iBreakfast

Gung Ho and the RFID Hunting Dogs of Virginia - Signs of our New Economy

2012-01-04T09:03:00.000-08:00

Our year-end vacation took us off the beaten path down South where we had an epiphany of sorts about the new economy. Along the way, I read a book which explained that, although Gung Ho usually thought of as a Marine war cry bur it really is a Start-Up’s war cry. It was adopted by a Marine officer who was inspired by the determination of a very spirited guerilla entrepreneurial program in wartime China with that name!

(More about that later – but it may be the greatest irony of our economy that we used a Chinese idea to promote warfare and conquer who? while the Chinese used it to devastate our manufacturing base.)

We may also be so Social Media’d out in NY that we forget the potential for fundamental change occurring in the hinterland (OK I did see 3 people with Occupy Savannah signs, but they may have been leftover Yankees). So, I will give you a list of changes I saw that could outline our future…..you connect the dots.

Factory building companies move from Chicago to South Carolina – because, said my engineer friend over dinner in GA “the South is the only place where factories are being build these days.” You can see a nice looking Honda plant from the highway when you drive through North Carolina. No signs promoting unions, plenty talking about the Bible.
I meet two teachers looking to move to Ashland, N.C because they are virtual teachers working for the State of Florida. To save money, the Florida hired a group of ex-Disney execs to offer their troubled schools a low-cost alternative. The teachers are considering Ashland where costs are lower and the lifestyle pleasant. The schools may be good too.
The country store talk in VA is about where to take their handheld transmitters in order to missing hunting dogs by locating the transponders. I hear that out West cattle herding is done from a laptop that sends signals out to cattle tags which lightly shock the cows into their pens.
One of the fastest growing retail chains is a cheap tool supplier called Harbor Freight.
All that shale gas fracking talk has inspired mineral searches in non-shale gas areas as well as a new fight over well water. Gold has been found in VA...
I get 4G in the countryside – no problem.
People love huntin’ and military bases seem to be just about everywhere. Is housing starting to come alive.
No one talks about robots in farm mechanization but the farms are generally under 100 acres.....and you'd think......will returning solider use their newfound skills with predators and roadside robotics skills on the farms

9. The point here is that the internet, social media and high tech are now entrenched in the heartland. For the most part, they are not used particularly innovatively. They are “paving the cowpath” – in other words doing traditional things but with better tech. The farmers complain about overregulation – our strawberries had to be tested for sweetness before they could be picked (they were still quite sour on FL) and wineries (yes there are wineries) can’t sell across state lines and so on…

We are still using an old state regulatory pre-internet infrastructure to govern while everywhere else they are bursting at the seams with tech and connectedness. Many regulations could be managed by online reputation and every consumer will have a 4G smartphone to keep them abreast. Yet, when states are desperate like Florida’s schools, they go virtual - no problem

As for innovation, we are sending factories down there because of unions and a supposed work ethic. Supposedly, rural people tend to value production more that urban people and are willing to do the repetitive work.

I can also add that the big Southern cities are mare diverse than you might have thought, but that is another story. The issue is, has the hinterland’s economy changed in a significant way due to the tech economy and the answer is probably no, not really. It’s doing the same only somewhat better.

But it could – and that’s where Gung Ho kicks in.

This is a long forgotten story that Marine connection has overshadowed. When the Japan occupied half of China in WWII, the free Chinese lost their major urban manufacturing and so the Communists and the Nationalists – a bipartisan group – launched a program of guerrilla manufacturing in the rural areas. They even threw in Angel money. Soon, small very nimble operators were making everything from soap and matchsticks to airplane parts in jungle factories that filled supplies, created jobs and kept the country going until it could take on the Japanese. Gung Ho is just an abbreviation for Chinese Industrial Cooperative or "gōngyè hézuòshè" 工業合作社 shorted as " gōng hé" 工合 that coincidentally translates as “work together.”

The Communist revolution in China made us overlook this highly distributed form of manufacturing which underwrote the revolution and then, when the dogma subsided, turned China into the manufacturing superpower it is today. [I write this on a China made PC, distributed through a China made router etc. etc.]

Whoever wants to win the next election should to revisit this story because it is the true source of our recovery. They should be underwriting exactly this kind of nimble manufacturing.

Sure, we are seeing some recovery but it tends to focused on big corporations that can make more money with fewer employees. In order to bring unemployment down we need to spark the creative abilities of agile, fast-changing highly informed low-cost specialty manufacturers. We have the connectedness, the high tech tools (designed here but made in China), the distributed education and the infrastructure to deliver. We need to foster the markets and get out of their way. With 50,000 or so returning troops that pressure but also the possibilities will increase. My guess is that our successes with unmanned flying will spark a revolution in robotics, remote control land & aerial technologies and a resurgence of mineralogical development.

Maybe they will remind their kin that hunting with dogs makes for lousy meat. All the excitement and fear sends adrenaline to the animals and the meat is soured. Wouldn't it be better if they found way to tag animals in the wild and then use to chips t lead them with a surprise?

Anyone else been out in the country? I would like to compare notes!

PS There is nothing here that explain the mad crowds at Harry Potter World except to say that it is really well done, magical reality (read: cult marketing) is big and people will pay and suffer just to experience it…..

"Occupy" on Cover of Wired vs Our Town Hall Meeting

2012-01-04T08:21:00.000-08:00

From our Town Hall meeting to this! Social Media nihilism.

We envisioned a self-organizing, people friendly group as in: Headless Body Seeks Topless Rule. However, at Wired it is: #Riot: Self-Organized, Hyper-Networked Revolts—Coming to a City Near You

To understand the phenomenon - more on it negative side - this article is a must read. So is the one in the same issue on the world's informal markets. They are unexpectedly linked.

The bottom line is that Social Media can either be "weaponized" or it can be an underlying force for the new economy. For that, see Marc Andreesen on Software Eating the World.

Marc essay assumes everyone is on smartphones. The downside, as is widely pointed out - is the net loss of jobs and the rise of a new winner/loser economy that you typically see in "developing countries."

Fortunately, I have been travelling in the rural South where I have farm friends and I see the possibility of something quite different and for that, I ask you to read my next blog on the RFID hunting dogs and the real meaning of Gun Ho (its actually more of an entrepreneur's war cry - not a Marine slogan).

New articles on the PowerPitch NY Convergence

2011-12-16T18:44:00.000-08:00

Great article series on the iEvening in NY Convergence

1. The Key is Clarity

2. Its Not What You Tell - It's What They Tell About You

A Teachable Moment? Report from the Dec. iEvening

2011-12-08T16:21:00.000-08:00

Report from the Pitch iEvening for Entrepreneurs

Need to raise a million? The iBreakfast/iEvening series has helped Start-Ups raise over $40 million. This powerful iBreakfast/iEvening quarterly meeting of entrepreneurs, VCs and seasoned execs enables start-ups to find their "Power Pitch™" while offering a unique opportunity to raise capital.

VC Panel lead by: John Ason, Angel Investor • Heather Gilchrist, RAK Tech Fund • Allan Grafman, All Media Ventures • David Teten, ff Venture Capital • Moderated by Alan Brody

Nikhil Paul, CEO Nfoshare & Alan Brody, Moderator, iEvening

The Report: A Teachable Moment

Every Entrepreneur iEvening seems to have its own theme. We don’t plan for it but it somehow works out that way. Last time it was medical plans.

This time it was education.

Not only was our winner, Andrew Cohen’s Brainscape, an educational product (popular multimedia flash card apps) but so where the runner’s up.

Even your humble host of the workshop was invited to put the collected wisdom of the Entrepreneur Power Pitch panels into an educational format. (More about this blog and eBook later).

Our panel of investors included Heather Gilchrist of RAK Tech Fund who had succeed with an educational product. John Ason, the Angel Investor who gets to write his own checks has some educational investment but Allan Grafman of All Media Ventures and David Teten of ff Venture Capital are not generally there. But they voted for it anyway.

Maybe it is just the current mood. No one seems to understand the economy, what to spend our money on or even what to manufacture - so why not get an education? And hasn’t the cost of education outpaced the economy. So there it is - an overpriced enterprise ready to be taken apart by technology: reducing analog dollars into digital pennies by turning pedantry into personal pedagogy.

BrainScape came out of Columbia and seems to include a little of a very hot commodity according to number of our judges, “gamification”. It is not just learning with your own flash cards, or borrowing from others who have been there before but you can have some fun doing so too.

The runner up was Rami Cohen, MD whose Tel-Aviv start-up, Telesofia comes with a special pedigree, he worked with ICQ founder and Israel Start-Up guru, Yossi Vardi. Telesofia, is a platform for creating personalized video communications between doctors and patients. A form of education, you might say.

Another runner-up was Nfoshare, a website that allows college students to tap the collective wisdom of their class by tying the professors, tutors and students into an ongoing forum. It spares the professors from endless of questions and lets the slow kids tap the knowledge of the smart kids.

Afiniate's IntentEngine™ software, produced by Ram Singh, the winner of our DC event, educates banks on the needs of their customers and feeds them offers they are likely to be interested in.

Firmcontour educates you on how to lose weight. After getting your personal profile it delivers a customized menu for your weight loss or dietary needs for just $12.95 a month.

ZeroIn Media educates banks customers on whatever the banks deems worthwhile -on flat screen TVs as they wait in line.

Finally, Candid Capture, educates employers about the candidates they are looking to hire by allowing them to capture structured video interviews for perusal on their own time.

PowerPitch workshop - once again we used the power of our panelists to help the Entrepreneurs shape their plans and calibrate their messages for various kinds of investors. It also raised so many issues that Entrepreneur asked us to begin the eBook below.

A special thanks to our sponsors Herrick Feinstein for hosting a marvelous event with great refreshment and food & wine breaks.

____________________________________________________

Due to popular demand and as part of the iEvening Education theme, we will be releasing a compilation of our PowerPitch Workshop’s book of wisdom.

POWER PITCH™ - TAPPING THE HIDDEN RULES OF START-UPS

The heart of this workshop is focusing on the pitch - that 10 or 15 second elevator shpiel. It sounds simple and doing some kind of pitch is simple. But doing the right pitch is incredibly because it makes you focus on the essential, communicable element of your plan.

We stumbled upon this through two sources. One of our investors told us that the lives for 3 phone calls he gets every morning that rave about this new start-up or Entrepreneur. Then Bloomberg TV approached us to do a show about our startups and they asked, so what do these companies do?”

It turned out to be almost impossible to explain and so we recognized the challenge:

How do we get entrepreneurs to reduce their idea, management, specific experience, technology and marketing plan into a bite-sized chunk? How to make it relevant to a potential investor? How to turn it all into a meme so that angel investors can pass it around to their colleagues like a chit in the favor bank?

How do you get your idea to become remarkable to investors? How do you make it go viral for the checkwriters?

We came up with the idea of using their colleagues. We found out that the best way to do it is to make a group of your peers give you the feedback you need. After all, they are most like you: the VCs can be dumb, your loved one may never understand you but if your peers don’t get you then you know you have work to do.

That’s the essence of the PowerPitch Workshop. But in order to manage it you have to know a lot about the mindset of Angel VCs: what they are looking for, how they handicap you and how they get into their own kinds of buying frenzies. That is the essence of this book, gleaned from years of listening to the VCs after you’ve left the room.

They have their own ideas, their own rules of thumb which they generally don’t share with you. Much of the time they don’t really articulate it because it’s a given.

But not to you.

You also need to understand whether you are investible - how to improve your chances or how to find more accessible and far cheaper sources of capital.

Many of these points are on the blog and this outline will direct you to some of the points already written and all the rest waiting to come.

Are You Investable? An outline of our coming eBook

Are you investible? Understand what investors are looking for before you pitch. In our blog.
How do Investors rank you? Eskimos have 57 words to describe snow and the Bedouin have 100 for a camel. What do Investors have for entrepreneurs?
The Secret to Pitching: the “3rd Dimension” In our blog.
5 Things you should NEVER say to a VC - 5 things you SHOULD.
The Jockey vs. the Horse - the key to your future. In our blog.
How to dream the meme - like DNA and Google you can make yourself stumble on the key idea.
How to spot a VC.
How to calibrate your message for different VCs.
VC Frenzy: What you can learn from Tupperware.
How to launch a business when you’re “the 99.”
How to survive the drought.
Plan B: Do you Pivot or Deconstruct?
Payday? All about Termsheets.
How to grow: Lessons from billion dollar companies I helped.

Disrupting Medicine: Report from mHealthcon I at Rutgers

2011-12-08T11:38:00.000-08:00

mHealthcon opened to a full house at Rutgers, NJ. We are providing a full report below with numerous published articles about the conference - including a week-long series in NJ Tech.

With close to 300 delegates assembled at the heart of the pharmaceutical industry, this event saw the confluence of medical and pharma stakeholders, seasoned digital entrepreneurs and savvy early stage investors.

MHealthcon sprang from the ongoing mass adoption of powerful mobile devices - phones and tablets backed by global connectedness and the "data cloud". With health reform driving the digitization of patient records as providers and payers demand improved outcomes and cost efficiencies, there is a surge of innovation in medicine. Seasoned entrepreneurs and investors are exploring new channels to collect and distribute medical information, manage patient care and streamline payments.

Tom Wheeler, Chairman of the mHealth Alliance Partnership laid out the roadmap of adoption, proliferation and global opportunity.

The event attracted delegates throughout the U.S. and Canada and from as far away as Germany and Israel.

Tel Aviv's Dr. Rami Cohen won the Start-Up Award with TeleSofia, a personalized doctor-to-patient instruction video platform. His runners up were Atlanta's Dr. Nicholas' DocPons and one of the most seasoned start-ups we have seen, Sandford Roth's Medsonics.

Successful entrepreneurs like Anand Iyer from companies like WellDocs, Dr. Gopal K. Chopra from pingmd and Serge Loncar from CareSpeak discussed the adoption and growth process - with some surprising conclusions. Sonny Vu, the founder of Agamatrix gave a spellbound presentation of the growth of his Diabetes product from his college dorm room to a multimillion dollar sale.

David Shrier of Ernst & Young surprised the audience with the revelation that his company had consulted for Google from the time they were just "5 people in a garage" and were similarly interested in dealing such early stage companies today.

A significant number of dotcom entrepreneurs made the trip from New York's Silicon Alley to attend the conference - including such execs and the confounder of About.com that went public at $1.5 million in just 3 years.

As one investor and MD, Brad Weinberg said: "Great event. Engaging people and intimate enough to really meet people."

For more articles on mHealthcon visit:

Med City News "Keynote: Stakeholder's Concerns"
NJ Biz NJ Tech Weekly "Medical Entrepreneurs Gather"

MedicalCrunch "Just the Apps"

Selected Presenter's Slides

To see the full video

2012 Registration

www.mHealthcon.com

Headless Body Seeks Topless Rule - OWS Town Hall Meeting

2011-11-09T16:27:00.000-08:00

What Happened at the OWS Town Hall Meeting?
Social Media Insiders Explain the Real Significance of Open Source Thinking and Self-Managed Groups

Headless Body Seeks Topless Rule

If it weren’t for the fight that broke out in the second hour of this Town Hall Meeting it would have been merely interesting. Social Media has gone from a dating, teen popularity management and marketing phenomenon to a revolutionary movement thanks to Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring, Spanish indignados and so on.

When a Wall Streeter at the meeting objected to being photographed after making an impassioned statement about how hard he worked and how much he deserved the American Dream, the clash of cultures became apparent.

Any netizen would accept being photographed in a public setting as simple transparency but his group saw it as a violation of privacy. Social Media, when applied to organizations that only know top-down management of the opaque kind is an existential threat. Keeping out of the news is a big deal. Showing your face is asking for trouble.

That generational divide is evident at many levels. Even the founder of Social Media and our lead speaker, Andrew Weinreich, who created the prototypical social media site, sixdgrees.com back in the 90’s, had doubts about the power of this movement because the numbers, he noted, are still small. Only a few thousand show up at Zucotti Park vs. millions in the Arab World, Spain or for that matter, Israel. Even the money it has raised, is a mere $500,000. Obama will raise $1 billion for his next campaign.

He would not be alone - industry types often underestimate its power because they saw this as a consumer business and not a battleground for the politically disenchanted who would be so inspired as to put themselves in harm’s way. Nevertheless, most of the public seems to get the potential. They are well aware that just one police strike generated 953 Occupy movements in 84 countries within days.

Headless Group Seeks a Topless Government.

The recurring complaint is that Occupy Wall Street has too many messages. Perhaps. Yet anytime they focus on one, it can be devastating. The numbers on the ground may small but the numbers at home or on their smartphones are immense. Americans may like to do their protesting from their couches but as long as a symbolic number are willing to take to the streets, the power of Social Media seems to hold.

What we are really witnessing is the battle testing of open source thinking vs. the old hierarchies. Like the civil war, where the bullets were more powerful than the military strategies of the day, there may be large and unexpected casualties. This may be more powerful than its creators imagined and harder for people in power to resolve than they know.

Thanks to our meeting, we have generated a few ideas - but they won’t be easy.

Legless and Headless

The courts may be the next testing ground. Yetta Kurland, is a legal activist and TV host who helps represent a Law society observer at an OWS protest who was run down by a police motorcycle. The police use these vehicles to control crowds and in the past, if an innocent person got in the way that was just too bad. They will arrest them, make up a story and bring them before the courts which would generally assume that the police are telling the truth. In this case there are widely distributed videos showing that the police mowed down this innocent observer, trapped him under the wheels of the vehicle and then beat and cuffed him as he writhed in pain. He now has to defend himself in court against some type of obstruction of justice charge. This charade continues even though the video is common knowledge thanks to YouTube and numerous cable TV news shows. One would imagine that the charges will be dropped but the issue will probably wind up costing the city dearly when it goes to Civil Court. The biggest cost to the NYPD, however, will be their credibility. Somewhere, heads will roll and a new management will have to rethink their practices in a world where everyone is watching.

Media Reorganization

Greg Galant, the founder of the Shorty Awards, arguably the “Oscars of the Twitterverse” talked about its impact on media. Journalists are now using Social Media tools like Storify, Klout and Hootsuite to keep tabs on the movement. Equally significant is the reshuffling of the media ecosystem – the blogosphere is generating stories that feeds the mainstream coverage while doing its own coverage of the traditional media’s reporting. Now that Google+ is adding journalists’ bios to the net, there is a channel for readers to communicate with them, thereby making the conversation interactive in all media. Besides, as Kurland pointed out, the mayors and police chiefs are using Social Media to discuss the issues among themselves too - Social Media’s influence has become inescapable.

What Color is Your Social Media Parachute?

John Havens, the author “Tactical Transparency” cites Facebook’s 900 million users and $21Bn in ad sales as the transformational issue in the business world. If CEOs haven’t already been alerted by those numbers, then the Occupy movement is surely their ultimate wake up call – and the Social Media industry’s single greatest advertisement. Companies need a crisis protocol for Social Media. More importantly, CMO’s must know that the brand doesn’t entirely belong to them although they bear ultimate responsibility for it. Jet Blue still seems to be the poster child for this type of approach, with CEO David Neeleman responding to customer issues with a heartfelt and slightly ruffled apology on YouTube. Admission of responsibility and promises to change seem to be the mantra. To keep the promise, JetBlue now has a team of people with the power to respond to Twitter complaints on the spot. The last storm showed that the problem could sill recur, yet so far the response has been relatively tepid.

