE Debuts a Demo Zone

SSIMWAVE recently added a “Demo Zone” section to their website which lets visitors explore different use cases and see the company’s proprietary SSIMPLUS technology in action.

These demos are valuable additions to the site for two related reasons:

1. They let prospects get somewhat hands on with the solution, to interactively experience it without needing to engage in a proof-of-concept or install anything
2. They let prospects self-serve, which helps to scale up SSIMWAVE’s reach and efficiency by eliminating the need for an sales engineer or other team member to join in the conversation

Plus, I love that the Demo Zone isn’t gated!

In my view, too many tech companies try to control conversations too much, limiting the amount of research a prospect can do on their own without being forced to fill out a form or schedule a sales call.

Or, they forget how important it is for someone to just play around with a technology to get a feel for how it works and what it can do (remember when you were a kid, and you had fun with unsupervised learning???)—yeah, you use it every day, but your target buyers and users have never used it even once.

So let’s take SSIMWAVE’s new Demo Zone as a reminder that the more people can actually use our stuff, the better.

Bonfire and Vidyard Bring the Data

Bonfire released The State of Public Sourcing How COVID-19 and Remote Work Have Become a Catalyst for Change in Public Procurement, in advance of NIGP 2020.

Like the SSIMWAVE report profiled last month, this comprehensive asset analyzes survey responses to tell a market about itself—in this case, looking at how COVID-19 and remote work have impacted procurement teams.

In doing so, it provides a window through which procurement professionals can understand how their peers and other organizations are meeting these challenges.

Among other things, the report shows that—as is the case with many industries and functions—the pandemic and its ripple effects have accelerated the introduction of digital technologies, which will have lasting impact on how procurement projects are handled in the future.

And not to be outdone, although I doubt they’re competing for the same dollars, Vidyard dropped (as the kids say) The State of Video in Remote Work. This report, co-created with Demand Metric, looks at how synchronous and asynchronous video usage has changed during the COVID-19 pandemic.

I won’t spoil it for you, but working from home, social distancing, and travel restrictions have not caused business video usage to go down.

MOAR STUFF!

Here are a few other notable August activities:

• P&P Optica (PPO) delivered a webinar on The Science of Spectroscopy, which explains the inner workings of their proprietary food safety technology—as PPO’s VP of Marketing, Heather Galt, says in her introduction, “I hope you have your brains ready”
• For all you digital techstack online commerce people, Smile.io launched a new podcast, What’s Your Ecomm Stack—listen to it, learn from it!
• Waterloo EDC followed up their demolition of Austin, Texas with a head-to-head comparing Waterloo and Pittsburgh—notably absent was any mention of recent Stanley Cup wins from the surrounding area; and they followed that up with a comparison against Columbus (I don’t know enough about Columbus to insert a witticism)

If you want to hear a bit more about PPO or to learn from Heather’s wealth of experience, then check out this episode of the Crommunity Podcast.

———

Aaaand that’s a wrap.

If you want to nominate something for inclusion in the September round-up, then hit me up (figuring out how to get in touch is the test to prove that you’re not a robot).