by Annette Giambroni

Earlier this week, we launched Z-Commerce for Media at Fall DEMO’09 in San Diego. We were really excited to see this event growing in size despite the economy. As always, there was a real palpable energy and buzz about the place and we were honored to be asked back, following our launch at DEMO in the Spring.

We’re busy following up on connections made, press coverage, and internal de-briefs – but before we move on to the next big thing, we’d like to share our observations and thoughts with you.

First of all, we were thrilled to see such a strong focus on business models and whether or not the presenters could turn a great idea into a viable business. I guess it’s a sign of the times, but following the tweets, it was obvious that people were more interested in how presenters would monetize their offering than in seeing cool technology.

Some of our favorite presenters included Webroot, Liaise (a super friendly bunch of Aussies who won the Enterprise People’s Choice Award and $500k in IDG advertising), LeapFILE (great group of people who offer a secure file transfer service), Rumbafish, Pinyadda, and TwirlTV just to name a few. Not surprisingly, there was a heavy focus on social media and crowdsourcing, but we were a little shocked that Zuora was one of few enterprise, B2B apps.

Despite the heavy focus on consumer technologies, quite a few of the Lifetime Achievement Awards went to B2B vendors such as Marc Benioff, Founder and Chairman of salesforce.com and an early Zuora investor; as well WebEx, Adobe Systems, and Google. With our own founders coming from salesforce.com and WebEx, we certainly hope to follow in their footsteps!

Finally, we were sad to see Chris Shipley hand over the reins to Matt Marshall, but getting to watch her victory dance was well worth the hefty show price tag.