Damn You – I’m Good

Stuart Tracte, who runs his own geek talk show “Beer Diplomacy” notes that Apple has no Social Media effort to speak of. Steve Jobs put out occasional text statements when he hurt his faithful and almost none of their products are actually made in the US. He just makes a “damned good product and you want it.” From Stuart’s perspective, OWS is not a Social Media movement as much as a human movement: people don’t want business in their government. They want to end that unless, of course, that business is as good as Apple’s.

Topple the Banks

Co-host, TJ Walker of Worldwide Media Training noted that the movement lacked the kind of single message that animated the anti-Vietnam War and Civil Rights movements. He announced his own eBook “Bust up the Big Banks” as an antidote to this, since the banks in his opinion, are the real issue. Then again, as he noted, thanks to Social Media he is now competing with 40 books on the topic of Occupy Wall Street.

Too Promotional to Fail

So where’s this all going? The city believes that winter will put OWS out of business but I doubt that. What better advertisement for a hip new camping company than supplying them with thermal tents and sleeping bags? Ski clothing is so good these days that freezing temperatures are just a fun fact. The movement only needs a few hundred people to keep their foothold – any number of interchangeable volunteers who can do this in shifts seem to be endlessly available thanks to the 10% unemployment figures.

Going Public About Being Public

Generally, the powerful will try to co-opt the groups they can’t crush. But OWS is a leaderless group. There are key influencers but they could be anywhere and if co-opted they could be replaced at any time by another influencer. Over time, it is quite possible that the group will dig in. If they raise enough money, they can buy the protest property they want or, in the ultimate irony of ironies – they could go public. They generate income, so why not sell stock? In theory, they could wind up acquiring the companies they oppose – the first publicly traded anti-Wall street company on a hostile takeover frenzy. When you consider that the NASDAQ OTC has not one but two technically illegal medical marijuana companies, MJNA and CANA, the idea is not so far-fetched.

Headless vs Bodyless: The End of Two Party Democracies

The real issue is this clash of civilizations: what happens when an amorphous, open source group organizes synchronously and multinationally against the World Order? Anyone who has grown up with Wikipedia knows that it works. Anyone who grew up with a set of Encyclopedia Britannicas still can’t accept that it’s for real. Democracies are really based a binary system – its either Democrats or Republicans, Labor or Management with a revocable dictatorship granted to the majority. Over time, the power concentrates near the top where it is open to manipulation by the highest bidder. That might have been fine when there were majorities but today we are more diverse and the ruling party is really the one with the best plurality of constituents of which most are not really served.

As Ross Perot and Jack Nader proved, we can’t handle a third or fourth or fifth party but in an open source environment, you can sustain a plurality of voices without affecting the core functioning of the system. Most governments, when not unduly influenced by special interests, can function quite well in a transparent, self-organizing, user-operated fashion. That would lower costs and doom a lot of bureaucratic guilds whose first priority are self-protection and poliferation.

On the other hand, leaders can try to learn from Apple: become a cool cult while providing incredibly good and inventive programs.

The public may stand to benefit either way.

Warning: to be a cult you must have somehow died and come back to life. On the other hand, if you are incredibly good and inventive in politics, your opponents will help you with the former.

See article in NY Convergence

Video Highlights to come

What the "Occupy Wall Street" Town Hall is All About

2011-11-03T12:08:00.000-07:00

NOTE: This event is being streamed, starting at 6pm EST on Nov. 3

How did a web medium that was designed to help lonely people find dates or teenagers improve their social lives become what may be the most powerful medium of organized public resistance we have ever experienced?

To paraphrase Hemingway our a social writer in his own right – it happened to ways: gradually and then suddenly.

It probably incubated in Iran where Twitter feeds gave the world a blow-by-blow report of an oppress people trying to shake off a vicious regime.

Then it swept the Arab world with the speed and force of a desert storm. Out of nowhere – this time organized and chronicled though Facebook – it took down one dictatorship after another. This is a revolution that no amount of diplomacy, editorializing, letter writing or armed resistance has been unable to do in decades.

Then Europe – especially Spain – experienced the organization of los indignantes – angry young people who organized tent cities in dozens of cities in Spain.

We watched and thought – that’s over there. Never happen here…..

In Spain, the organizers wrote a manifesto that seemed to make perfect sense to anyone with a smartphone, a Facebook page, a twitter and blog account and no job prospects, that they could join a cause – a flash mob that grew virally and actually had a purpose.

And then it came here.

In our rational, issue driven world the idea of Occupying Wall Street seem quaintly absurd. Laughable. It looked like it was going nowhere. As Ben Stein famously said, how can banging a drum change Wall Street? When millions of people do it together, they can. Anyone remember the story of Jericho?

It only took one police lieutenant to get videoed pepper spraying 4 helpless women. The Video went viral on Youtube and within days, 953 Occupy sites had sprung up in 84 countries.

If you run a control and command, authoritarian system – then this has to be your worst nightmare. The people can bite back.

So what does this mean to business, government and the administration of society?

Can you still tell people what do to do? When everyone has a cell pone videocam and a YouTube account you no longer own the narrative – that has he legal consequences, as we will see.

When citizens can reach millions directly with their stories, the news media is no longer the information gatekeeper.

What about business, does the Fed and Wall Street still control the value of currency when we know that troubled cities in Greece have created their own barter systems using open source software.

What about crowdfunding – so far the SEC opposes it and leave financing to the good people on Wall Street. If enough people band their drums, Congress will have to pass laws enabling it.

Should the government own policing? Or will whistleblower laws and public surveillance change that. In South Korea citizens make a living by using their video cams to act as bounty hunters against crime and corruption everywhere. Their whistleblower laws already make that possible – the social technology makes that a certainly.

What about the political process? We live in a binary system – its either Republicans or Democrats. Labor vs. management but the world is no longer binary. We no longer have simple majorities – demographically the US is now a country of pluralities. Most jobs come from small, independent businesses not from mega-corporations and the Spanish manifesto makes it clear that unions are not welcome.

Crowd politics – well organized - may in fact be the future of our politics and the only way we can truly accommodate diversity. Maybe what looks unfocused to us is really the fuzzy, fractal logic of the new politics. We have already seen a microfinanced president.

Why not a politician who wins because he amasses more Facebook likes than anyone else or parties that are formed and reformed around issues that people care about and not about party lines.

Can bureaucracy exist when the Internet has shown it can eliminate inefficiency and the middlemen? Why is medicine run by insurance aggregators and medical unions or even education, which has only resulted in higher costs no matte how good or bad the marketplace.

What we will learn tonight is that we are witnessing the birth of a parallel system of government, decisionmaking and administration. All empowered by the Internet, mobile and social media. It looks messy and ridiculous to outsiders – as do all births – but it is the future and societies will never work quite the same way again.

Finally the Digital Media Industry has been put on the front page and it is already producing new products, ideas and opportunities.

So let’s discover what and how….

The 3rd Dimension in Pitching

2011-10-19T07:16:00.000-07:00

iEvening’s Power Pitch session took on a new twist when we invited noted pitch consultant, Laura Allen to join our workshop. This gave entrepreneurs a chance to test their pitches, have the group break them down and let Laura help them build it back up again according to her proven 15 second pitch formula.

They key to pitches is that you really have understand everything about you and your plan and then ruthlessly cut it down to the absolute essentials. They also have to be the ones that matter to the appropriate investors. Most important – you have to establish your credibility as the person to deliver and execute the plan. You also need to know how to read an investor so as to calibrate your pitch and then give them the right call to action.

SWING IT – DON’T WING IT

In the real world, this is harder than mastering a golf swing. Sure, some people just get it but everyone else has to really work at it. That’s why we have a standing room only workshop!

What takes the Power Pitch workshop to another level and delivers a steady stream of rave reviews is unique is that we take you to the next level and introduce you to the really big picture: how do investors actually perceive a pitch? We call this the symbolic dimension and it is distilled form our experience of listening to investors after thousands of entrepreneurs “have left the room. “

What investors come up with is not necessarily what you think. This is especially true in the Start-Up world where business ideas change so much that it really is more about who you are rather than what you pitch. Or as they say, it’s the jockey not the horse they’re betting on. So investors have ways of figuring out who you really are that having nothing to do with the text of your pitch. That is why I have seen a barefoot engineer in his 20’s from Palo Alto get funding while a savvy exec in a suit got a pass. One look credible for his space while the other didn’t.

The symbolic dimension is simply the way in which investors scan you for the information that matters to them. And they all have their little rules of thumb. If you figure that out you will get funding, or supporters, followers and everything else you need to succeed.

In other words, investors see your pitch as a coded enactment of their future business relationship with you. How you present yourself, whether you ramble, whether you are too sure and so on, tells them the following:

1. Are you coachable?

(Ever wonder why some really bad pitches get funded. Ever wonder why Apple’s management actually fired Steve Jobs? Being a great entrepreneur can mean less than their ability to take guidance.)

2. Are you specially qualified to do this?

You don’t have to be the expert – in fact, that can work against you because then you wouldn’t be coachable. The issue is whether you have the ability to execute - so your track record in any related way, really matters.

3. Will your respond to the marketplace? Every idea is great until the market gets to see. Mostly they ignore it or hate it and so you have to adjust or “pivot” – but in a way that doesn’t lose the essence of the idea. Most entrepreneurs believe they are right and the market is wrong. Investors generally avoid those kinds of entrepreneurs.

4. Will you be on budget? Fiscal discipline, without going overboard is a big plus. So, for example don’t invite the investor to a fancy restaurant – share a sandwich. If you own a BMW don’t drive it to your meetings unless you want them to think you don’t need the money. Talk big but act frugal.

5. Can you survive the inevitable draught? All stat-ups will face times of low cash and no sales. It’s the ones who can overcome that who matter. Most investors can sniff out a survivor but what they really want is a winner. Someone who can turn adversity into a plus. Find an example in your past that illustrates this.

6. If there is a known objection to your plan – start with your response to it. For example – you are a me-too company in a crowded space. You have a big liability risk. The market is not growing. Investors will find this weakness in a heartbeat but if you confront it by describing your solution – you can win them over.

THE PITCHERS & THE VCs

As if on cue, on of the iEvening’s Investors, David Beatty of Goldenseeds took measure of how long the speakers went over their 4 minute limit and predicted how much they would go over budget. Yet very presenters adjusted to their pitches in response to that.

There was number of medically related pitches since this is a growing marketplace. This is a perfect storm: an aging nation that lives longer with meds meets digital solutions and a relaxed approach by the FDA.

The iEvening’s winner was AgSquared – an arguably unlikely winner since New York investors are not known for their interest in farming. But in this case, by tapping into the locavore and health consciousness movement and adding the Pitch Panel insight about mentioning mobile data collection and delivery - the idea of providing big time farm ERM software as a freemium sevice for small farmers struck a chord.

The crowd choice was Gift Side Story, a site that helps people, particularly men, buy gifts for their loved ones with a kind of online concierge.

The other presenters were:

Brouha which provides an RFID-based customer tracking system for retailers.

Ross Medical offers a low cost alternate ER patient management system for low-risk chest pain patients

Medsonics US, Inc. is handheld dvice that scan scan for stress fractures

RF Telematics is a HIPA compliant secure wireless network for Medical data transmission

Eco-Auger is a high efficiency, low impact, water motion power generator.

Additional pitches on the program were:

Lessonwriter – an online service lesson capture and development for teachers.

BP Wiz (Book Publishing Wiz) an online gateway for book proposals to publishers.

The Athlete’s Network: a system that brings high school athletes to the attention of college coaches.

FreezeCrowd, Inc: a college social network that interactivelyconnects people through group photos with their friends

Additional story in NY Convergence

Read our thinkpiece on "'Occupy Wall Street' as the Tea Party for Social Media"

Dec. 1 - Mobile Health Conference

2011-10-18T11:52:00.000-07:00

Dec. 1: The First Health Conference on Mobile Apps
Attend the first conference on the convergence of Digital Media and Healthcare - a demographic perfect storm - on Dec 1.

The Mobile Health field is exploding! By 2015 mHealth will become a $23 billion market with over 500 million doctors, patients and users of apps to help diagnose disease, manage healthcare, fitness and exercise.

That's why you can't afford to miss this important one-day conference hosted by New Jersey's Rutgers University in the heart of "pharma alley" dedicated to the hottest innovations in mobile healthcare today. Hear from top innovators and mHealth gurus as you network with opinion leaders and the investors entering with hundreds of millions in new investments. Visit mHealthcon for more details.

Slated Speakers include:

Al Shar, CIO, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
Tom Wheeler, Chair, mHealth Alliance Partnership
Mayor Cory Booker of Newark
Jayant Parthasarathy, SVP, Mobile United Healthcare Group
Ryan Sysko, CEO, WellDoc
Richard Glassberg, COO, MedHelp
Dr. Edward Zuckerberg - "The Father of Facebook"
Serge Loncar, CEO, Carespeak and many more!

Sign up today at the early bird price of only $125 and get:
2 Keynotes! * 4 Workshops! * Network with 200+ startups, investors, pharma execs and stakeholders.
Meet the innovators breaking new groundCheck out more than 20 exhibits and demos of the mhealth apps gaining traction.
Hear from the investors ready to fund.

What "Occupy Wall Street" does for Social Media

2011-10-15T15:50:00.000-07:00

Occupy Wall Street Turns 1984 Upside Down - Thanks to Social Media

We always knew that Social Media was the enabler of the "Occupy Wall Street" movement - that's what got the word out in the first place. We just didn't know what direction it would take: what could possibly be the Wall Street version of the Arab Spring?

The answer may involve a tectonic shift in government.

When the first punch was thrown by police white shirts - management - you knew whose bull was really being gored. It wasn't Wall Street that was threatened as much as the administrators traditional power relationships. That's why the police brass instinctively brought out the pepper sprays and clubs then made the rank and file follow suit.

On their own, the regular cops spent little time worrying about the protestors. Most of the time they did what protestors did - stand around checking their iPhones and 'Droids.

Police management may have been taking heat from Wall Street execs just a few blocks from 1 Police Plaza - but this is more that territorial. It could be the first time hierarchical order has had to confront social media managed organized chaos - and they instinctively hate it.

Social Media has turned the traditional patrol relationship upside down. It is now the world watching the cops and not the other way round. It is enough to make George Orwell rise up and wonder!

You'd think Police Management would have known that the first act of violence would go international. Yet they clearly didn't understand the force they were confronting or they would have been better off house all those protesters at the downtown Marriott. No overtime, no brutality no worldwide public sympathy.

Wall Street is good for 25% of the State's economy and it likes to hire ex-offers for their own extensive security needs. But once the NYPD leadership lashed out they turned what looked like a joke into an International Phenomenon. Now they have attracted a level of attention to Wall Street and government that will change how they operate forever. It will cost them more than money - it will cost them their way of life.

We still haven't taken stock of the fact that government used our money to save the banks and yet, did almost nothing to save the public with mortgage relief. Now the banks are foreclosing those houses and you can probably forget about getting loan. I recently served on federal jury duty where a small time mortgage hustler was indicted by the FBI for a few thousand dollars while the bank that made millions by enabling him - got to testify against him. And boy, were they outraged.

When the crowd is the watchdog and they are empowered that kind of think is not likely to happen - at least not without a fight. This is the battle that has been waiting to happen.

Like Hemingway said, things change gradually and then suddenly.

Crowds have already been taking control in gradual ways. Ask Microsoft what they think about open source - as they lose market everywhere. Ask McCain or Hilary Clinton what they think about the people who microfinanced Obama's election. They haven't exactly gone away.

3 years later, mobile has accelerated the social media that bought "change" and now everyone with a smartphone is probably using it. "Occupy Wall Street" and the opposition it engendered only seems to amplify it's reach. It is already teaching people how to take charge of the political system in entirely new ways.

In countries like Greece, with severly troubled economies people are already taking control of their banks and their currency. In South Korea, they are even taking on some of the police enforcement burden.

How long before we vote by cellphone? Or "buy" politicians with Facebook Likes. Policing is already subject to who has the cell phone video. Almost everyone has one and now they are posting them on on the web taking the presumed authority away from those in charge. Political and business watchdogs are popping up in South Korea which now relies on citizens with cameras and videos for a large part of its prosecutions of corrupt businessmen and politicians.

As Wall Street loses it ability to generate jobs we might wind up doing what the Greeks are did, start using barter with homegrown markets and local currency. With mobile internet and open source software, the tools are available for the taking, free of charge. When governments print worthless money or taxes become unsustainable, smart communication may be a better way to store value. Many Africans now put more value in their cell phone minutes than their local currencies. Ask any Zimbabwean with a $100 billion note.

The triumph for the "Occupy Wall Street" movement is simply to stay on long enough - as they attract eyeballs all of the above cascades down naturally. It was just waiting to happen. Control has begun to shift to the aggregators of social media-connected communities - essentially, the new political parties.

It just needed a nudge, the NYPD brass gave it and the media fanned it. For this, they should probably be thanked.

Video & Text of Esther Dyson's Comments at "Master of Your Domain" gTLD Conference

2011-08-08T09:11:00.000-07:00

Esther Dyson in discussion with moderator, Paul Farkas.

Did she she help or hurt the new gTLD Program?

Esther Dyson Stands Her Ground at New Domain Conference

2011-08-05T09:21:00.000-07:00

The iBreakfast NY and Smart TLDs hosted the first conference on ICANN’s gTLD program since it's passing at ICANN Singapore a month prior. New gTLDs will enable brands, orgs and trade groups to escape the dot and own a TLD in their own name.

While most of the speakers, following ICANN SVP Kurt Pritz's keynote were enthusiastic supporters of the program, Esther Dyson, a former Chair of ICANN, livestreamed her objections from a remote location. Noting that she couldn’t see much value in new gTLD’s and that ICANN's near $200,000 price was too much, she went on to make the point, “I wouldn’t want to be a cheesemaker if Kraft owned .cheese."

Paradoxically, Dyson’s neo-traditionalist objections seemed to heighten the value proposition for key players and conference attendees. While Dyson's point is that cocacola.com is just fine at the cost of a few dollars versus .cocacola at $185K which appears to offer nothing more. Unless, that is you see value in the very exclusivity and prospect of category ownership – which has made it seem so enticing for Fortune 1000 companies. [Dyson's audio transcript below]

As former Kodak CMO, Jeffrey Hayzlett made clear, brands would be foolish if they don’t get on board now. How would you look if your competitor has say, .pepsi and you soft dring company hasn’t even applied yet, he asked. This would be even worse if you were locked out of this application window and the next one is delayed for years.

The technical providers Verisign, Afilias and Neustar, as well as speakers from DotBrand Solutions, Aus Registry and Donuts, Inc., gave insight as to what the application process entails and why you need a partner to manage your TLDs once approved. The application is highly managed with about 80,000 words of explanation and procedural steps. Barry Werbin, a partner at host, Herrick, Feinstein LLP, showed a flowchart of the application process thatt was clearly daunting. This is not a path to be taken alone and will probably warrant legal help all along.

Importantly, there is a limited window for the gTLDS – applications begin in January, 2012, and if granted, they will require a major financial and technological investment to maintain.

ICANN's SVP of Stakeholder Relations, Kurt Pritz, outlined the process and made it clear that his organization has always looked for a transparent and non-combative process. The TLDs are meant to be given out judiciously, with trademark protections and without favoring individual groups over trade organizations and it offers an elaborate dispute resolution resource as well as an open auction process.

