Friday Linkfest: Startups, investors, money, pitching

July 3, 2009 – 12:43 pm

Wellcome Mat, LLC ~ from gomatman on flickr

We’re being given pitching advice up the wazoo here at Ignite Cambridge. Yet the main pointers to websites are all printed, and some out of date. So let’s pass on some of the wisdom, and track down in-date versions of the links:

  • Structure of an investor pitch - very similar to the TechCrunch advice I already blogged, and worth a second writeup all of its own. A quick google turns up this guide by Tom McKaskill (PDF) which is wonderfully thorough. Key points to answer: what are you looking for and what are you going to do with it?
By jennie | Posted in Startups | Comments (0)

Is #moonfruit a good strategy?

July 2, 2009 – 1:27 pm

An interesting example of the boundaries between spam and promotion: #moonfruit. By tweeting this hashtag, Twitterers are entered into a daily prize draw to win a Macbook Pro. Mashable thinks they’re doing this right (compared to other failed tweet-about-us campaigns).

What are the key ingredients for success?

  1. Give away something that makes people froth at the mouth. (Apple products tend to have this effect.)
  2. Encourage multiple tweets, over time, to ensure constant visibility among trending topics (Daily draw only uses the previous day’s tweets, so people have to keep tweeting to win.)
  3. Have visible, happy, real, winners.

Yet this has annoyed people, as it’s encouraged a flurry of spammy messages - leading to the question ‘will he who spams most win?’. Is the draw normalised? Does it take into account multiple accounts, or syndicates? There are so many ways to game something like this, it’s fortunate it’s only a 10-day promotion.

Will it leave a nasty taste in some people’s mouths? Undoubtedly. But it’s certainly got Twitter talking about Moonfruit. Is there no such thing as bad publicity? Sentiment classification, or other filtering, might help us understand what people think about Moonfruit - or whether they just want to win a laptop. (Almost undoubtedly the latter, no?) But when you’re just after volume, does the content matter?

By jennie | Posted in Social Media | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)

Real-time search, noisiness and influence

July 1, 2009 – 3:17 pm

There’s a really fascinating post over at TechCrunch today by Mary Hodder, someone who’s been working in ‘live search’ - what we now call the real-time web - for some time.

The article’s definitely worth reading in its entirety, but I wanted to highlight some of the difficulties with real-time conversations that she mentions. A great example is the Michael Jackson Tweet-splosion; if you’re taking a purely search-based view, what do you search for? “MJ”? “Michael”? “King of Pop”? As Mary says, that’s a relatively easy example!

More interestingly is the comments Mary makes about authority. How do you measure authority online? Well, as part of my initial PhD research I looked at various web-structure algorithms (yes, including PageRank) and how you might exploit them along with semantic information to gain a true understanding of the importance of an article.

This research is rooted in scientific publications, in fact; we can learn a lot from the relatively ‘clean’ case of scientific paper citations, although the language used on the web is about a thousand times more interesting. (And, thus, a thousand times harder to process.)

If I told you how we actually track influence, of course, I’d have to kill you. But check out Mary’s article, it’s great food for thought.

By jennie | Posted in Hacking | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)

Aspirin or Vitamin?

June 30, 2009 – 11:30 am

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I’m doing the Ignite course in Cambridge this week, sponsored by Informatics Ventures (thanks!). It’s been a mixed bag so far for me, and although checking email during sessions has been banned, I’m going to try and take notes and blog a few things from the course.

Yesterday was about marketing — establishing who your customers are and how you’re going to get them. Businesses typically go through two stages: initially, you are pre product-market fit, so you spend your time figuring out how your product will fit into the market or vice versa. Then, once you have that fit established, it’s time to ’step on the gas’ and sell to the market — and go supernova.

An initial step, though, is to define whether you’re an aspirin or vitamin.

Aspirins cure pain. Vitamins enhance.

There’s room for both, but knowing which you are is important — and not just from an internal point of view, what you’d like to be, but from a customer’s point of view.

Do you solve an acknowledged problem?

Do you solve a problem the customer doesn’t know he has?

Do you make the customer’s life better?

Another interesting division is whether you’re a new idea, or better-faster-cheaper than something that exists. It’s possible to be a bit of both, but the key camps here are ‘very risky, have to establish the market’ versus ‘existing market but competitors’. If the latter, what will your competitors do when you launch? (A side note, something I was told a while ago: very few business plans/presentations consider competitor response as well as simply competitor existence.)

If the former, are you really a new idea? What do people do now? Is your technology disruptive? Is it defensible? If you’re a tech company, can you productise as well, or are you better off licensing? How do you fit into the existing picture?

This is possibly the most valuable part of the course so far, having time to think about the larger scheme of things and where we fit in. Interesting.

By jennie | Posted in Startups | Tagged , , , , | Comments (0)

Alma Mater

June 26, 2009 – 11:10 pm

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A city where nothing ever changes.

A city where, in just over a year, an entire shopping centre can materialise out of nowhere.

A city that goes to sleep at 6pm and, despite a heaving throng of tourists, appears amazingly visitor-unfriendly.

Cambridge is all of these — and more.

Coming back to my old haunts, I realise quite how much of my life here revolved around social activities and my PhD because there really isn’t much going for Cambridge as a city. I’m spoilt now; I’m used to Edinburgh and its coffeeshops that actually stay open, the fact there’s more to do there in the evening than eat and drink.

Nomadic entrepreneurs, web workers, freelancers etc can plug in and get to work anywhere, but it’s hard when the city seems to be actively fighting against you. Plug outlets? Well, I found some in Borders Starbucks, but it closed before I was even a third of the way through my tasks for the day. (OK, argue that I should work normal hours, but this oppressive weather is playing havoc with the old sleep cycle.) Printing? Sure, if you want to pay a near-obscene premium at Starbucks.

Knowing people locally helps — it’s easy enough to scavenge a hotdesk, even — but without an ‘in’ it’s pretty tough. But what do we need? Starbucksen that open late? A city-centre hackerspace in every major UK location? (Yes please.)

I do have a vision for a network of drop-in entrepreneur-friendly business centres that don’t charge the earth — basically cafes with free wifi, printers, tables, power sockets, whiteboards, printing, fax (some people still use it), etc. A room for meetings. Maybe even a relaxation area. Membership of one would guarantee use of all, and a day rate would cover non-members. I even have the location of the first one in mind, in Edinburgh — an office I’ve had my eye on for a while, wishing I could afford.

Ahem. Let’s make the current startup a success first, shall we?

By jennie | Posted in Lifestyle | Tagged , , | Comments (0)
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