All PR people fear the bad product demo. I remember being in a room with a very significant journalist at The Wall Street Journal years and years ago and our demo of the latest version of our product simply would not work right. Let's just say instead of going to our next meeting we headed directly to the bar. Most demos go fairly well, but there are always problems or small glitches. Back when I was drowning my sorrow in a lowland single malt there was really no way to battle back except to climb back up 13 floors and do the demo over...or call crying lightly and plead that the bad demo doesn't make the paper of record (not my style, no, really).

When I read this post from Boston Globe's Scott Kirsner, who I've actually given a product demo to in the long ago past, I felt for the exec from Nuance, Peter Mahoney, as his demo of Nuance's integration in TomTom failed to recognize Morrissey Boulevard in Dorchester, home of the Globe. Go check out the video on Scott's blog.

But here's the thing...Peter created his own video afterwards, telling why the demo went awry, posted to YouTube and Scott posted it with his original video. A great job by Peter to answer the issues on the demo directly and allow it to be easily shared, bravo. Here is Peter's video:

/kff