Despite the seeming lack of awareness and words of dissent, the early interest in gTLDs is potent – declarations of interest have already been raised for over 1,000 applications, indicating a possible market of close to $200 million at the starting gate.

Some of the more intriguing plans were DotGreen which would organize and essentially brand enviro-friendly companies. Likwise .gay would create a lifestyle brand and .Asia, already an established regional TLD, welcomes the changes in the web with new gTLDs, cityTLDs, as well as IDNs, to better organize and enable pan-asian expression.

The undisputed aspect of the gTLDs is that ability for non -oman character users – the so-called next billion online users – to reach sites without using the .com by way of Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs).

The Master of Your Domain conference was produced by iBreakfast and Smart TLDs, and moderated by Paul Farkas, Esq., of Smart TLDs. It was sponsored by Afilias, Neustar, Verisign, Dot Green, Definition 6, and Herrick, Feinstein LLP.

Audio Transcript of Dyson Session

How to Destroy a Company in 30 Clicks

2011-08-05T08:40:00.000-07:00

This is a death plan for vindictive people going after shady companies. A case study you won’t find at Harvard and whose names and precise mechanisms have been shaded for obvious reasons. The story however, is quite devastating - an amazing intersection of SEO and crisis PR.

First, for those of you who are not quite sure what I do when I am not arranging iBreakfasts and iEvenings or helping start-ups to shape their plans and raise money – I am a marketing consultant. Back in the day, I wrote the first marketing column about Apple for MacWEEK (my mantra was: forget corporate, go creative as in “ad industry”) as well as ADWEEK and Advertising Age’s various publications.

While I advise many companies and execs on digital marketing, the assignments are often influenced by the topics of the iBreakfast. If we do mobile, I’ll get calls about mobile. When we do Social TV and I’ll be involved in media. So when Google’s new search algorithm became an iBreakfast topic, I got called about a ranking issue which was really, crisis PR expressed online.

A client was referred to me because a disgruntled webmaster had targeted his former employer for revenge and had more less put them on the road to destruction. By the time they contacted me, he had already forced them to change their name and reincorporate. But rather than evading him, he just went after their new company. His technique was so simple that it was laughable - but it also put the power of Google behind him. This wouldn’t work on Coca-Cola but for a small company or any company with credibility issues: bingo.

The company is in Multi-Level Marketing – not my favorite area – and they sell a product that protects you, let’s say, from environmental problems. We’ll call them ENVIRO-Y. There really is no way you can prove or disprove ENVIRO-Y’s efficacy. The problems they claim to solve are looming and obvious. Their supporting studies sound good but their sources are second rate if not dubious. So the entire sell depends on the credibility of their reps as well as the overall appearance of the company.

When they fired their webmaster with what looks like unreasonable prejudice, he decided to get even. Yes, ENVIRO-Y had reason to fire him but the cause (taking jobs on the side) seemed a little out of touch and in any case should have at least been done with a cordial but solid exit package.

So the ex-webmaster set up a vile website that slandered every aspect of the company, its founders and its operations. It used four letter words. It was an affront to any website anywhere. It literally stunk up the Internet with toilet language. It was anonymous.

However, it also came up first in search rankings relating to the ENVIRO-Y.

For about 6 months, ENVIRO-Y did nothing, thinking that the vileness of the site would be self-evident and be dismissed. But new clients whose credibility must be won, were easily spooked.

So ENVIRO-Y tried to flood the web with multiple relevant metatags and page variants drawn from their own website. Even then, savvy new customers were probably a little spooked when they saw repetitive websites pop in the search. Still, it seemed to work OK until the Farmer and Panda updates came along penalizing websites with “fake” or low quality pages. That also made the el stinko site rise to the top again. Genuine content!

In the meantime, the crisis sparked a fight between the founders who then split up and the company was reformed under a new name.

The ex-webmaster just incorporated ENVIRO-Y’s new name into his website and its tags and he went about his business I would imagine, with a laugh.

Now this is where it gets interesting because you are probably wondering why they didn’t try to shut him down via ICANN or his host or whatever.

The answer is that he didn’t rely on any of those institutions. He had used Google’s blogsite to set up the attack site and Google is a very firm believer in the First Amendment. They will only take down that site when presented with a libel judgment from the court in Santa Clara. Lawyers will know more about this than I, but I am guessing this takes time – even though this webmaster is highly unlikely to show up at the courthouse. Then again, he might show up with something on ENVIRO-Y that they really don’t want to air in court. Either way, he had Google on his side and they were in effect, paying for his attack site.

So ENVIRO-Y flooded the web with more sites – this time using their sales consultants to do the work but now they ran into three other issues.

1. Social Media sites like Yahoo Answers had already begun fielding questions about the company and the attack on them. These are essentially unerasable and rank high in searches. The company, lacking a PR strategy and hoping to drown out the bad site never bothered to respond – leaving he questions hanging and in some case answered by people with their own agendas.

2. The well-meaning consultants trying to help ENVIRO-Y were, shall we say, less than subtle and so they created sites along the lines of “what lying, no-good company are they talking about – not us? Look how much money we’re making. Look what nice people we are. We can’t be bad. We’re not liar.” This seems to be right out of Richard Nixon’s playbook and worked just as badly. However, since they didn’t get the lesson, I’ll repeat it: in corporate PR you rarely fight fire with fire. If customers want to see a fight they’ll buy tickets to an ice hockey game. The IFC. Or they’ll just watch, but they won’t be customers.

3. Google steps in again with their “Suggested Search” feature. Anytime you pop ENVIRO-Y into a search panel, the negative searches are suggested to you! And people look. How can they not? It looks more interesting than the company itself! So, once again they drive up the attack site’s ranking. To make matters worse, other companies that sell lead generation and other services to MultiLevel Marketers use these key words to boost their rankings and thereby reinforce the attack site’s rankings.

You are hearing this story because the story shows how delicate your image on the web can be. Obviously, if ENVIRO-Y were squeaky clean they would use this opportunity to take this whole issue head on - risky as that can be. I say that not only because they probably don’t have any honest answers, but even if they did - every new customer would feel obliged to cross-examine their consultants whenever they asked for business. That’s not fun. Net result - the company is seeing its salespeople run out on them and are facing a corporate tailspin from which they can't recover.

The moral of this story is be good and clean. If you can’t be – and here’s a shout out to Seth Godin – be careful how you treat your linchpins which, I might add, is a much more precarious job position than Seth would have you believe. Management has a much more conflicted view of linchpins in their midst and tend to resent their power. What usually happens is the Type A execs feel the need to throw their weight around from time to time, forgetting that disgruntled linchpins sure know how to make things fall apart when they’re not around.

As for consultants like myself who are hired to mop things up - the solution here is simple: hire us early, pay us well and listen up!

As for the 30 clicks - that's about how many keystrokes it takes to set up a Blogger account and start your own attack site.

PODCAST OF SOCIAL TV - SESSION 3: Software

2011-07-12T10:32:00.000-07:00

Listen Here

What happened at TV GOES SOCIAL

2011-06-24T10:56:00.000-07:00

Dear Executive,

Thank you for joining us yesterday at TV GOES SOCIAL.

We think you’ll agree that our speakers packed a lot of eye-opening ideas into a compact day.

You can watch and share the Conference from our channel on Ustream.

Part 1 Hardware & Software Panels

Part 2 Facebook & USA/ABC Keynote Panel

[We will also be posting highlights and a full report shortly to improve the conversation-sharing.]

Some of the key ideas that emerged were:

* The importance of recommendations (Facebook’s Andy Mitchell and “TV With Friends”)
* Brand Ambassadors (USA Networks, Jesse Redniss),
* Taking the content to the expanding array of platforms (ABC News’ Isaac Josephson)
* Incorporating Wi-Fi and Apps like Facebook into the TV box and opening up the API (Samsung’s Eric Anderson)
* Social Media check-ins and TV Community building options (Get Glue, Social Guide, theChanner, PHILO, TunerFish)
* Ad synchronization models and campaigns from SecondScreen TV and Social Bomb
* Mass video interaction from Watchitoo
* Explosion of Pads as the key second screen device and the harmonization of lean-forward, lean-back experiences.

Other interesting but lightly covered topics were education, telepresence and the exploding Social TV Start-Up ecosystem now welcomed – rather than resisted – by key broadcast and cable networks as well as Social Media platforms like Facebook.

This was a well tweeted and commented event that you can follow on Twitter at #TVGOESSOCIAL and #SOCIALTV

We think this is step one in giant Media Convergence industry that will profoundly affect the communications method, content, style and influence dynamics in advertising, marketing, politics and learning. We are honored to be part of the beginning of this movement and will be back later this year with larger conferences in NY and L.A. We will also introduce investor-oriented meetings on a regular basis to support the Entrepreneurial ecosystem as part of our iBreakfast/iEvening monthly meetings.

Thank you for joining us and stay tuned – and connected.

Best,

Alan Brody & the TV GOES SOCIAL Team

June 23: TV GOES SOCIAL at CE Week

2011-06-15T06:02:00.000-07:00

Event Registration Online for June 23: TV Goes Social

iBreakfast/iEvening in NJ - A New Yorker's View

2011-05-24T10:36:00.000-07:00

Cory Rises to a Packed House and iSpeech Silences - with Awe!

By Alan Brody

Mayor Cory Booker - the media-centric next-generation mayor of urban regeneration -wowed a sold-out crowd with his story of reaching for more. As a former college basketball player and coach he told a story of getting his team members to reach out some more. When he offered an incentive, his team reached for even more. But when a short kid whispered that he deserved the prize, Booker laughed until the kid took him up on the roof.

That’s reaching - and thinking out of the box. The kid won!

This gala event - the first in a series that opens the iBreakfast and iEvening in its decade-long mission to find the next great business and match it to a long list of worthy investors - was the perfect example of where we are. Innovation abounds everywhere and big-league investors want to reach them. These companies have local attributes and they could use the publicity and sometimes, the help. Best of all, the iBreakfast is looking to partner with local influencers like Sperlingreene and the results are spectacular.

This event with John Ason, Angel Investor (diapers.com); Stephen Brotman of GSA Venture Partners; Mike Segal of Joshua Capital, and Chris Fralic of First Round Capital found its star: iSpeech, a profitable provider of cloud-based speech technology and mobile apps will come to a NY iEvening and received an invitation to present at the prestigious Private Equity Forum in New York, to be held in June at New York’s Yale Club. We predict a VC feeding frenzy.

The other companies painted a useful picture of entrepreneurship. For obvious reasons, New Jersey has a lot of bio, manufacturing, med and pharma start-ups. But they haven’t been plugged into the kind of digital growth seen in NY and Silicon Valley. Both have something to learn. Investors need more patience and start-ups need to focus on high growth, scalabilty, ramp rates, avoiding government gatekeepers and not loving their science in front of investors. What is known in the research world as “molecule fondling.”

One presenter waxed poetic about aneurisms and morbidity rates while the panel considered either throwing up or checking in at the hospital the next day, just in case. Another spoke about helping the digital conversation of medical records with great conviction and an overdose of detail until at the very end she noted there was a mandatory set-aside of $40K per doctor in the process. Talk about burying a lead!

Best of all were the oldest start ups in our world - no one under 70! - who promoted their idea with umpteen Burma Shave-like signs and showed how their heat collector beat copper with a gangly display of copper pipe and sheeting. Their real story was their discovery of a high conduction plastic material. It could be huge. They just need the big city boost, a touch of youth and some of the 360 degree thinking we provide at our free, trademark “Power Pivot™ workshop. In short, they need the high interaction of an iBreakfast/iEvening.

iBreakfast NJ: Mayor Booker Soars & iSpeech's Star is Born

2011-05-24T10:06:00.000-07:00

iSpeech Wins Investor Competition at iEvening NJ Conference of 160 Local Startups and Entrepreneurs

Mayor Cory Booker Is Keynote Speaker at First iEvening New Jersey Conference Hosted By The Enterprise Development Center at NJIT

NEWARK, NJ, May 24, 2011 – A promising new venture based at the NJIT Enterprise Development Center in Newark was selected as the winner at iEvening New Jersey, an innovative new business event attended by more than 160 startup founders and entrepreneurs, and hosted by the New Jersey Institute of Technology, on Thursday, May 19th. The 4-hour conference included two workshops, networking, 14 exhibits and an investor pitching competition for start-up companies seeking investment capital.

Newark Mayor Cory Booker, delivered a keynote address on innovation and business development at the event, and NJ startups presented competitive speed pitching presentations to a panel of high-profile, early stage investors.

Said Judith Sheft, Associate Vice President of Technology Development at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, “The success of this event demonstrates the leading role NJIT plays in promoting innovation and entrepreneurial education in the New York metro area. Jerry Creighton, Executive Director of the Enterprise Development Center, continues to foster an environment in which startups can grow and succeed. We expect this will be the first of many events we host.”

The event was produced by iBreakfast New Jersey, a venture of NJ marketing firm, Sperlingreene PR and Marketing, in partnership with New York-based iBreakfast.

Attendees heard from a panel of early-stage investors about what they look for in companies in which they invest. The investor panel included: John Ason, Angel Investor, Stephen Brotman of GSA Venture Partners, Mike Segal of Joshua Capital, and Chris Fralic of First Round Capital. The winning firm, iSpeech, a profitable provider of cloud-based speech technology and mobile apps, received an invitation to present at the prestigious Private Equity Forum in New York, to be held in June at New York’s Yale Club.

Sponsors of the MiniConference included NJIT, human resource specialist Ambrose, and the law firm Plata Forbes Ferrer & Gutierrez. Event organizers plan ongoing events and meetings sponsored by NJIT, that cater to the New Jersey small business community, including the 86 startup companies based at The NJIT Enterprise Development Center.

Steven Greene, Partner of iBreakfastNJ said, “This first iBreakfast event in New Jersey demonstrates the powerful resources available this side of the Hudson, and points to the surging growth of business in the Garden State.” iBreakfast founder, Alan Brody agreed, “We are seeing an exciting new wave of tech and life science ventures emerging from the Garden State.”

About iBreakfast New Jersey (iBreakfastNJ)
iBreakfastNJ is an independent venture of Sperlingreene PR and Marketing in partnership with iBreakfast, the long-standing New York-based digital events organization led by Alan Brody. For additional information and dates of upcoming events, visit www.ibreakfastnj.com.

About NJIT Enterprise Development Center
The EDC at NJIT is home to nearly 86 high-tech and life-science companies. Located on the campus of the New Jersey Institute of Technology, EDC companies have access to NJIT facilities and can partner with researchers to help grow their business. EDC is in the heart of Newark’s University Heights Science Park and the Newark Innovation Zone. For additional information about the EDC visit: http://www.njit-edc.org/

About iSpeech
Founded in 2007, businesses, organizations and consumers worldwide choose iSpeech for its high quality, scalable and easy to use text-to-speech (TTS), automated speech recognition (ASR) and voice to text solutions. iSpeech's flagship and award winning mobile app, DriveSafe.ly™, has read over 400 million text messages and emails aloud in real-time to over 8 million people. iSpeech® is a privately held company headquartered in Newark, NJ, with offices in San Francisco and New York. For additional information about iSpeech, visit: http://www.ispeech.org/

About Sperlingreene
Sperlingreene PR and Marketing is a communications, public relations and events management firm headed by Karen Sperling and Steven Greene. For additional information about Sperlingreene, visit www.sperlingreene.com.

# # #

Karen Sperling
Chief Conversation Officer
Sperlingreene PR and Marketing Communications
Phone: 201-543-7421
Fax: 917-599-0427
www.sperlingreene.com
ksperling@sperlingreene.com
LinkedIn: http://tinyurl.com/LIKarenSperling
Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/ksperl131

LinkedIn gets no respect on Wall Street

2011-05-22T20:26:00.000-07:00

The Media loves them. The VCs have stars in their eyes and we like them too.

But Cramer says the LinkedIn IPO was pure manipulation - right out of the dotcom bubble playbook: the underwriters do great, the VCs do well too but the founders mostly get the downdraft.

Joe Nocera and Henry Blodgett say the founders got ripped off to the tune of $200 million - as if they sold their house for $1 million but in fact their broker resold it for $2 million.

What are we to think? The secondary will tell!

Can Politicians Help Entrepreneurs? My article in Gannett

2011-04-19T09:13:00.000-07:00

Here is an article I published in the Gannett papers. It is a formula - a policy proposal that changes the way Start-Ups grow in this economy. Based on current trends, the next election seems to be focusing on job-creation so this could become a really big topic!

"County Executive Rob Astorino did a great outreach to the voters of Westchester with his recent phone conference "town hall" meeting, yet he stumbled when he took questions about developing new business in Westchester. The best he could say was: "We need Pepsi . . . and 900 jobs."

He is not alone. As the head of a national start-up forum called the iBreakfast, which has helped thousands of start-ups meet investors, I can say with some authority that most politicians — in fact, most corporate executives — have no idea how to create new businesses. Corporations may know how to grow the businesses they already have; they certainly know how to negotiate better tax deals for locating their headquarters. But when it comes to creating new business, they usually buy someone else's start-up.

Yet start-ups are where the new jobs really come from. At the New Jersey Institute of Technology, which has more than 90 start-ups, each one generates an average of seven full-time jobs and four student jobs according to the director, Jerry Creighton. In this new economy, where factories tend to be in China, logistics are king and everyone is online, we have to think way beyond fostering the growth of sweetened-liquid companies. The question is how?

What we need is a new business ecosystem
Read the rest by clicking here: Brody on Innovation and Politicians in Gannett

iBreakfast Controversy - Can You Beat SEO?

2011-04-09T05:48:00.000-07:00

Report from "Google Changes the Rules" iBreakfast

It is not often that the staid world of Search Optimization erupts in controversy but it did at the last iBreakfast on Google's "Farmer" and "Panda" Updates. One of the speakers, Steve Arnold, claimed to override traditional SEO and boost the rankings or even silence offending sites by a method that sounded both intriguing but also like a storyline out of the "Wag the Dog."

This iBreakfast was designed to cover the key issues of Google's revamping of its ranking algorithm supposedly to reward quality providers and to ditch the questionable "content farms." These are the sites that fill the vast underbelly of the net with just enough text to attract high value Adsense ads or raising the rankings of a particular site

What we got was a challenge to go beyond the SEO model and think about creating a kind of transcendent awareness that enables sites to be seen via social media and mobile search.

While Google has framed the update in terms of refinements it is quite likely to be more profound than that. Silicon Alley Reporter noted that upwards of 12% of sites would see their rankings change. Some dramatically. The ever pugnacious Jason Calacanis found his Maholo website at the wrong end of the "update." This resulted in him drastically changing the business model from a kind of "Yahoo Answers" to "better" eHow. Good luck.

Google has grown on the backs of these content farmers since they boosted their ability to monetize high value keywords. After all, Google let everyone know what the high value keywords were and by encouraging the content farms they wound up with more inventory to sell.

When the New York Times ran its famous expose on the JC Penny that prompted Google's change - it seemed well, just a little too convenient. Perhaps there was more than meets the eye. While we can't say we saw the smoking we can suggest the bigger picture here - at least according to Arnold. Google would rather sell paid placements than let SEO's artificially boost the rankings of well-heeled but unworthy players. Not only that, but they are seeing real competition in Facebook which is becoming the home of more and more searches that are powered by Microsoft's Bing. The situation can be more drastic overseas while mobile too, is becoming more of a challenge since it is less and less web-oriented.

