Pitching your startup to VCs

You might have already read this, but was pretty good that I wanted to post it on my blog.

Canaan Partners, recently released a slide deck on Slideshare called ” Canaan Entrepreneur Pitchbook” .

It’s a workbook style presentation that is intended to help entrepreneurs give the right pitch to VCs and angel investors. If you have been successful in pitching to VCs/ angels before, what do you think ?

Understanding spatial search

So what is spatial search ?

In today’s context, where the Internet is the starting point for finding any information you need about anything in the world, and of course most of us use Google. The problem with traditional search is that it does not support or have information about the geographical dimension.

Why is spatial search important ?

This becomes extremely important when searching for something like “Guest houses in Bangalore”. Although the geographical location, in this case ‘Bangalore’ can be used as a part of search query term, the search engine does not interpret it as a geographical location.

So results for the search query – “Guest houses in Bangalore” will turn up documents with “Guest houses” and “Bangalore” and might not show up results with guest houses koramangala or indiranagar which are localities in Bangalore and also hence very apt results. This is because, the search engine does not have a relationship between these terms.

The other issue with traditional search in entities like homes is that the geographical information of these locations are not known, and hence they cannot be visualized on a map – which would be the most intuitive way to visualize these results.

While planning and architecting my100floors, we understood the need for Spatial search and helping users visualize home searches on maps. Moreover we felt that that searching for properties on maps was the intuitive way to find properties. In fact, we are the first to provide a map based search in India, cracking the problem of non-availability of geo-coded data.

The next post will talk about our implementation of Spatial search in, challenges we faced and a walk through of the user experience.

my100floors.com is currently in closed beta, leave your email address on the site and drop me a line here or on twitter and I will make sure that you get the invite.

Top 10 Twitter tools for a power user

The Twitter obsession (and addiction) continues, we are all hooked on to it, aren’t we.

If you aren’t already, do follow me on Twitter.
So for all the Twitteratti / Tweeple / Tweeps out there, here’s my list of top 10 tools / plugins (in no particular order) for Twitter to enhance your Tweeting experience.

Tweetdeck

Tweetdeck takes all the information from Twitter and helps you manage the information overload by grouping them into managable pieces or based on your interests.

Twitturly

Tracks Top URLs which are talked about on Twitter. Extremely useful service and helps you find the most interestsing and latest information on the web.

Twitter Patterns

Helps you give your twitter page some style! They have some really cool designs, check it out.

Twitterfeed

Very useful app, which automatically tweets whenever you publish a post on your blog. Helps you get some link love!

Easy Tweets

A handy tool for online and digital marketers who wish to leverage the advantages of social media and microblogging. Easy Tweets enables you to switch between multiple Twitter accounts, track follower, replies etc all from one dashboard.

Hashtags

Hashtags enable you to track and follow conversations on Twitter. Follow @hashtags on Twitter and the service will index your tweets. Then add a #tagname to your tweet and this can be instantly looked up or searched.

Quotably

This service lets you follow a user’s conversations in a threaded manner, showing you all the various people the given user has had a conversation with. Interesting tool, especially when you trying to find out what others are saying about your brand/service.

Plodt

Plodt enables charts your tweets based on a tag and rank you provide. For example you could tweet

Vinodh’s blog . *interesting 10* and as you keep adding such tweets, Plodt gives you a timeline graph such as below

Power Twitter

This Firefox plugin greatly enhances twitter to include: photo sharing with embedded flickr photos, video sharing with embedded youtube videos, shared tinyurls are unwound and lots of other power user features.

Twitter Keys

Twitter keys is a fun tool for Twitter which enables you to use UTF8 symbols in your tweets.  Once downloaded, this appears as a floating window, so all you need to do is to choose your symbol, copy n paste. So come on, get creative in your tweets using these symbols.

One special feature

Vakow

Vakow is an India focussed service which lets you post to Twitter as an SMS. Very useful and probably the cheapest way to pot to Twitter via mobile in India.

Let me know what you like and what tool you use.

Startup strategies for handling the economic downturn

The slide deck below from Sequoia Capital is some solid advice about dealing with the entire economic crisis and recession from a startup standpoint. If you are an entrepreneur in any part of the world, I am sure there’s something useful for you in this deck.

In fact, the slides below give a good synopsis of the entire problem in the US and global markets and the effects which they have had on the global economy and how startups need to deal with new challenges and realities. I especially like slides 46-55, which are strategies which startups can adopt to get past the tough times.



What do you think ? If you run your own startup, what’s your strategy in dealing with the tough times ?

Creating beautiful word clouds

I stumbled upon Wordle – which as they like to claim is a “toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide”

They accept anything from free text, to blogs RSS feeds and del.icio.us tag clouds and create stunning looking word clouds from them. The clouds are created based on the similar tag cloud concept, where words that are frequently repeated are shown with more prominence.

Simple idea, small app with a lot of impact. I just wish they had a “Save as jpg” option though. Below is a word cloud I created from this blog. Check Wordle out and let me know what you think.

Open Coffee Club meetups

I will be attending the open coffee club (OCC) meetup on August 3rd. 08. Details of the event are here.

For the unintiated, let me talk about OCC and what it does.

OCC bangalore is an open forum for Entrepreneurs, VC’s and budding Entrepreneurs to come together and connect with each other at the grass root level. The group holds its meetings every alternate Sunday in Bangalore.

The Open coffee club was an international initiative to enable entrepreneurs to connect with each other and started off in London in 2007.

The meeting this Sunday, Aug 3rd is very interesting where we will be meeting Mr. Rajeev K Purnaiya, a serial entrepreneur who recently launched hooeey – a tool which enables users to manage their online productivity.

Before this, Rajeev founded CyberBazaar, India’s first and largest conferencing company which was eventually acquired by WebEx.

This is going to be one great meet with many other interesting people like Vijay Anand of Proto.in, Sameer Gulgani of Morpheus Venture Partners, Anjana Vivek of VentureBean, Anjana Kaul of Footprint ventures and Ganesh Rengaswamy (Ex-Greylock) expected to be there.

The event

Date: 3^rd Aug 08

Day: Sunday

Time: 10:30 AM – 12:30 PM

Venue: Principal Axis, 34/1 Crescent Road, Bangalore, 560 001.

Office Board Line: 4126 6279/80/81 (request you to call the front desk in this week and make sure you get the directions correct so as to avoid delays on Sunday.

Mark your confirmation of attendance from here.

If you plan to be at the event, we can catch up there, drop me a message on Twitter or leave a comment here.