Presenting Mobile Applications to a Crowd
I invented something recently. We mobile phone guys have a tough problem; how do you demo your product to a group? If it's one or two people, you play the "gather around" game. But that solution doesn't scale beyond demoing to one or two people. If you're demoing web apps, you just output the computer to a projector, but there is no way to directly put the screen output of a phone onto a projector. The problem is exacerbated when you need to bounce back and forth between a phone experience and a web app.
What I did was take my iSight camera (which outputs via firewire), set up a video window on my desktop, then output the entire desktop (including video window and browser window) to the projector. I hold the phone up to the camera and bring the video window to the front when I need to demo phone side. I bring a browser window to the front when I need to demo the web side. It works like a charm.
David Beisel showed me a company that has a product that does something close. But besides being expensive (start ups are cheap), their solution is lacking. They output video, you can plug that video into a projector, but then how do you demo the web side?