Matt Robson of Hachette talked about some of the key attributes of the Google upgrades that would qualify sites for a "Trust Ranking" - meaning it has been reviewed and tagged as a "quality" site for better rankings. The other side of this is being tagged with an "adversarial classification." The big issue facing traditional publishers online is their expense in creating deep original content is often challenged if not undermined, by the likes of Gawker or Mahalo which follows high value keywords and writes just enough fresh text to appear as a quality site before linking to the underlying video or story. They industry term for this is "Churnalism" and it is a behind-the-scenes battleground. At the end of the day though, Google values the user experience, rewards the originator and in his view they are moving to wards more techniques that harness forms of crowdsourcing to filter or improve their algorithm.

Hamlet Batistsa's Altruik is known for automating SEO techniques. In his view, the major area of concern for websites is that prior to the updates their rankings were based on individual pages. Today, the entire site is taken into account. That endangers sites which used lots of filler pages loaded with keywords. On the other hand Google gives higher rankings to sites that are updated frequently.

For those looking to improve rankings these are key lessons.

For those looking to step up the game, we will be taking a deeper look at Steve Arnold's end game around SEO with his "Content with Purpose" seminars.

Want to know more about "Content with Intent" Seminars?

Report: Entrepreneur iEvening

2011-04-09T03:19:00.000-07:00

VC Panel led by:

Stephen Brotman, GSA Venture Partners

Mike Segal, Joshua Capital

John Ason, Angel Investor

Frank Garland, Investor

Dorothy Price Hill, Mid-Market Capital

The Entrepreneurs: Fahim Mahir, Allan Pincus, Tanjila Islam, Farhan Memon, Steve Naidich, Richard Radoccia & Alan Brody - Photo by Seitu Oronde

Herrick, Feinstein, LLP hosted the now quarterly event for Start-Ups at their fine auditorium on 32nd & Park. All attendees are invited to the Entrepreneur workshop beforehand - this is unique forum variously titled: "The Pivot Workshop" the "Positioning Panel" or even just the "Start-Up Shop." The purpose is to get your peers to give you completely unbiased feedback on how your plan is perceived. It is the skill of the facilitator to help you understand the following: are you hiding your real idea (much more common than you'd think) are you seen as investible and what can you do about that? Most of all, since businessplans change, can you identify the "Soul of your idea?" When you have to reposition a plan for different kinds of investors - this is what you need to know. It is also a place where execs can throw their resume into the panel and see how entrepreneurs would reinvent them.

Some of the issues that came up were:

· How would you increase value for a world news digest (find high value readers such as investor or government analysts)?

· Math site for kids - will parents respond to claims of a superior algorithm, or do the kids need to be lured somehow?

· When it came to the pitching, the feedback we elicit from our panel of four judges is often worth its weight in gold - even at today's commodity prices. Not all the startups will get the gold but hearing from in the investors can totally change the life of their plans. Just listening in can help you go for the gold!

Steve Naidich & winner, Farhan Memon - Photo by Seitu Oronde

The Winner of the Start-Up evening gets a meeting with investors and a ticket to the high-value Private Equity Forum at the Yale Club in May. Last weeks winner was Farhan Memon of WikiOrgCharts - a site that combines the best features of LinkedIn and Jigsaw by using a core database and crowdsourcing to fill in all the organization linkages between government and corporate personnel. It's a great resource but I'd probably not want to see Al Qaida using it either!

The other Start-ups were:

TigerTrade presented by Tanjila Islam, who made an impressive presentation on a world trade site that offered to do what Ali Baba does - but for South East Asia which is now competing as a lower cost alternative to China. The challenge, for often foreign-averse investors, is convincing them of the value of this marketplace.

The Language Chef, polylinguist Robert Auidi's site is based on the theory that you only want to learn a foreign language so you can understand their menu. The judges didn't bite.

GigBlast Ed Johnson's site came with a room-rousing presentation and a warm recognition from the judges of the value professionals have in developing a career presence online. Making this a scalable business is another challenge though.

John Rogers, Alan Brody & Steven Greene - Photo by Seitu Oronde

ClipboardMD is one of those services of the future for the medical world - all your incoming data is entered through their notepad and patients lives are eased while doctors profoundly improve their ability to get reimbursed by the insurance companies. The issue is adoption and competition. Will doctors pay for this? (Clipboard already claims to have too many customers.) How do you avoid the 500-pound gorillas?

CarNova - this is a car buyer referral site that promises to offer better info for the buyer in order to attract a high price per lead from the dealer. Judges were interested but the money was sought for marketing: Adword arbitrage, linking, advertising and so on. Check my upcoming "Prayerbook for Entrepreneurs" for tip #26 VCs hate to invest in marketing.

eGenomics, Inc Steve Naidich made a great presentation on identifying the problem - locating the origin of nasty hospital bacterial breakouts. But, from an investors point of view it came undone for lacking a cure itself. While the identifying the source is worthwhile and hospitals might pay for it - the real money is in an eradication product. That would put a bug in VC ears!

ComfortMouse by Allan Pincus is a product that has identified a problem - people with serious hand issues who cannot use a regular mouse. The solution, however, is not exactly a sight for sore eyes. While it is true there is money in custom fit and medically prescribed solutions, investors hate products that require gatekeepers and reimbursement. But at $500 a pop people might prefer iPads and motion sensitive technologies. Perhaps 10 years ago, at the height of PC adoption. Now we're all mobile.

Joy Wai with investor, John Ason - Photo by Seitu Oronde

Sponsored by:

The Next iEvening
May 19 - iBreakfast/iEvening NJ presents Mayor Cory Booker
June 14 - visit www.ibreakfast.com

Publish Post

The New Incubators Report

2011-03-07T07:36:00.000-08:00

David Tisch, TechStars · Gabe Zichermann, Founder Institute ·

Brian Cohen, NY Angels · Moderated by Alan Brody

Sponsored by Herrick, Feinstein

Three styles of incubators were highlighted at The New Incubator iBreakfast last week - giving our audience of entrepreneurs and investors a view of options that may never have been available before.

Start Ups if You're Under 30
The buzz has been with TechStars, a new kind of incubator that, like Y-Combinator and others is part of the so-called "agile start-up" movement. Unlike the old days of betting on an expensive build-up based on the Entrepreneur's theory of what the market wants, here the idea is to build cheaply - even living at the incubator - while allowing the market to tell you what they want. At that point, the start-up pivots to where the market is.

A good example of this is ignighter.com - a TechStars start-up for group dating - that found its true market in Southeast Asia and India where group rather than one-on-one dating is the norm. Despite knowing almost nothing about India, the founders were now in the Indian dating software business.

With TechStars, a vast number of applicants are viewed before a handful are selected to receive $6,000 per principal up to a total of $18,000 for around 6% of equity and a few months to produce. They are given space, business and technical resources and then access to additional investors. The house typically has options on an additional 20% or so of equity. This tends to favor young, lean start-ups that can dedicate themselves, move fast and adapt. Their success rate has been quite compelling.

According to David Tisch, who runs New York's TechStars chapter, of a crop of 70 companies, 70% have received additional funding or been acquired by companies like AOL and IAC. (The program was originated by David Cohen, a serial entrepreneur in Colorado.)

Start-Ups if You're Over 30
The Founder Institute is almost the opposite of TechStars since it favors people that may already have a job, business or a career and are taking a part time approach to evolving their Start-Up. They may even be execs reinventing themselves by way of a their Start-Up. As New York manager, Gabe Zichermann says, the vast majority are "not out of college but are post business or retirement." After a sign-up fee, Founder Institute members, a group created by Adeo Adessi and now in over a dozen of cities and countries, give up about 3% of their equity and go through an entrepreneur's program that sharpens their plan and puts them on their road to seek funding and customers.

For All Ages: New York Angels
Brian Cohen is the Vice-Chairman of New York's venerable angel group that has made scores of investment over the years - over $60 million in over 40 deals. Their view is more traditional - good plans, good young management, straight angel deals. At one point, NY Angels, was involved in its own lean incubator, SparkSpace but exited it after a few years because they felt their operating model did not require it.

While the panel offered a cordial cross-view of start-ups, there was some controversy over the idea of a start-up as being the "new cool" - something akin to being a screenwriter in L.A. The work of Entrepreneurs, some of the panelists opined, is really quite mundane and that calling them "stars" is not such a great idea. "Success," said Cohen, "is the worst teacher."

After the presentations and discussion, we invited starts-ups of various levels to come up from the audience to make elevator pitches. This was instructive in a number of ways:

1. All starts-ups seem to need some type of interaction with peers, business experts and investors to find their new business path
2. People with experience often dwell on their past accomplishments rather than their business ideas
3. Investors can still find a good a good idea in an uncertain pitch

The pitches covered a lot of educational areas: financial, hiring etc. Investors are often leery of education but seem to give a second look to pitches that find a genuine pain point with actual dollars at stake. Likewise, businesses that reach kids are only of interest if parents with checkbooks are standing behind them....

New kinds of apps are always of interest. One testy moment occurred when a software entrepreneur asked the what value would be given to having patents. Due to the fast-changing nature of software tech, the group were not very enthusiastic about it. They appear to be valued in Biotech and medical and other devices where there is a long approval lag but when it comes to software the patent bloom seems to be off the rose.

The iBreakfast/iEvening will be return on April 5 with its famous Executive & Entrepreneur Workshop and Pitching Event.

Middle East Turmoil & Entrepreneurship: What I Learned from My Trip to Israel

2011-02-16T07:39:00.000-08:00

With the uprising in Egypt and the Middle East this analysis of Israel offers a timely insight to the region.

I had just returned from Israel when the rebellion in Egypt took place. In an odd way, I wasn’t surprised that it happened, nor that the name Israel was barely invoked during the revolt. Where once Israel was the rallying cry of the Arab street, they were now a mostly forgotten bystander.

I remember thinking at the time just how calm was this new Israel. How long could this last I wondered? This was not the same Israel I saw 25 years ago: the once nervous, ramshackle outpost of world Jewry and the lightning rod of Arab animus had grown into a secure, wealthy nation state. Time Magazine even had a cover story in September 2010 observing much the same thing (“Why Israel Doesn’t Care About Peace”).

After the 2000 Intifada, Israel put up a controversial wall separating them from the Palestinians in the West Bank. At the same time, Israel’s lively mix of chaotic politics, citizen army, advanced education and pure chutzpah had met the technology revolution and liked it. The country took off. This is no longer the resource-starved country of old living off handouts from the Diaspora or gifts from Uncle Sam. The Israeli side of the wall – clear as day – is the showcase of a vibrant, self-sustaining knowledge economy that can fill highways with fancy cars running on $8 a gallon gas, glittering skycrapers and a bountiful middle class.

On the other side of the wall lies the hardscrabble Arab world brimming with its own chaos, dilapidation and poverty.

Thanks to this parallel showcase of socio-economies the differences between the two competing world views are stark and unambiguous. Thanks to Al Jazeera, every Arab with a TV has seen this and one way or another, they know.

For years, the PC party line of the left was Israel had sucked the wealth out of the Palestinians. There are plenty of arguments to show that Israel took first dibs of the resources. However, the Egyptian uprising showed that peoples’ conditions under the autocratic regimes of the Middle East weren’t that different from the Palestinians. So maybe it wasn’t just the Israelis. If anything, it made the Israel look pretty good, especially when looking at the Arabs living on the Israeli side of the wall. Regardless of Israel-US politics and their hankering after Mubarak as keeper of the peace - in terms of lifestyles - Israel stopped looking like the devil and more like an island of aspiration.

There ought to be a way they can trade on that because the future of the Middle East will be nothing like the past. The turning point is not just democracy or that the Internet and satellite TV have opened the eyes of downtrodden. There is also a changing of the energy guard. Israel is now sitting on one of biggest gas reserves in the world. You can assume there will be innovations that only a scrappy, inventive, barrier-breaking country like Israel can come up with. At the same time, we in the US are also awash in natural gas yet are deeply reluctant to make full use of it. Put that together with our need to migrate from oil and you can see why an influential source in the middle east with nothing but gas on their hands and an innovative will to use it across the board will open up new possibilities.

Israel’s influence has also grown due its population boom which is unusually sophisticated for the region thereby adding value more than the resources they devour. In the 70’s there were about 3 million Israelis. Now, it is closer to 9 million. Nevertheless, they will need space and my guess is they will eventually reach out to the Mediterranean in the same way Dubai did with its artificial islands in the Persian Gulf. Advances in water desalination combined with their own low-cost energy sources is likely to drive hydro innovation and once ntractable deserts may suddenly bloom. The Negev is still Israel’s biggest land mass. Going forward, peace negotiations may have less to do with land – there is plenty of idle, arid kind – and more to with hydration. In effect, the conversation will move more toward innovation than real estate.

To give you an idea of what I mean by an entrepreneurial country consider this: my host had recently taken his software company public on the NASDAQ with a $500 million cap and $187 million in annual revenues. They had invested some of that money with another relative who had developed and artificial bone biotech company. At some point in my trip I met an old employee of mine who had moved to Israel, used her experience with our parent company, TECHmarketing to get a job in a start-up that also went public on the NASDAQ and then married a colleague who went on to sell his company to IBM. Nowhere did oranges, real estate or kibbutzes play a part – except that a pioneering, collectivist state of mind probably molded a culture with a will to work and overcome.

The highways glitter with flashy high rises sporting Micorosft, Intel, IBM, Texas Instrument and other well known logos. Teva Chemicals has becomes a huge generator of biotech and pharma start-ups and so on. If Facebook is credited as the enabler of Egypt’s uprising’s, then it is worth noting that social media as a technology probably began in Israel – with Yossi Varid’s ICQ (now AOL’s AIM) while the proto-social media site, sixdegrees.com was itself invented by a homesick Israeli in New York. They may not celebrate this in Cairo or Teheran but somewhere it is known that the Facebook they cherish bears the imprint of the chosen people. In any case, Israel is a dramatically clear example of a free market knowledge economy vs. a repressive oil-and-religion economy.

More to the point this polarized vision of parallel universes has become clear enough to the Arab masses that it has raised the bar on their governments. Even the old revolutionary movements will have to take note: Hamas can chant and Hezbollah can hiss but thanks to Al Jazeera the Arab world knows what a tech paradise looks like and the young, I believe, will want them to match it or get out of the way. You can pray and innovate but when prayer bans it and progress it brings, the theorcrats will lose.

While Mid-eastern utopia is a long way off it is not impossible. There may be historical grievances that cannot be solved overnight but when people share a common goal, they can begin the process of forgiving if not forgetting. When the future is about creating abundance you no longer have to fight over vanishing resources.

When you talk to historians they will tell you that Jews and Arabs have always gotten along. They have had their tragic moments but it was nothing like the fate Jews suffered under the crusaders, Rome or central Europe. So there is hope. Perhaps Israel, rather than being the enemy can be reinvented as a kind of Dubai of creative technologists, brainpower, guts and a certain outlaw attitude. Remember, entrepreneurs are usually rulebreakers and apparently, the UN and the liberal West’s approbrium of Israel have, in a peculiar way inspired the country. Even Apple’s developers, for years, worked under a pirate flag. (So take note Microsoft, RIMM, Dell etc. loosen the ties get a little chaotic….)

While no one knows how the Middle East uprising’s will play out – the bottom line is that Israel is no longer its bogeyman but a silent exemplar of 21st Century possibilities. Tech innovation and entrepreneurialism will have a huge role to play, the China card is rarely discussed but as I will discuss in Part 2, it lurks – as it does in Israel – in provocative ways. Most importantly, this extraordinary moment of flux there are clear opportunities where we can influence the future and settle, with honor, some age-old differences.

Meeting with Al Gore

2011-02-12T12:51:00.000-08:00

My meeting with Al Gore at Social Media Week.

Good old Social Media Week. It brings up great topics - like our TV Goes Social iBreakfast - and it brings out the stars like Al Gore. It turns out we have a common interest in the Tobacco Industry! When he was Vice President, he stood up to the tobacco industry. As a southern politician with presidential ambitions, that took a lot of guts. Like Mandela’s release from jail – it was one of the things I never expected to see in my lifetime. While Al Gore did not risk his life the way Mandela did, his stand had its own world-changing effect: the great $250 billion tobacco settlement of 1997 and a fundamental change in smoking regulations here and around the world.

My interest in Tobacco is a little more academic. My book Cigarette Seduction is about the marketing research behind the brands, how that defines smokers and cultures (brands vary dramatically by country) and how smokers can use that knowledge to quit.

Al Gore believes that Tobacco Companies are evil. While I don’t necessarily disagree with him, I do think it’s a little more complicated. They are addressing some fundamental human needs. If we don’t understand what they are and how to deal with them, they will just re-emerge – probably in more harmful forms. In that respect, Tobacco Companies are, to certain people, the good guys - and you have to accept that.

In any case, I salute Al Gore who is really warm guy in person. I thank him for his Nobel Prize-winning work on Global Warming - it has made us think green and electrified ours and our children’s generation.

Just one thing - and sure, this is a cheap shot - with this rotten winter, we could use just a little global warming right now……

Standing up to an Internet Bully - why we support Private Equity Events

2011-02-12T12:01:00.000-08:00

For several years now the iBreakfast group has run low-cost Angel pitching events of its own where the winner gets a free seat at one of Mike Segal's Private Equity Forums. So on that basis I can speak to this issue.

Mike Segal's Private Equity Forum events are always sold out and are packed with real investors and entrepreneurs - often from outside of New York.

In most cases, these players are worlds away from Calacanis and Digital Media. They never get the attention of the Fred Wilsons, the Esther Dysons, the DFJs and so on. They tend to come from energy, engineering, biotech, transportation, waste management – all the stuff that doesn’t make it to the blogoshpere. They are also usually older and let’s face it - you don’t see too many gray hairs in the digital Start-Up world. When they do, the seniors rarely get funded.

At Segal’s events these participants are, for the most part what I call pedigree start-ups – people with 10 or more years of experience in serious business and technology fields. Their plans are not too sexy or too wildly conceptual and they will never be the next Facebook or Twitter. But they often have real customers on tap and genuine backgrounds in the field with deep relationships and so on. They tend to come from areas in the hinterland that are not flooded with investors – so presenting in New York means something to them.

Should they pay what they pay? That’s their calculation. Does Mike have a right to charge them? Ask them? They know the cost and resources they need to reach out to investors – and there really are investors here – and so they make that decision.

The bottom line is they will never get an invite to Fred’s office, they won’t get a “free” invite to Techcrunch or any other hackerthon or techie start-up fest. And guess what, this is not a socialist country - people have a right to charge and you have a right not to show up.

So why the libel?

Has anyone stopped to ask what Jason gets out of this crusade of his? Free publicity for his ridiculous people-powered search engine, Mahalo that now answers your every lame question. Jason is the same idiot who dropped over $200,000 on a late night TV poker game and then claimed it was really publicity for Mahalo because he wore a logo shirt. Some publicity! See Calacanis Poker Face.

Last year, after he got into a fight with his partners at TechCrunch, he went after Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook. While the site has its flaws it is nowhere as evil as Calacanis made it out to be. But he was after his usual cheap publicity. I don’t recall any Egyptians saying “Thank you Mahalo.” Even the so-called “founder” of the revolution, a Google executive, said “Thank You Facebook.”

I have met Mark’s dad, Dr. Edward Zuckerberg so I know what it is like from his perspective to be slandered by the likes of Calacanis who has never found a cheap shot not worth taking. It is not only an unpleasant thing but almost impossible to respond to because he hogs the conversation. I even saw him hold up a gun of some sort when talking to a Keiretsu exec. Hardly a fair fight.

I am all for choice. If you can get a free ride as a Start-Up, for heaven’s sake take it. But most entrepreneurs heed some help and one way or another they are going to have to pay for it.

What I can’t abide is a bully. Calacanis made his mark as a champion of NY’s Silicon Alley in its salad days (remember that?). He picked battles when no one else would and paraded about with his trademark bulldogs – which made him look like a good guy to some people. That was 10 years ago. Flame throwing is OK when you’re in your 20s. Being a Tae Kwando black belt when everyone else is a geek is intoxicating all right. But this act is getting old – a touch of the Mubarak. In reality, Jason is rapidly becoming a slander machine that mistakes dirt-dishing for publicity and thinks it makes Mahalo and his various conferences look good.

If he can make money doing what he does good luck to him. But here’s an amazing reality: the Private Equity Forums have never been fuller – precisely because they fulfill a need that others don’t offer. Apparently, Calacanis is just singing to his choir hoping they’ll pay for more of his web-thumping. Watch out, if he thinks there’s a publicity angle, he could come after you!

What IS Social TV?

2011-02-12T11:52:00.000-08:00

This is the report from our TV Goes Social iBreakfast on Feb 9 during Social Media Week.
Speakers include: Simon Applebaum, Tomorrow Will be Televised • Bonnie Sandy Sterling, 28 Squared • Scott Varland, Social Bomb

This iBreakfast opened the door on what many think may be the next really big thing. The CEO of Endemol thinks so. So does Wired, Fast Company and so on.

But what is it?

There is a hardware and software component and a history.

The hardware is that TV will show up anywhere and may come from any source. Your flat screen will soon integrate TV, YouTube and Facebook and anything else you want from the web. Your mobile device and laptop will do much he same. Companies will soon offer really effective whole house servers that let you get the full experience on all your TVs and your smart phone will probably double as a smart remote. If they don't do this hackers are already doing it for them.

Simon Applebaum

On the software side, we are seeing communities form around TV - the content, the actors, the recommendations and so on. Marketers will try to create an ecosystem around their shows. Speaker Scott Varland of Social Bomb does this with an integrated platform they developed to help viewers develop a conversation with the shows they watch. Bonnie Sterling does this on 28 Squared with Brooklyn and African artisans who can share and sell their goods through this visual transaction medium. There is also a coding standard for cable systems that will enable the launch of App markets etc.

Alan Brody

The iBreakfast founders are already involved in doing this on the creation end - helping schoolkids develop their own network using social media tools to develop content and then promote it afterwards. Our first coup was their interview with Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg's Dad which got picked up by 700+ news outlets around the world. SNNews.org

The real magic is that the teens know how to use these tools for development and communication - more importantly, they know how to use it for social and academic gain. They get noticed by friends and eventually, college admissions officers. This is presumably a blueprint for way adults will eventually adopt Social TV. We just have to figure out which gatekeepers they want to impress.

According to Varland, TVs many gatekeepers have made investors fearful of entering this space - Social TV in all its forms may just be the means to getting around them!

As for the History - Social TV has become the new flagbearer for elusive quest for Interactive TV - and therein lies the minefield. Everyone gets the social community and communication angle - they even get the idea of communicating with visual references etc. They don't get the dangerous side - that viewers don't want their TV experience interrupted. In other words, they don't want their vegged out mental state disturbed. This is our national meditation time.

A key reason Interactive TV failed is they did a good job of disturbing viewers - with the exception of their amazingly successful caller ID on the screen feature. This was great precisely because it saved you from getting up from your chair to screen your call. If only it could handle the call itself - so you won't have to be bothered with it at all!

With these themes in mind and a million more questions - we will be running a number of additional panels as well as a TV Goes Social blog.

If you have any ideas of your own please share them with us at soctv@ibreakfast.com and we'll post them.

Additional Report on IPTV Evangelist

Want your Twitter TV? - read about it in Fast Company.

My Meeting with Al Gore

2011-02-12T09:48:00.000-08:00

Good old social Media Week! It brought out a lot of important issues - see our report on TV Goes Social. It also brought out the stars.

Alan Brody & Al Gore

This is my meeting with Al Gore. As it turns out, we have something in common - a deep interest in the Tobacco Business. VP Gore stood up to the Tobacco Industry despite coming from from Tobacco country. That took an enormous amount of courage - the kind I equate with Nelson Mandela in that I would never have expected it to happen in my lifetime and as a Southern politician, had a lot to lose. His stand lead to a worldwide change in smoking habits and legislation around the world.

My interest is little more academic - my book Cigarette Seduction is about the way the brands work: how they were created out of deep research, what that says about the culture and how it can help smokers quit. While Al Gore believes the Tobacco industry is evil - and I don't totally disagree - the issue is a little more complex because smoking fills certain psychic needs. If we are not cognizant of that, guess what? People can do a lot worse.

Social Networks Take Hollywood - Who’s the Gekko Now?

2011-02-02T19:38:00.000-08:00

Who’s the Gekko Now?

Looking back, the two watershed moments of 2010 are when Facebook became the only real challenger to Google, hitting the 500 million user mark and attaining a valuation north of $20 billion. But that is nothing compared to the Oscar-worthiness of Social Network - the movie – which also came at the expense of Oliver Stone’s less than spectacular Wall Street.

Wall Street 2 is entertaining but it lacked the defining lesson of the day – so what’s the next big business principal. In 1987 the bad guys were corporate raiders – taking over old-line companies, throwing out old management and dumping workers. As it turns out, the resulting leaner, inherently efficient companies took full advantage of a computer revolution that fueled our economy for the next 20 years. The Good ol’ boy companies would probably have died off anyway. Moviegoers got a villain anyway since Gekko was an insider trader. But he was also part of the future….

Fast-forward to 2010 and we find that in Wall Street 2, Gekko is now a figure of redemption. He is out of jail and wrote a best seller that predicted the crash. He may be a crook but an old crook is better than these newfangled ones with their high frequency trading and funky derivatives. The solution? Bet everything on one big clean tech deal. Not only did this violate the rules of Hollywood redemption – give all your money to the poor and become a funky monk – but this just wasn’t visionary enough.

Social Media is Business Now

Social Network, the story of Zuckerberg’s founding of Facebook on the other hand, IS today’s Gordon Gekko movie. This villain is another overeducated high flyer but instead of a slick Wall Streeter he is a gangly student who is spurned by his girlfriend for his lack of empathy. This becomes the basis of a “who’s hot” college website. This, in turns gets him a project designing code for a group of uppity entrepreneurs who see the opportunity of creating a social site for people who want to date Harvard students.

Zuckerberg front-runs this project – coding his own version while he sandbags his clients, the old-money Winklevoss twins – and then voila, he’s in the Facebook Business. Just as Gekko 1 did, he defined the blueprint of business in the Digital Age 2.0 - the ultimate viral tool. Zuckerberg’s employers can’t compete, so they sue. They settle for a multimillion dollar sum – but as Facebook grows beyond all imaginable bounds the Winklevoss’ become increasingly restive hoping to kill the settlement and get more money.

Did Zuckerberg hide Facebook’s true prospects or were the Winklevoss’s lacking in the vision to see it?

Either way, the message here is that every business has to find a Social Media angle or they could fade away.

Start-Up Nation for….Grown Ups

2011-02-02T16:24:00.000-08:00

In a world brimming with Start-Ups we will continue what pioneered in the 90’s – connecting start-ups with sources of capital. We also provide a forum to help them shape their plans and find alternatives when they cannot get funding (the other 90%+ of you....).

Next iNNOVATORS iBREAKFAST - Wed Feb. 23

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In that light, it is worth noting that I recently took a trip to what has become known as Start-Up Nation – Israel. I once spent time there in the early 80’s when it was more like Hand-Out Nation because, other than oranges, they were largely living off donations. The difference today is instructive. Now that the Middle East is on fire – there might be some lessons here.

Contrary to popular thinking, Israel is a lot more than a protectorate of the United States. It is its own power center that has become quite interesting to China. Read my thoughts in “The Great Wall of Israel.”

Start your Own iBreakfast

2011-02-02T16:19:00.000-08:00

As the iBreakfast enters its 15th year, we have taken a moment to reinvent this national forum. Soon we will offer a new self-run version of the iBreakfast for Executives looking to reinvent themselves and build a business community. Our specialty – daytime venues.

iEvening Entrepreneurs Report

2010-11-30T08:32:00.000-08:00

Brian Cohen, NY Angels · William Reinisch, Paladin Capital · Mike Segal, Joshua Capital · Joseph Daniels, Hodgson Russ

Moderated by Alan Brody

The long-running iEvening is one of the Tri-State's most valuable working events for Entrepreneurs and now, Execs - it helps Entrepreneurs shape their business models while looking for funding and Executives reinvent themselves while seeking opportunities.

Alan Brody at Workshop

Last Tuesday's event was hosted by the Fordham Business School at Lincoln Center. The Entrepreneur's Workshop, which has been running for over 10 years was recently expanded to accommodates executives - although the workshop has always attracted Execs seeking renewed career opportunities through Start-Ups, they were never formally part of the program. Now they are.

The Workshop

In the technique we pioneered for a Bloomberg TV segment, members of the group are invited to give their 30 second pitch. By using the dynamics of the group, we quickly discover what those pitches really do and don't say about the company or executive which leads to some great discoveries. Entrepreneurs learn what gives their ideas "curbside appeal" and execs learn how to pivot their business experience in the same way a Start-Ups has to keep looking for the right way to connect to its market and its investors.

One Start-Up founder, which struggled to explain himself succinctly happened to mention a much catchier second company called Wazzup - the group response made it clear where the opportunity really lies. Another Exec, who had been helping Start-Ups shape their pitch was shown by the group how the same techniques could also apply in everyday sales situations, opening the door to a new kind of consulting practice. Other Start-Ups found that while analogies are a great way to describe a new company, they have to be the right analogy or they could also be misleading. An Exec from a Start-Up that went public discovered that even though he did not cash out like the principals, just by being part of an IPO he can claim membership in the sacred group of the Serial Entrepreneur who IPO'd - thereby boosting his value. (More about the secret hierarchy or Start-Ups in my upcoming book....!)

Joe Daniels, Hodgson Russ

& Paul Wegener

Deal Structure Workshop

After the Workshop, Joe Daniels of Hodgson Russ gave an illuminating presentation of deal structure and the clear value in seeking good counsel while going through the various stages of creating the Start-Up. The ability to raise capital, retain ownership value and share stock with employees are highly dependent on the quality of advice at this early stage.

Entrepreneur Pitches

The pitches included some very promising companies. The winner, who will go on to attend the Private Equity Forum at the Yale club was Caleb Gandara of TuitionCast - a metasearch site for higher educational programs.

The panel of judges which included Brian Cohen of New York Angels, Bill Reinisch of Paladin Capital and Mike Segal of Joshua Capital listened to the following plans and advised the companies to sharpen their focus in a variety of ways.

Mike Segal, Brian Cohen & Bill Reinisch

MergeSkills (www.mergeskills.com) was advised to focus their value proposition relative to competitors like LinkedIn, eLance and Guru.

Conexus (www.nq.com) which adds marketing intelligence needs to evolve their offerings to advertisers.

Traversive, (www.traversive.com) which enables IT departments in small to medium size businesses to shop for providers, the judges thought they needed to focus on a more specific market niche.

Risk-AI (www.risk-ai.com) provided risk analysis tools for the hedge fund industry but appeared too small of a niche for investors looking for a minimum 10x growth.

The Panel in Action

Remote Stylist (www.remotestylist.com) suffered from a similar judgment - although the market is big and they loved the founder, Kelly Fallis, the site appeared too manually service-oriented to scale - what investors call a "lifestyle business."

LEO (www.kryonsystems.com) a surprise entrant by an Israeli company that turns point and click tutoring into a saveable feature to be shared by other users. Investors leery about the training business but intrigued by the functionality.

So what is an Entrepreneur to do: fix it, pivot their model or constructively deconstruct? How about growing it themselves organically through sales an partnerships? These are the issues every entrepreneur faces and we hope the iEvening and its collaborative environment helps them make them make the right decision.

About the Speakers

Entrepreneurs - photos by Seitu Oronde

Brian Cohen is Vice Chairman of New York Angels is an investment group of 61 members.
Joseph Daniels is the chair of the Hodgson Russ' Emerging Companies & Venture Capital Practice Group.

Bill Reinisch runs Paladin Capital's New York office.

Mike Segal heads Joshua Capital

Alan Brody pioneered the Business Model Discovery Workshop for Bloomberg TV

Submit Business Plan

Face of Opportunity Entry: Watch, Laugh, Vote.

2010-11-12T11:05:00.000-08:00

Face of Opportunity Entry: We create US jobs. B.A. can take it worldwide.

Face of Opportunity Entry: Seasoned Execs pitch Start-Ups to be their CEOs

2010-11-10T13:56:00.000-08:00

Face of Opportunity Entry: Seasoned Execs pitch Start-Ups to be their CEOs

Video Reports from Mobile Strategy - Apps vs. HTML5 and the Cloud

2010-11-10T13:55:00.000-08:00

To really understand how Mobile is going to shape up read (or watch) between the lines.

HTML5 will kill Apps
Search is the Killer App
Mobile optimized sites will rule
We will live under the cloud (Next iBreakfast topic BTW)

Jesse Haines, Google Video

John Paris, Time video
David Gwozdz, Mojiva video

Kelvin Rowlette, July Systems video

Alan Brody Comments, Q&A

Report: What's Your Mobile Strategy?

2010-10-08T07:00:00.000-07:00

Mobile at the Heart of Transmedia – the new Convergence?
By Alan Brody

The emerging term for the new convergence is Transmedia. It’s a great term for this Halloween month so we’ll go with it even though it is still an insider term – not quite at the tip of everyone’s tongue.

Transmedia does, however, raise the issue of vampire technology – the specter of digital media sucking the life out of print, TV and most other traditional media. And that’s why we love Google – they are not the ghouls here just, we hope, the white night.

According to Jesse Marmon Haines, who heads the ad marketing unit, smart mobile is growing so fast that, by 2013 it will outpace computer-based browsers. While the world loves iPhones, Google Android is already outpacing them and the search and adsense worlds will increasingly move to Mobile.

While we can’t say just how lucrative this will prove, we can see how different the experience is playing out on Mobile. For one thing, people use fewer words to search – on average of 3 on mobile vs. 5 on a computer. 1 in 4 searches are using the voice recognition feature – and those tend to be more comples. Ads that lure people on the move to your destination can make be worth a lot of money – perhaps more than online.

The beauty of smart phones is they have almost completely sidestepped the old stranglehold that phone companies had on “the deck” – so the Mobile ad business is exploding. That is why Google recently bought AdMob for a premium. They are signing up 200,000 users a day. Most importantly, websites need to be optimized for the Mobile if they are likely to promote instant action. For example, one of the most successful functions on Android optimized websites is the link to phone feature – click on the website’s phone number and Android starts ringing for. Directions are often offered too. It is only a matter of time before people start using the voice recognition feature to do a lot more than search – but as the dominant mobile interface.

The big news here is that Google wants to own the mobile browser – not just search – and you can be sure they will be focusing a lot of resources on that! Bill Gates, Firefox, Apple – your immortality is being challenged!

At Time Inc., John Paris, the Senior Strategist talked about the differences in Mobile users and the old vampire challenge: can Time still make money in a mostly free digital world using content from their old paid subscription world? Right now, they are a long a way from the “witching hour” because, as Paris puts it, people on the run don’t read the same way. “Mobile is article driven.” People are not looking to read the whole magazine.

Does this have the haunting strains of the digital music world where people stopped buying albums and began downloading one song at a time? Maybe – but for now, Time can monetize by keeping good metrics and still use the mobile experience to drive subscriptions to their print and other vehicles.

Not surprisingly, he mobile world is around 2/3 male and 1/3 female – but that is rapidly changing. What is more important is that men and women use Mobile slightly differently. No one seems to be sharing this information but my guess is that men are from Transylvania and women are from Twilight (ask your kids if you don’t get that.)

From Time Inc.’s perspective, the iPad is much more likely to be their growth vehicle and that market will move dramatically with Android-based pads, the much anticipated Dell Streak – but most of all, with the introduction of a smaller, lighter iPad probably one with a 7” screen.

David Gwozdz of Mojiva, whose company offers an ad network modeled somewhat on the original DoubleClick model, also sees Mobile eclipsing desktops in 2012 and Intel selling 150 million Atom-based netbooks. Kelvin Rowlette CEO of the systems integrator, July Systems talked about the successful project his company did with Fantasy Football. Most of the profitable Mobile projects he pointed out are based on sponsorships rather than ads.

Form the perspective of users, Media will simply follow them. The Mobile device is a lot like the baton orchestrating all of the media, it is your newspaper, your book, you DVR, your GPS, your friend summoning articles to and from the desktop or TV and other digital devices. As we are discovering, they are doing it in more ways than we ever imagined. The Mobile is transforming form the underdog of the digital world to the, well, werewolf gobbling up the old media laggards. Arooo.

TV Highlights will be coming soon!

Alan Brody on MSNBC TV - Affirmative Action for Small Business

2010-10-08T06:58:00.001-07:00

Affirmative Action for Small Business - now there's an idea!

Scroll through to the second speaker and you'll see it in all it glory!

Alan Brody on MSNBC TV

Report from the July “Exploding eBook/iPad iBreakfast”

2010-07-30T13:13:00.001-07:00

Ana Maria Allessi, VP Publisher, HarperMedia
Andy Weissberg, Managing Partner, Digital Publishing Partners
Anthony Antolino, Senior VP, Copia
Mike Shatzkin, Founder, Idea Logical Co.
David Steinberger, CEO, comiXology

The mix of exhilaration and trepidation that once swept through the music world may be shaking at the foundations of the once staid world of book publishing.

One thing that is clear the public seems to have taken to the iPad and to a lessr extent, eBooks with an enthusiasm that caught many visionaries off-guard. Apple announced over 3 million units sold and Amazon reported they had sold more eBooks for the Kindle than print editions.

Yet many readers say they still love the feel of a book. So what do digital books bring to the table that are somehow different from a plain old print book? What exactly is the paradigm shift taking place and how will publishers, resellers and content creators react. Most of all, what will consumers pay for?

According to Dave Steinberger of Comixology, the big word coming out of ComicCon – where comic lovers coexist with digital commix and moviemakers – is Transmedia: Content exists across media. It also seems to help explain which media belongs where – some media like comics belong as static or as movies but not as moving comic pages and so on.

Certainly, according to the publishing futurist on our panel, Mike Shatzkin, of the Idea Logical Company, with digital books, everyone can be published and have instant distribution from their websites. This is a game changer for everyone! Mike was also recently quoted in the New York Times, pointing out that the surpassing of print by eBooks (on Amazon only, of course) was inevitable.

But who, said Andy Weissberg of Digital Publishing Partners, really knows because measurement at Amazon is not, pun intended, an open book. More importantly, if eBooks eliminate so many stages in the publishing process – like retailer and to some extent the old publishing houses, where do the big publishers fit in? Ana Maria Allessi, of HarperMedia talked about publishers as really being developers and marketers of authors. Which begs the question of whether publishers will start to look more like record labels that now have 360 degree deals with their artists so they now get a piece of their live appearances and merchandise sales.

The Transmedia paradigm shift is easy to understand in some areas but more complicated in others. A famous training author might generate profit with the application developed by the publisher to help deliver and test the readers (e.g. a voice coach whose iPad product can listen to the readers voice and judge it). In thrillers and romance novels the background details – like the extras in a DVD could be plus. Vook does this with supporting videos (the Slash book has Guns & Roses interviews and concerts). The best seller on the iPad right now, according to Shatzkin is Elements which give the viewer the full story with pictures and videos of all the elements on the periodic table. Is this an anomaly or simply the non-fictional romance novel of geekdom or is it more - a clue about 360 degree novels about the future?

It’s hard to tell – these are tantalizing clues to which you need to add the next element. As they say, if Henry Ford asked people what they wanted, it would have been a faster horse. The translation of that today, is a Mustang.

One of the interesting possibilities is that iPads and eBook devices will become portable book clubs simply by plugging into community. Why read your book alone? Why wait for the book club to meet? As Antolino pointed out, you don’t buy what the best sellers tell you, you buy what your friends recommend.

The consensus is that the party is just getting started – if it is a party – but the full picture is only just emerging. The rules are only now being written and will probably be rewritten a few times too. This is an emerging world that is likely to change the publishing world forever, and with New York at its center it means that many more conversations are coming here before we get a true measure of the changes taking place.

To listen to the podcast click below.

eBook/iPad iBreakfast Podcast Part 1

eBook/iPad iBreakfast Podcast Part 2

Click to take part of our survey.

What if Corporate America Actually GOT Word of Mouth & Social Media Marketing?

2010-07-23T10:19:00.001-07:00

Plus - a few thoughts about Mad Men, Apple and some other exploits

By Alan Brody

As co-sponsors of Andy Sernovitz’s Word of Mouth Supergenius event on July 21, I finally get a chance to weigh in on a number of issues that have been weighing on me for a while।

Social Media is hot, most players are making very little money out of it but it does provide low cost advertising if you don’t mind doing the work and more importantly, reinventing who you are. That’s the part that gets me and it really showed up at the Word of Mouth summit because WOM is about the idea and not the medium, which is what Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and all those social media are।

The reason these media can be so annoying is because most people are using them poorly. It's as if the New York Times offered all comers free ads. The average person has nothing to say except "Hey I’m going to the beach and I love cotton candy.” Actual marketers go hey, we can do what we did for free and they find ways to spam you. Most realize they have to give something away, and so they organize games, offers and promotions – which is something they understand and that definitely works, but only for a while।

Only the really smart understand they have to be something different। That’s where the gurus kick in. Be lovable. Be outstanding. Be honorable. Be a cult. Be a linchpin and so on.

Now for the fun part. How many of these corporations could actually do that? How many popular products are remotely outstanding? Even if the conference attendees get it, imagine the conversation when they get back to the board room. You want us to what? We can get sued. We don’t want to talk to the consumers. We aren’t like that…॥ B-school never trained us to give up control to the customer and so on।

This leads me to Mad Men because, as a student in 50’s advertising research I can tell you that corporate America was similarly shook by a cultural shift when Madison Avenue was introduced to the unconscious। It wound up with the kinds of odd interactions you see in Mad Men. Except there, the client just had to OK an ad and hold on. With WOM/Social Media, they actually have to change.

So here’s a quick breakdown of this cultural gap as evidenced with our Supergenius interactions।

1. Tony Hsieh and Zappos. Use your customers as your advertising by indulging them – with the money you save on customer acquisition, you can afford to indulge them, thus attracting more customers। True and Tony is an amazing exemplar of the CEO who lives and breathes his mission। Hard to imagine BP following this (they should). One secret advantage about the shoe business – as my 50’s motivational researchers pointed out। “To women don’t sell shoes, sell beautiful feet।” In other words if you want to wrap your feet in a bargain you go to Payless but if you want to indulge your foot beauty fetish then the unique people at Zappos are there to oblige. And no one in their right mind asks their fetish master for a discount. Except Elliot Spitzer - and look what happened to him!

2. Who really knows what they are doing? PR Exec talks about creating stories – that sell। WOM is not just about telling stories – it's about telling stories that make you want to tell other people. That drives them toward an action that leads to becoming a customer of some kind. So my reasonable question is – you’re an agency, how do you test which story ideas will work. Answer: we don’t - if Henry Ford asked farmers they would have told him they wanted a faster horse. My answer is yes, and that horse is called a Mustang. Research is not the answer - it is guidance for your creativity.

Gevalia reinvented itself in Social Media because its affiliate marketing program made it look like a spammer। Many companies are probably viewing Social Media as a cheap ad or ethical spam machine. Gevalia did the right thing and got their customers in on the action – made them heroes, part of a club that even helped named their product. It also happens to be extraordinarily good, if expensive coffee. Now, could you imagine if Kraft or General Mills or Hormel went up that warm and fuzzy route. Wanna blog about Kraft American Cheese, PopTarts? Join their fan group. Read their labels?

4. Culting of Brands. Wiley was all over this conference with their Social Media Marketing Books so this is ground zero of who buys and arguably, reads these books. Flip the Funnel (spoil your existing customers and stop chasing for more and more prospects at their expense) or the Marketing Lessons of The Grateful Dead (acid sells!), Ignore Everyone Else and so on are read and paid attention to here. But imagine if you tried to turn Exxon into a cult. Or Chrysler. Or General Mills.

Steve Jobs and Apple come up a lot। So here’s the memo: the word cult comes from the Latin “cultus deus” - the care and worship of gods. So unless you are willing to deal with life and death (most cult brands have come back from the dead, overcame some amazing obstacle or represent people who did - and don't forget the Grateful Dead) don’t waste your time. Settle for fickle fans. This way you go home at 5 and have the weekends with your families. PS there is no second coming for BP or Napster. But they can try.

5. Be a linchpin. Right – and get ready to lose your job. Companies hate irreplaceable people and if you are one, they will spend a lot of time thinking about how to replace you. Not only that, but you become a target for all the other company wannabes. Not that you shouldn’t strive for this but without the accompanying book on how to protect, conceal and generally keep the linchpin status in an unassailable spot, this is dangerous information. Ask Carolyn Kepcher, who looked too big for Donald Trump and so on. Usually, linchpins are hidden or look deceptively ordinary. And they definitely don’t give it away for art on the company’s dime. That would make them a lynch pin.

Look out for more on my Mad Men rant and advertising from the 50’s in my book and radio interviews on Cigarette Seduction (why does President Obama smoke Marlboro and why is he unlikely to quit until we exit Afghanistan) and other ideas you really hadn’t thought of lately।

Next iBreakfast on July 28 – Exploding eBooks & iPad Market

If you are interested in the Word of Mouth/Social Media issue and how corporate America is really responding, tell us - and we'll have an iBreakfast.

Report from the June Agile Funding – Agile Hiring Event

2010-06-30T09:51:00.000-07:00

By Alan Brody

Speakers: Ian Sigalow, Partner, Greycroft Partners, Stephen Brotman Managing Director, Greenhill & Co, Graham Lawlor, Founder, Ultralight Startups

As we continue our Job Generation series of matching senior execs to Start-Ups, we had the June event to take stock - from the VCs perspective. Our featured speakers, 2 active New York investors spilled the beans on the money side while our dean of agile Start-Ups kicked in with confessions from the entrepreneur side.

The result is an eye-opener - and if you are looking to boost your Start-up or work with one, pay attention.

1.    Very few companies get funded.

2.    Angel-funded companies still have to grow to the next level – there is a very small chance of a follow-on round if you do not grow dramatically

3.    Your best chance for breaking through is by building a savvy, connected team that includes some industry veterans. But you need to make it worth their while to come over to your side.

What we learned from the two VCs who do $500K - $2 million deals, is that you need to have high-growth potential in a rapidly growing marketplace in order to have a chance at funding. Then, the best way to get their attention is to have other people in the industry rave about you because word gets around in this community’s echo chamber. Getting a savvy player on board can help make the connection and will help you when they come calling.

The problem is that very few companies qualify for this kind of funding. Some get lucky and find an investor of one kind or another. This is not always to their ultimate benefit if they don’t use the money wisely and they don’t grow - but at least they have raised capital.

For everyone else, listen up, there are still plenty of opportunities. Some part of this is domain knowledge and experience – if you really know your business and you’re savvy, you will generally prevail. But a certain kind of faith and positive flexible vision is also key. Why - because you have to believe that you can prove yourself with whatever resources you have. Money is not everything. Too much of it can kill a company. Also, most start-ups find their real business or revenue opportunity down the road and it is usually starkly different from what they anticipated. So, being able to change direction to catch the right wind is key and investors have to feel comfortable that you will find that wind and adjust accordingly. Passionate amateurs tend not to do that.

Luckily for us, Ian Sigalow, a partner at Greycroft, LLC, Alan Patricof’s venture fund was on hand to break it down.

The single biggest thing he looks for is market size. If it’s not in the billions and growing rapidly, don’t bother. They need to make 10x within 5-10 years. In reality, they are searching for deals that are more likely to make them 100x. Seriously, is that you? If not how could you steer your enterprise toward that goal?

First, don’t be desperate. It takes at least 3 months to structure a deal usually longer. Your credibility is a huge issue. This is true even if you are the first to a huge new market. Who you are and what you bring to the table a big issues because if you fail to execute, there are so many others waiting in the wings to jump on your market.

That is one of the reasons that VC money tends to go to serial entrepreneurs. People who have done this before and succeeded are always preferred. They get the big bucks, the quick deals and even have the right to do a “me-too” company just because it is assumed they can execute.

If this is your first start-up you need help. You need to create buzz and then you need to have at lest two VCs looking at your deal to raise values and create a sense of closure. Otherwise, you wind up with meaningless phone calls, useless meetings and 90 day lockups. (Preferred no-shopping clause is 30 – 45 days)

VCs often refer promising companies to angels if they are pre-revenue and still working on their product development. That is usually a good thing. However, when VCs do their own Angel round that has its own special danger because unless you succeed spectacularly you are not likely to get follow on rounds from anyone other than the VC who may be even more disappointed than everyone else when you don’t beat projections.

[For the record:
Series A requires revenue and 3-4 customers
Series B 10 – 20 million valuation
Series C $100MM+]

Valuations – so here’s a big secret – go for a convertible note. Angels will ways try to hold you to a valuation. The lower the better. VCs on the other hand are more likely to prefer that you took a convertible note at a discount to the series “A” valuation – typically 25%. That means the company is more accurately valued and they know they are getting the best deal while you, the entrepreneur get to keep more of your company to sell to the VC. This is where find out how angelic your investors are – by whether or not they will accept the convertible note.

Know thy VC: do your homework. Know what kinds of companies they fund and why. Funds must be also be active – with the economic hiccups, many are walking dead.

Steve Brotman, the Managing Partner at Greenhill SAVP was quick to concur and we got to hear about his investments. Once again, your research is everything. VCs have areas of interest and their own theories of the marketplace. If you understand how they think you can determine who to go to and how to present your idea. Greenhill, and to a large extent, Greycroft, favors technology platforms that help automate services. Advertising can be transformed this way, so can financial products, even search engine optimization. If your product does something spectacular in those areas, and the market is getting B-I-G, they will probably want to hear from you. Or better yet, hear from a few of your credible fans.

What you need to know about VCs is that most exits are M&A driven at between $50 – 100 million. They want to see a minimum 10x and preferably 100x returns, so you can see how sharp the numbers have to be to get their interest. On the other hand, Steve spilled the beans on negotiating from the book “Hacking the Human Mind”: time pressure, lack of information and perceived opportunity can make otherwise intelligent people do strange things.

[For the record: Snapshot of Greenhill Investments
5 year old company growing faster than Twitter.
Medical metadata co. for testing.
Yellowjackets to consolidate IMs on trading floor.]

Graham Lawlor
Graham is the founder of Ultralight Startups which is a lively forum for the kinds of agile companies that are sprouting everywhere. Graham quotes the patron saint of the movement, Steve Blank whose book, “4 Steps to Epiphany” lays out the case for these companies. They key issue is that it doesn’t take much to start a company today, whereas ten years ago it cost plenty. Making them work is lot like using the steps taken by savvy corporation in a successful product roll out. The problem is that everyone seems to be starting a company because they can, and in the noise, some key issues are forgotten. The point about a successful roll out is having something customers seem to want and not just something you are able to make. So step one is having a minimum viable product. You learn from early adopters what they really want and pivot your development around their actual needs and desires of these people. Then you build your customer base with leases and marketing and then you build a company.

That’s the theory. In practice, the market throws a lot of curve balls and the interest of the early adopters may be very different from the later adopters. So being nimble and agile and listening to the market and also knowing when not to listen is a whole other issues.

Bottom line: anytime there seem to be a lot of buzz as a promising market emerges and you get people to talk about you, investors will come calling.

Start-Ups Presenting
Hal Charych has RFID automated gates for ski resorts. Generally seemed like it was a great idea but ought to be aimed at much broader markets. New York is not a ski investors market.

Alex Combos, EventNow. This site enables event planners to put their events out to bidding rather than having to go chasing after venues for pricing. Seems like a great idea but there are many big name like eVite that seem to be lurking in the wings.

Executives
James Mancuso, a former executive and CTO at Platform Computing Inc. a, Financial Services company in NY gave these Start-Ups helpful advice about growth and positioning.

COMING JULY 28 – The Exploding eBook/iPad Marketplace

Cleantech Exec Comments on Westchester's Disaster Response

2010-06-11T09:22:00.000-07:00

Disaster Recovery: Are We Too Focused on the Big Bang to See the Deadly Little Bangs?

Introducing The Falling Tree Syndrome: Electrical Internet, Houses with Crash Helmets and Trees with Seat Belts.

By Alan Brody

Last Sunday The Scarsdale Forum at the Scarsdale Women’s Club hosted a lecture on “Dealing with Local Disasters: What Can Nuclear and Pandemic Disaster Planning Teach Us?”- a timely topic one would think, following the disastrous March storms. The trouble is, you quickly realize that Indian Point has a way of dominating all disaster conversations to the point that we may be overlooking the clear and present mundane disasters that surround us: trees and power outages.

After 40 years, Indian Point remains controversial but no one seems to have died from it. Yet, in the March storm 7 people were killed by falling trees. Over 200 trees fell in Scarsdale and Greenburg, thousands of homes and businesses went days without power, dozens of streets and even schools were closed and downed power lines threatened lives.

Yet, the conversation returns to Indian Point where you quickly find that few people have any idea where to gather or where to hide in case of an emergency. Almost no one has emergency food or Potassium iodide pills, the cheap, essential radiation protection. Is it possible that by worrying about the really big thing, a nuclear disaster, about which we feel we can do little, we see no reason to worry about the smaller, more pressing issues and so we wind up doing nothing at all?

Maybe, like the “broken window theory” in crime-fighting which was effective because clamping down on small outrages lead authorities to its larger sources, we should think of an equivalent “falling tree” philosophy. If we prevented the giant trees around us from falling on power lines in storms and lowered the vulnerability of the networks massive power disruptions our lives would improve significantly.

Houses with Crash Helmets - Trees with Seat Belts?
Trees don’t have to fall – or at least, not where we don’t want them to. Con Ed and the towns may prune trees or even clear-cut them around major transmission lines, but the remnants of the 200 fallen neighborhood trees show they have shallow root systems thanks to our rocky soil. Yet they tower over 60, 70, 80 feet leaving our power lines as vulnerable as our houses.

So why not think out of the box? My neighbor’s 65ft tree fell on his house but caused no damage t because of a large abutting arbor which cushioned the tree fall. Maybe this is the key to thinking of ways to protect houses from falling trees? Reinforced protection trim? Eaves with foam buffers. Rooftop airbags? A non-lightning conducting roof rim and tree catcher?

Half-timbered colonials may seem untouchable but once upon a time, so did cars without seat belts and footballers without armor. Injuries changed that – so why don’t we learn that lesson within the fragile sanctuaries of our own homes?

Could the trees be restrained? If you go to any circus, you will see acrobats hanging from threads – so why shouldn’t trees be similarly restrained by cheap, invisible non-conducting Kevlar-based materials. In some cases, they might use roof nets. In most cases, groups of trees could be networked, some harnessed others restrained. One day, we might be able to genetically shorten our trees, extend their roots or somehow anchor them in rock - but right now they are looming giants that threaten us with every storm.

Microgrids – Personal Energy and a Power Internet
Once a tree falls on a power line whole towns and even regions pay the price because the power grid is an interdependent and not very fault-tolerant mid 20th Century contraption. The obvious answer is to cordon it off into Microgrids that can provide their own energy outside of the Grid. These are ideal for downtown business districts, the town hall and schools but could also apply to whole neighborhoods. This would use a combination of Con Ed power and locally produced solar, wind, cogeneration, sound-baffled generators, fuel cell, clean natural gas or a new advanced technologies.

There are also major safety advantages because these Microgrids can use non-lethal DC transmission: streets will not be closed by downed lines and temporary workarounds are easy. The wires are smaller and therefore easier to hide or bury. They can generate their own energy during expensive peak hours while buying cheap off-peak power from the Grid. They also enable smart measuring, metering and powerbalancing appliances during peak periods – something that will only increase if we adopt battery-powered cars

When you consider the savings from tax credits the ability to create local energy (according to the U.S. Dept of Energy, as much as 9.5% of power is lost on AC transmission lines) and funds from the recovery budget Microgrids start to make economic sense. Most of all, there is a growing consensus that these represent the future of power and towns that don’t take advantage when they can will be left behind.

While we applaud the quick cleanup after the storm and the willingness to discuss the issues – the agenda has to move from the familiar and politically hardened debates to a realistic look at our immediate vulnerabilities and the rapidly evolving technologies that will transform our energy usage. Otherwise this storm will be a true disaster when it just might have been a blessing in disguise – one that opened the door to smart, safe and lower-cost green energy.

Alan Brody is an internet entrepreneur who recently graduated from the NYU-Poli Cleanech Execuive Program whose classmate Mathew Fairy and professor Mel Horwich assisted in developing these ideas.

Start-Ups and Execs – A Match Made in Heaven? Event with Columbia Business Club

2010-05-25T21:34:00.001-07:00

[Report from the Columbia Business School Alumni Club event at Duane Morris, LLP moderated and co-produced by Alan Brody of iBreakfast/iEvening.]

Speakers:

Chris Fralic, Partner, First Round Capital

Tom Bennett, co-founder, Pond5.com

Tommaso Trionfi of Lusyte

David Blumenstein, The Hatchery

In this challenged economy it would seem the obvious place for jobs growth is with Start-Ups. For an executives of a certain age and status, and for Start-Ups struggling to find their way, it would seem like a good match – good for the economy and job creation too.

As it turns out, it’s not that easy.

Start-Ups have long offered execs the opportunity to be on their advisory committees, but this is usually for stock and almost never for cash. Often, this appears to be for window dressing or networking - their advice not actually needed.

That changes when the execs are considered instrumental in raising money or are believed to have the “golden rolodex” for sales or business contacts. So, in the Start-Up world where advice is not that sought after, capital is key and payments are hardly made, why bother?

As it turns out, for execs who make the right relationships early, Start-Ups that succeed can scale quickly, according to Chris Fralic, a Partner at First Round Capital, whose largest portfolio company grew to 600 employees in less than 4 years.

According to Tommaso Trionfi of Lusyte, who helped a flailing Start-Up that had just 2 months of capital left raise $900,000, it took a modest investment and a restructuring of the company. Then the Start-Up went back to the same investors they had already approached and were able to raise an eye-popping amount for this economy.

One of the reasons expertise is less valued than plain cash is the relationships have to work – the chemistry can’t be piped in. With Tom Bennett, co-founder of Pond5, a start-up that got funding through the iBreakfast/iEvening Entrepreneur program, he worked with an experienced executive in the video business that first came on in an advisory capacity. Over time, the relationship thrived and Bennett went on to bring him on board as COO.

David Blumenstein of the Hatchery, which searches for deals among many Start-Ups, the issue is one of readiness for the entrepreneurial world. There is no support staff, you wear many hats and there is no 9-5. For many execs coming from the big corporation world, there is a step-down, re-education process.

Nevertheless, as start-ups grow, they need to get experienced executives on board. Either they choose for themselves, says Triomfi or the VCs will do it for them later. At least if they make the choice, they can find out if the chemistry works while the VCs may impose someone on them they don’t really like.

The VC view, according to Fralic, whose company is considered a “Superangel” - investing up to around $500,000 per deal - these issues are viewed on a case by case basis. Often, they prefer executives who grow within the company, where the chemistry is better and the cost of hiring may well be cheaper. But in any case, the re-education process has a few steps – some on the inside. Some on the outside.

Execs need to think small, be savvy and innovative. They can’t expect the same pay and have to take equity. Even advisors cannot expect the fat corporate fees. If they once got $350 an hour they will have to accept $50 and $75 and consider the rest an investment in the future of the company or their relationship with the VC. They will have to live, act and think cheap. Expense accounts barely apply and the work hours are not family friendly. The start- up will probably change course several times as it seeks its true market.

Finally, there is the issue of outward appearance. Experienced execs know they have to reinvent themselves for the new, fast-moving media and technology business world which is vastly different from the same world just 3 years ago. That can be daunting but, if done well, their experience still counts for a lot – for example, the former Polaroid exec who tells a Facebook photobook start-up what decades old research says about their true marketplace, and is right. Bbut they have to learn Facebook, Twitter, FourSquare, iPhones, iPads. More importantly, they need to start flashing around these totems of the new workplace or they won’t even be considered.

Reinvent, talk tech, buy gadgets, start relationships, get hired …..

Next Job Generation iEvening: Agile Funding - June 23

Report from Job Generation II - May 2010

2010-05-06T14:44:00.000-07:00

Speakers:Will Porteous, General Partner, RRE Ventures
Paul Borgese, Digital Strategist, AP
Graham Lawlor, Ultra Light Start-Ups

Hosted by Alan Brody

[Job Generation is covered again on NY1.]

Job Generation II unfolded yesterday at Herrick, Feinstein, LLP on Park Ave. Now with a revised format and your host Alan Brody, back at the helm, this event moved at a quick pace showcasing new business ideas and interesting executive crossfire.
Job Gen is where Executives have the chance pitch Entrepreneurs with their ability to manage, rethink, grow, finance or otherwise get a Start-Up off the ground.
There is always a VC in residence - in this case Will Porteous of RRE Ventures - and a couple of sidekicks, Graham Lawlor, Founder of Ultralight Startups and Paul Borgese, a digital strategist with Associated Press.
This new format moves quickly with entrepreneurs not only being able to tell their story to the investment community but also to find out what a brain trust of savvy execs would make of their enterprises. For most of them it was invaluable advice.
How many Start-Ups understand the true value of their company? How many know how to position it or who to sell their services or products to. Our savvy group weighed in with enough good insight to improve their chances of growing their businesses and raising capital.
We began with a quick story from Tommaso Trionfi of Lusyte who helped a social media start-up, running out of money, to raise what today is an unheard of amount of money - close to $1 million - simply by spending time with them and reshaping their business plan.
On that note we moved into our presenters:
Bahar Gidwani of CSRhub.com was advised to become a kind of Moodies of socially responsible companies and consider bringing on a famous spokesperson in lieu of or as a way to raise money.
Paul Orlando of chatfe.com, a voice chat system, was advised to take the enterprise route - selling it to companies that need to call up for internal advice between employees.
Autoslash’s Jonathan Weinberg, a discount car rental booking service was advised to find a travel partner.
Dora Tarver’s e-projectmanager.com ran into some crossfire from execs who saw her as competing with the giant Project Manger’s Institute. But execs in the audience saw a difference picture and were encouraged by her 16,000 project manager subscribers worldwide. Adding a social media angle seemed like an obvious and potentially lucrative route.
ConeXus’s Hunter Cohen, a kind of behavioral targeting method by tracking social media relationships, was advised to find a media partner - no small task.
The executives on the panel voted the Most Valuable Players were:
Dan Cohen, as Chief Executive Officer, clearthink.com
Laura McCann Ramsey, as Chief Marketing Officer. Wsywygllc.com
Other participants included: Bill Reinisch, XIV River; Martha Lorini, Bill Simon and Paul Wegener, waveberg.com

What’s the Secret Sauce in an Out Sourced World?

2010-04-12T21:31:00.000-07:00

Are you a linchpin or a munchkin? We have an answer…..and its management.

David Rose’s keynote at NY Entrepreneur's Week put the question of what is valuable in a "virtual business world?" Once upon a time, Ford Motor was a vertically integrated company with 100,000 employees in the Rouge River plant making everything it needed down to the actual paper in their car manuals. Same with Fleischmann’s yeast in Peekskill, NY. Nowadays, only a fool would operate that way when you can outsource everything, minimize your overhead and start a business on a dime.

Great, but then who holds value here? The Entrepreneur, of course – you can’t outsource Entrepreneurs, said Rose. You could feel the room swelling at the thought of being the economy’s new linchpin (as defined say, by guru Seth Godin). But then they heard that only about 1% of start-ups ever get funded and, in the virtual, cloud-y, outsourced age, they don’t get that much by way of valuations, thereby making them feel more like economic munchkins.

Despite that, the investors all say the bet is not on the idea, it is really on you, the entrepreneur and your ability to execute. You are the real talent.

Its been my experience that anytime someone calls you a genius - or linchpin, for that matter - they are definitely not paying you, or they are paying you more compliments than cash. You may be a genius Mr. or Ms. Entrepreneur but not a rich one and not with a lot of equity to hold on to.

Still, the entrepreneurs hang on to every word hoping to hear where that check is coming from. And for how much! That is obviously the purpose of Entrepreneurs Week. But should it be, when in age of 8.4 million unemployed where the cheapest resource may be talent and not Angel VC dollars?

In the outsourced world, why do you even need all this investor money when you can get most of the development on your own dime with a credit card or two and some friends and family money? One answer is that many Start-Ups think of Investors as a kind of jackpot winning. The other is that they think investment translates into sales.

It does neither.

Even Rose complains that only 1 in 10 of his investments pan out.

The thing that matters, the secret behind the sauce and the thing no-one was talking about is the management. The entrepreneur may be like Dave Brubeck, but Dave (and I have seen him play) needs at least 3 really professional musicians to make his sound come alive. That’s management. He may be CEO of his jazz band but those players are not lackeys, they are key ingredients to his extraordinary success.

Yet management, better management never came up in the conversation. It was missed in a few other panels except fleetingly in the bootstrapping one which Scott Shuster managed so well…….

This may not be oversight so much as a belief that real start-ups can’t afford good management. How wrong are they! The country is full of great executive talent thrown out of the marketplace at the peak of their experience. They are available and yet no one even hinted at the possibility! Fortunately, as savvy souls in our own right, we at the iBreakfast can help!

So here’s a modest proposal, check out Job Generation, our new program that lets Entrepreneurs interview really savvy execs to find out how they would run their company for them. Get free advice and a wealth of powerful contacts. You may hire them, a VC might pay you to hire them or they may come on board with their own money. One of these execs we know raised $900,000 for a Social Media start-up by going to his former Wall Street colleagues. Try doing that at an Angel group!

Most importantly, it is management – a superior team of high-functioning execs that sell things which, in the old days, is how people used to make money. They can also raise your valuation dramatically, not just in dollar figures but in the termsheets themselves. Inexperienced start-ups get one kind of termsheet (lousy) savvy execs get the better one.

The real opportunity is like no other – thousands of savvy execs are waiting around to meet you. For now, and for now only. When the economy picks up you can pretty much forget about them, they won’t be taking your call. If they do, you won’t be able to afford them. Today they are like your server, a part of the cloud…..

So do yourself a favor, get those savvy execs on your side and then talk to the VCs. Not the other way around. The execs can make you the genius you really are because they benefit by increasing your value, the investors only care about improving their odds and downplaying your value. Sorry, but it's true.

So while everyone was hyping the cloud and open source and the low cost wisdom of the crowd, they forgot to tell you about the real talent that's available: the once-in-a-lifetime firesale of Harvard, Wharton, Columbia, Fordham, Kellog and you-name-it, MBA’s who like to share with you, a minute or two of their time.

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Additional notes: One audience member actually complained, in a long-winded way, that investors never give him enough time to hear his story.........

Job Generation - Report from 1st Live Event

2010-03-29T13:47:00.000-07:00

Job Generation went live last week and it resulted in this amazing report on NY!

Thanks to all of you who followed this new event, Job Generation. There will be more and in many cities because the need is so all-encompassing: 8.4 million jobs lost, 2.1 million gone forever.

Our experience with the first live event is that executives realize the need to reinvent themselves. This is an ideal forum to make a case for their expertise in public where they can display how they think on their feet.

Start-Ups are less certain. As we discovered, many Start-Ups are leery about reaching out to veteran execs. Part of being a Start-Up is doing your own thing - until you need to raise money or just grow the business. That's where the savvy set kicks in.

In return for getting great advice and chance to acquire talent, the Start-Ups get to tell their story to the business community which increases their chances of raising capital and building their businesses. The sooner we get the message out the quicker we generate opportunity.

Investors, were also an interesting case study. The objective of JG is to find the exec and start -Up combination that offers the best increase in value. Of the executives they picked for working together, the VCs tended to go with the most thoughtful and analytical while being averse to the more outgoing and sales-y. Are the VCs right? Or do they just prefer the studious type on a personal level, perhaps viewing them as more "coachable".

Come to the next Job Generation and you be the judge.

Thanks to the feedback, we've figured out how to tweak this model so it will really crackle with creative tension - we'll be doing several more events as iEvenings, at Business Schools and in other cities.

Job Generation - Like an Investor-in-Residence Program?

2010-03-01T17:26:00.000-08:00

According to the New York Times, VC’s spend thousands on Investor-In-Residence programs. Job Generation makes it happen in front of you - and for a fraction of the price. By putting seasoned execs in front of Start-Ups to see what VCs think make them more investible we are doing much the same thing – but the for the benefit of the public.

Sign up for our first Job Gen iEvening event on March 18.

What is Job Generation?

2010-02-22T12:57:00.001-08:00

Last week we taped the pilot of “Job Generation” and in March we will roll out our first live events.

So what is Job Generation? It is a variation on Start-Up Presentations to Investors except that we include senior executives seeking leadership positions in the conversation.

The bigger picture – the part that is creating the buzz - is that new business ideas tend to come from young start-ups with little capital and less experience. They are usually energized by real world interaction with savvy execs but are too busy chasing investors to do that.

This is a uniquely informative experience because it brings savvy executives into the conversation at an early stage. Too often these executives are chasing after the same entrenched jobs that everyone else is after - so by putting these two generations of business execs face to face along with VCs, we see a variety of possibilities will occurring: employment, consulting, joint ventures and investment.

More than a "Job Interview"
Job Generation is about about more than savvy execs being interviewed by young Entrepreneur about running their companies. It is telescoping the process than made companies like Google, Apple and Microsoft great - when they raised enough money they hired senior execs that took them to the top. We are starting the conversation now hat these execs are available as a way to increase their chances of raising money or building sales.

Polaroid goes Facebook - Lesson from the Job Generation Pilot

In the first Job Generation, a former exec from Polaroid – a great fallen American business presents to Pixable, a company that generates photobooks from Facebook – where he notes that although the technology is different, the customer base is almost exactly the same, young women. The Pixable founders agree and they want to hire this exec. The VC on the other hand, would prefer they hire an exec with operations experience. The net result is a blend of consulting and strategic rethinking and maybe a hire or a consulting opportunity…….

In this environment have seen roll-ups, consulting arrangement and joint ventures or alliances of one kind or another. After all, only a tiny number of start-ups are investible – somewhere between 2 – 10%. So, to a large extent this is an exploration of what happens to the rest of those start-ups. Often, these are concepts that need further sales or business development provided through a joint venture context. By taking this conversation beyond the purely start-up funding conversation, we allow many more business opportunities to flourish. When business grow through sales, investors find them!

Business Discovery

One thing we learn about what the CEOs bring to the table when they talk to Entrepreneurs is a deeper understanding of the true nature of their businesses. We also have VCs at the table to help the parties understand what each can do to increase the value proposition and make them more investible.

Starting in March we will be doing a regular series of Job Generation events. In addition, all iBreakfasts going forward will still have the typical informative content but will also feature this interaction between Start-Ups and experienced execs as part of the warm-up session.

The Theory Behind Job Generation: Raising the Investibility Quotient

For those who have experienced our “Hierarchy of Start-Ups” presentation, you’ll know the most investible class of start-ups, at lest in sheer numbers re those who have these key attributes:

• 10 Years or more of domain experience in a field

• Identify and industry-specific problem

• Have a team with the solution that the mother company doesn't value

• Have an existing relationship with the natural buyers

If this is you, your check is in the mail! Most start-ups aren't like this but we find that putting them together with savvy execs can get them much closer to this fundability zone - and that is the basic goal of Job Generation.

Unexpected Entrepreneur? A New Way to Understand Creating Your Own Business

2010-02-04T06:15:00.001-08:00

Are you an "Unexpected Entrepreneur"? this popular presentation lists the "secret code" of Start-Ups http://slidesha.re/U12Ik

Unexpected Entrepreneur Presentation

View more presentations from iBreakfast.

Job Generation: The next phase of the iBreakfast

2010-02-02T19:04:00.000-08:00

As you know the business world has changed!

After 14 years of running the iBreakfast, the iEvening for Innovators, the Web 2.0 NY Conferences and number of associated events, we are changing with it.

Our audience has always been those executives following the Digital Media revolution. Now, in this jobless recovery, what they need are more jobs.

We don’t believe the government or any state organization can make that happen, although they can certainly help. What really makes a difference is when entrepreneurs develop a new market or find news ways to solve persistent problems.

Often these great ideas needed help and our industry has generally viewed capital as the key driver.

We think that has changed. Today, start-ups can launch for a fraction of what they once required. On a relative basis, that means business expertise and contacts are worth more than start-up capital.

So the iBreakfast is launching a series of events and media initiatives to tap this shift. For the most part, they revolve around bringing seasoned execs in front of start-ups as a way to develop new business, employment and investor relationships. As we look back, these kinds of interaction have always taken place. Now, we are going to accelerate the process because we think it is the key to developing a new wave of employment opportunities.

So look out for announcements covering the following:

TV Show – will run to an audience of 50,000 on ours and partner websites
Local TV
Global Talk Weekly Radio Show
Job Generation Events
Business Opportunity Events

A Few Thoughts About Building Jobs and Innovation

2010-02-02T18:56:00.000-08:00

Innovation grows when the government encourages people to buy into it. Not every new idea is an iPod or an iPhone. Most require taking risks and overcoming inertia. But like cash for clunkers – if you give people a good reason, they line up. Governments should be required to buy say 10% of new American technology and businesses should get tax incentives to do the same.

How else can you encourage innovation?

Let’s face it, if left to their own devices, most companies and government purchasers are afraid to buy new products. So, even when the government pumps money into innovations it may not really drive business: you may get new products and services but you don’t necessarily get buyers. Besides, sales cycles are slow and many innovators lack sales skills. So the inovation cycle is not completed the companies and fail and the money is wated.

At the end of the day, it is not enough to push technology – you also have to pull it by creating a buying incentive.

The most spectaculalry successful plan for boosting business was the cash for clunkers which gave people a clear incentive and moved cars off the the lots. Sales is is what drives innovation, everyithing else is more or less welfare.

Report from the VC Outlook iBreakfast

2009-11-27T08:43:00.000-08:00

More Funding, Low Valuations, Getting M&A Ready

With a fast-growing entrepreneur environment - thanks to the somewhat recovering economy, this is a good time to go back to investors and find out what they are looking for. As we know, valuations are low, exits are limited but the business idea mill goes on nonetheless.

Now that the 40 plus set is the fastest-growing portion of the entrepreneurial class, the fundable ideas tend to be niche solutions. Geoff Judge talked about his own pre-investor record at 24/7 Media and true to form, is looking at investing in new kinds of ad networks - especially ones that are focused on specific high-growth areas.

Juan Lopez-Alcarcel described a kind of localization ploy that is quite common in Europe. When a US restaurant reservation company tried to spend money opening up in Europe, the locals quickly demurred when they realized their businesses would now appear on record and therefore subject to taxes. So a local entrepreneur stepped in with a similar idea but without the record-keeping. Often, local knock-offs like the first German version of eBay get acquired - or they just do well by using local knowledge.

Michael Kurdziel talked about exits which today, are mostly M&A. However, VC investment appears to be growing and new markets are emerging to trade and therefore create liquidity for founders stock. The bottom line, however, seems to be: find out what companies are buying and make your start-up M&A ready!

About the Speakers
Michael Kurdziel is the Managing Director of Landmark Ventures. He was a Partner and Managing Director with ARC Investment Partners, a Director at Activision, Inc., and a founding member of DealerTrack (Nasdaq: TRAK).

Juan Lopez-Valcarcel the Managing Director for The Digital
Sunrise Group, a new incubator and angel investment group for European digital startups. He was a VP in the Digital Media team at NBC Universal and the General Manager for iVillage.com

Geoff Judge is an active investor in early stage companies and member of The NY Angels. He was the Chief Revenue Officer of Piczo and COO of Preclick, a Digital Photography software firm with clients such as Hewlett Packard, Wal-Mart, Costco, and Sandisk.

Film Funding iEvening Report (Nov)

2009-11-27T08:40:00.000-08:00

Raising Money, Marketing and Shooting Digitally

Understandably, filmmakers are focused on making the film and not about marketing it. Raising the money is so hard, it seems almost reasonable to expect that if you do, everyone will come to see it. That's not necessarily so. The good news is that although Hollywood has always put a lot of money into marketing movies - often consuming as much as half the budget - in the digital age, there are many new options for independents.

Since you can build an audience while you are making the movie - it is not only possible to pre-market the movie but you may also develop a better understanding of your audience so that the film is ideally crafted for their tastes. This was almost unimaginable in the old days - especially for independent producers. In the digital age- it is highly possible.

So we began with a case study of sorts - Richard Temtchine's new movie, "How to Seduce Difficult Women" came out to an appreciative audience but vicious critics. What transpired was an expensive process of discovering his true audience - 18-24 males and mature women. Apparently, young males appreciate the idea of a challenge and mature women enjoy their complexities. Had he known in advance, he might have avoided the critics and gone directly to these specific markets. With social media it could have been possible to find them. We will discover going forward how he accomplishes it. In the meantime, the movie will be re-launched in May, probably recut and not at any film festival either because, according to Richard, they do not do a good of job selling movies - only of selling themselves.

Marc Jacobson talked about New York State tax benefits and movie dealmaking with much experience, big names and great stories. And for a lawyer - he spoke with great passion (although his last deal did feature a famous lawyer......). Here's a quick one - if you can start a movie in by Dec. 31 and your investor is awash in passive real estate income, you can write off up to around $400,000 of the flick. For this Thanksgiving, if you have a movie in you - rush to your landlord. Working him or her into the storyline could help.

Tom Ellis, a producer who has worked on many independent movies talked about savvy techniques for saving money on a shoot - like keeping a low profile and shooting with a new jerry-rigged camera that uses a better chip than the Red camera for a fraction of the price..

Jay Levy of Zelkova Ventures talked about investing in a digital network rather than content itself - a typical stance of investors. Likewise, many filmmakers talk about a slate of movies as a way to offset risk. But does that really work in this troubled time? Our answer is build an audience and then the investors will come. Digital Media enables that and it will be the theme of many more of our evenings to come - returning in January

The FREE Attack Report

2009-10-16T11:35:00.000-07:00

FREE is a powerful word and a powerful force – but it doesn’t always work out the way you expect. For example this FREE iBreakfast had our lowest turnout ever - and it was essentially FREE. Apparently, people will always pay for things they are think are worthwhile to them or somehow elevate their status – and FREE never does that.

This certainly applies to the world of physical goods (atoms and bagels). What about digital?

In this iBreakfast we took a deep long look at the digital world where FREE is really big and almost everything online has a zero marginal – once you cover your base there are minimal additional costs. By now everyone in the business gets this.

The real issue is what happens when digital FREE goes after non-digital or quasi-digital business. This is the essence of the FREE attack. We see it in Eric Frank’s Flatworld Publishing company which is going after he high-priced College text book publishers. Flatworld can ride the industry down from $10bn to $1bn because their business model is digitally energized: they get, in effect subsidized professors who developed teaching materials on the job to create textbooks inexpensively and then give them away for free on the web- but then charge for the printed versions and other learning support services.

Tim Fielding at Riverphonic advises mobile clients on dealing with FREE and increasingly this will be an issue – especially as web-based services crowd out the telco’s hold on the phone deck. Additionally, almost every paid or premium web service today is likely to come under a FREE attack empowered by localization (a free feature of mobile) e.g. localized free Yelp vs. Paid Zagats. Likewise Apps are quickly tuning into free ad fodder and so on.

The big question people are asking everywhere is – how do you compete with Free? The answer seems to be (1) figure out how the competitor is being funded and meet or beat that and then (2) offer a better experience (e.g. personalized, pro version or celebrity back) or rely on (3) tribe, community or status tends to trump everything. If people are on your side they’ll keep paying.

Then, take this advice for what it’s worth – FREE.

Download presentations: Flat World Knowledge Riverphonic

Note: As we write this report one of our colleagues in the Industry is facing a Free Attack – hope he takes notes. His company charges for higher priced events that give entrepreneurs access to investors. Another group wants to give it away for FREE. But if he follows the above tenets – he should do just fine. Right?

Response to Jason Calacanis' Attack on Mike Segal & Private Equity Forumss

2009-10-16T11:30:00.000-07:00

I know Mike Segal of Private Equity Forums and we even promote his events. So let me stick up for him in this way: his events bring out-of-town investors and entrepreneurs to New York. That is his strong suit and has been doing that well for years, filling up room after room with investors and entrepreneurs. He deals with what I call pedigreed starts-ups: people who have serious experience in their fields, have put a good amount of money into it and can afford to pay to be in this league. Dotcoms are a small part of his world - most of his Entrepreneurs have biotech, heavy engineering, energy, packaged goods or financial services businesses.

These obey very different rules from the digital world that Jason and his cohort inhabit – so before we get into some version of class war let’s understand that we are dealing with other classes of new enterprise.

As the organizer of the iBreakfast I should state that we run very modestly-priced start-up events and we give our winning entrepreneurs tickets to Mike Segal’s events so they can see what his world looks like. Some of it is familiar but a lot of it is very different – his investors usually look for revenue, tangible assets, assumable debt and a host of things dotcoms start-ups are oblivious to.

I can’t argue with Jason or anyone that access to investors ought to be Free. Why not? If Fred Wilson or Steve Jurvetson wants to see you – go ahead. They might even throw in a VitaminWater or buy you lunch. But unless you’re a serial entrepreneur and were recommended to them, the chances are the don’t want to see you. So events like Mike Segal’s and to some extent, the iBreakfast have emerged put you right in front of investors and get you into the general recommendation system. By organizing it into a marketplace they are entitled to charge what the market will bear. In that respect Mike is no different from a trade show producer or the Wall Street broker that takes his commission and the spread.

If you think he is charging too much – don’t pay. The iBreakfast offers a low-cost pitching event that grooms, educates and gives start-ups access to investors for a nominal $125. We don’t market it like crazy but then we also don’t pack dozens and dozens of investors into one place. So take your pick. As for the groups that do it more or less free, go to them – but they are probably oversubscribed and they’ll make you wait.

So, should one approach drive out the other or should all of these coexist?

If Jason can attract Investors and Entrepreneurs from all over the region – or the country to an event, do it on a regular basis and give it away for Free, I say more power to him. I might have a plan or two I’d like to trot out myself.

But keep in mind a few things. Free often drives out the good. Without a financial incentive there is a good chance the forum will run out of steam. Even if the forum continues, they still have to add some kind of value that makes it worthwhile for the investors to show up and for the best pitches to rise to the top. If they can do that, Free may win. Even so, many companies would still rather pay for all kinds of reasons like speed to the investor market or controlling their destiny.

A big question is why would Jason do it for Free. I buy his “sticking up for the hood” motive up to a point, but the real deal is publicity for his Mahalo “people powered” pedicab of a search engine, he needs to attract contributors, fire up his base them up and make them feel important.

As for the profit motive, well excuse me, Jason had no trouble charging over $1,000 for his Silicon Alley conferences when he could – thereby keeping good information and contacts away from the needy. Tech Crunch 50 is not Free. So why should these organizers behave differently? If Mike Segal can save his Entrepreneurs from traveling all over the country just to see investors and get the word out at once, then there is a value in it. Something like a road show in one place. Plus, many investors take this kind of effort seriously and see this as separating these Entrepreneurs from the pack – those which just can’t afford the effort and therefore may not be as viable.

That’s why these events take place at fancy ballrooms and not at a taco stand – it makes people take these presentations seriously. Maybe the investor should be paying for the lunch but the market dictates otherwise. Trust me, the doctor who just prescribed Jason his self-righteousness pills didn’t pay for his own lunch either if he didn’t want to. The drug company was happy to pick up that tab. More importantly, if an Entrepreneur is flying in from Minneapolis, Free starts to look very iffy while a paid event says “this is happening” and his time and travel costs will not be wasted on a flake out. Likewise, investors realize their time is unlikely to be wasted by people who are not really committed to their new enterprise.

Having said all that, I actually welcome Free because it forces the paid guys to do a better job or else. Plus it gives the posers a chance to discover their real selves before they do something silly like empty their trust funds.

As to which approach is really better – let’s say they are different and serve different purposes that may ultimately harmonize. A free event favors just-out-of-college start-ups with those big moonshot ideas like the next Twitter, iPhone Killer App or Search Engine (know of any?) Few succeed but the ones that do, make it really big. They change the world.

Paid events favor the seasoned player – the pedigreed start-up that has 10 years of experience in a field, often a mundane one where they see the real opportunity in their space, know the players, the customers and so on. There is less pizzazz and few ground-shaking ideas. The payoff is more earthly but to the investor, is also a safer bet.

The true serial (and successful) entrepreneur which includes Jason, only has to pick up the phone. The sensible entrepreneur has to know which category they belong in before they choose their path but they all have their place.

My prediction – a year from now, all these forums will exists in one way or another. All will do a better job and all will charge about the same – even the Free.

The New Free Attack

2009-10-01T15:21:00.000-07:00

An introduction to our Oct. 7 (almost) FREE iBreakfast

When you make something FREE something else becomes valuable. That, according to Chris Anderson, the author of the popular new book FREE, is the secret to fighting against the phenomenon that more and more industries are having to battle: The FREE attack.

The Recording Industry, Newspapers, Magazines and Hollywood have already faced this assault – so maybe we think we’ve learned a thing or two. We know ad-supported FREE (as in get eyeballs and ads will follow) and Freemium (give away the low end so that 5-10% will pay for the high end).

What's worse, according to a study reported in the Silicon Alley Insider - when you get a FREE Attack - you can't have it both ways and be a mix (a/k/a Freemium) you either go completely FREE or completely subscription.

Even as we absorb that message - we also need to look at something new that's coming.

The new FREE ties to together the major themes of the past few years – Social Media, User Generated Media and Open Source – and then turns it on entrenched players. That could be your typical Fortune 500 Company, the Government or you.

Just to be clear, the Internet introduced a kind of growth based on abundance (low-cost bandwidth) and zero-marginal cost – so once a site paid off its ever-lower set-up expenses, adding new customers cost very little. That’s standard digital FREE.

The New FREE is when companies aggregate Crowd Wisdom and particularly, Social Media groups, to go after high value targets. Flat World Knowledge is using this to go after the high value college text book industry: by using professors without typical publishing advances they are able to give away the books to students – and still make money. How long before mobile apps are harnessed in a high value way, like providing a virtual guide or legal assistant – an crowdsourced expert who comes to your phone – and goes after areas where customers are paying for high value information?

It doesn’t have to be completely FREE to qualify for an Attack. Just being so abundant that it is, as Anderson puts it, too “cheap to meter” is good enough. Look what happened to AOL’s hourly charge when the Internet become to too cheap to meter. Could that happen with the hourly billing system at a PR Agency, law firm or even Con Edison, when renewable energy really kicks in?

Abundance has its problems too. Facebook may be FREE but who pays us for stealing my children’s attention for hours a day as they jockey for social standing? FREE email means spam. When 18h Century settlers around the Appalachians learned to grow corn in abundance they soon found the best way to store it was to make whiskey. That lead to oddities like farmers drinking whiskey for breakfast. When the government tried to levy a tax it sparked a rebellion. The solution, as it runs out was Canal and then Railroad transportation which brought the corn to market while it was still fresh.

So yes, where there is FREE there is a solution of one kind or another. It just may not be obvious and it may not come quickly - but its there.

Soon, the tobacco industry and all the governments that depend on their steep taxes will be embroiled in a similar Attack as e-Cigarettes bring on “almost FREE” both in terms of health and cost to this age-old practice.

Barry Diller is latest Media Baron to take on FREE and believes he can get people to pay for content that others expect to get FREE. Maybe he knows something. But as the smartest players have found out, FREE and Paid can coexist in many ways – often reinforcing each other with FREE offering exposure and paid offering quality assurance, times saving, exclusivity and status.

Our next iBreakfast on October 7 will take this whole issue apart at our first (almost) FREE event. It's FREE to members and their guests……..and as our New FREE definition explains, that qualifies as FREE.

Report from the Glitter in Twitter II iBreakfast

2009-09-25T05:49:00.000-07:00

Phil Perlman, StockTwits
Stephen Gilberg, WineTwits
David Berkowitz, 360i
Ariel Hyatt, CyberPR

By revisiting Twitter we learned that smart marketers have used the microblog platform to develop a following and then build a platform on top of that. Giving people timely, essential information was the key to growing a loyal audience for StockTwits which enables investors to follow the picks of savvy traders. Now, according to Phil Perlman, their website has become a hub for independent investors, traders and other high-value Wall Street players.

Stephen Gilberg used Twitter to build a following for his WineTwits start-up, where wine-lovers could crow about their favorite wines in real time. That has grown into “Social Grapevine”, a wine drinkers’ social portal with useful filters and Twitter management tools that any social marketer might covet.

David Berkowitz talked about the ways his corporate clients have used Twitter and Social Media Sites to develop business. He even offers a free handbook called “The Social Media Playbook.”

Ariel Hyatt talked about the ways musicians, mostly independent, but also established artists, have learned to use Social Media to build a following. With Twitter, they have learned, the more personal, the better. After all, they not dealing with customers but fans. While some musicians “just want to play their instrument” many others have figured out the lessons of Godin’s “Tribes” and Anderson’s “1,000 True Fans.” With a following, and no record company to pay back, many musicians have learned how to flourish.

Is Apple the Evil Empire?

2009-08-13T11:22:00.000-07:00

Is Apple Really Evil?
As an old Apple person - I mean old as in covering Apple from way back in the now dead-and-gone Apple trade publications like MacWEEK, I can answer this very simply. They are not a technology company, they are a religion. They are giving us "cool people's technology" and they charge a tithe - about a 10% premium over non-Apple products - where they compete - and much, much more - where they don't. They expect followers to pay in blood sacrifice to be the first in line and rarely apologize when they abuse them for doing so. Likewise, their followers never really complain.

Some people say Apple is a cult - and they certainly are. That is why no one can really compete with them because they don't understand what it means to be a cult: You have to be very good, very important - you have to die in public - and then come back to life. That describes Steve Jobs and with him, Apple. No one in their right mind asks for this role but if it is foist upon you and you thrive - ordinary mortals cannot compete against you.

Apple is just competing against ordinary, grubby mortals: number-crunching tech execs, power-mad entertainment execs, government flunkies and shabby lawyers. Apple almost always wins - or at least wins in the public relations arena.

However Apple is more than a cult because they are just as passionately loved by ordinary users as they are by the geeky priest class. That makes them a religion. Because of that, Apple could survive the passing of Jobs.

So if you think religion is evil, then Apple pretty much is evil. You want technology heaven? You follow their path. That's how religions work. At least Apple delivered us from the temptation of illegal downloading, the darkness of Crackberry, the demon of Vista and so on. Then they made a deal with the devil - AT&T. This is like the cool early Christians, some gnostic - most not - teaming up with the Roman Emperor, Constantine. He made them bigger, established and formidable but something got sacrificed with that.

What got sacrificed is just what people like Mahalo's Jason Calacanis is complaining about. The cool open web is now a closed garden. It is the formal church. Just as Constantine threw out the heretics who would not hew to the canon - you can't just do what you bloody well want on an iPhone. No Google Voice, says Jason. No porn. No unapproved apps. No holy spirit other than AT&T. In return, you pay your dues, confess at the genius bar over sins against machine and pray for the high holy days of new product releases.

That's the deal we make with regular belief systems and Apple will not change any more than your favorite religion will. At least not fundamentally. So if you are talking about competing with Apple then you'll need some religion of your own because you can't seriously do this by numbers, or by the book.

Look at Microsoft - they were never better than Apple - but they got richer because they were anointed by a higher Power a/k/a IBM which gave them the exclusivity of owning their operating system. (Watch out AT&T!)

So all those Google/Android/Palm Pre iPhone wannabes take heed. You can do OK against Apple by offering better features, better mobile carriers, lower prices and blah blah blah. But you can't win unless you're willing to be great, die and come back to life - in public. Or get a higher power to anoint you. Become the official phone of the Obama White House with one free call to the man. Or put yourself at the heartbeat of youth culture - say, by buying up every major record label and film company. Or better than that, finance their talent directly..... Or pay for every kid's online college education.....

Then maybe.

Mobile Apps Revisited - DigiDays Apps Conference

2009-08-13T10:17:00.000-07:00

A few thoughts from the Aug 12 Mobile Apps Conference

(First, a little disclosure - since we covered this topic at the May iBreakfast, everything I say may be tinged with professional jealousy. Or, I may just be right.)

Not a lot came out of the Mobile Apps Conference that we didn't already know - other than the fact that marketers are waking up to the App Business and so it is about to get much bigger. Since we were able to cover in 1.5 hours most of what took a whole day to discuss - and 3 months in advance - you can see why the iBreakfast is in its 14th year.

BOTTOM LINE

Fremium Model: Almost all sales models are Fremium based - give away the sampler and upgrade user to the paid version. Expect a 1% conversion rate.

Make Ad Deals: Everyone who can't sell their Apps - and that would be the vast majority of developers - needs to find a niche with a true need or a way to make a deal with an advertiser. Often, these deals are about expanding the free sample universe so they can get a higher number of paid conversions.

Jason Calacanis Keynote
The one-time publisher of the Silicon Alley Reporter asked who remembered that swashbuckling publication from the heyday of rebel internet world. Of maybe 150 people, 3 hands went up. Note to self - marketers are young and constantly being replaced.

As founder of Mahalo - a people-powered search engine - Jason's rationale was talking about the Apps he'd like to see. With App saturation being the topic de jour, that was a fairly lame pretext (several of the ideas which he pulled from his people-powered search list were already Apps) to talk about what he really wanted to talk about: Mahalo and the Evil Apple Empire.

No point in discussing Mahalo and human-powered search here. They have their place. So do pedicabs and Central Park buggies. But the Evil Apple Empire is a great topic and delivered by Jason with much aplomb. It is such a rich discussion that I'll devote a separate blog....

Report from the Sold Out White Plains iBreakfast: Social Media for Business

2009-08-07T07:46:00.000-07:00

Michael Terpin, Social Radius
David Berkowitz, 360i
Selina McCusker, Personal Branding
Stephen Gilberg

Alan Brody introduced the this first-time event by talking about the Obama campaign as more than a new way of succeeding in politics but rather as a whole new way of doing business - and a key indicator of how other businesses need to reinvent their customer relationships. The difference between economically thriving vs. contracting regions seems to be whether or not they are in on the conversation about the use of new technologies. The iBreakfast is all about the conversation.

Michael Terpin talked about the impressive “Yes We Can” video video used to help turn the Obama campaign around on Super Tuesday. The important element, he said, was getting the middle universe of bloggers at the largest section of the bell curve, interested in their message.

David Berkowitz began by offering his 4 Basic Rules of Social Media and then other elements of his Social Marketing Playbook. He followed that up with the ways Fortune 500 companies are using Social Media to engage customers.

Selina McCusker talked about using Social Media in unexpected ways for corporate clients.

Stephen Gilberg showed how he built his following of 37,000 in the wine business by focusing on the oenophile's desire to share notes on their favorite wines, and then monetizing it by selling them quality wine at below-market rates.

Notes: Sign up for the WineTwits beta site. To see the overall map of Social Media see the Conversation Prism.

Does your town need to be part of the conversation? Talk to us about opening an iBreakfast in your city.

The Obama Campaign and White Plains iBreakfast: Social Media and the Tipping Point

2009-08-04T06:48:00.000-07:00

Michael Terpin, who helped engineer the "Yes We Can" viral video with will.i.am is speaking tomorrow. Aside from telling us how he got to 40 million viewers and tons of press - this is a great time to ruminate on the power of Social Media. After all, it brought us an entirely new kind of President.

We all know the usual - harnessing the long tail, word of mouth, crowdfunding etc. But what about the gradual mass change of opinion anticipated by Obama's literary doppelganger, Malcolm Gladwell. While he never mentions Obama, Gladwell, whose 3 books (Tipping Point, Blink & Outliers) are still on the best-seller list was talking about a change in state, and he too is bi-racial. His books talked abut the paving new ways while paving the way.

Social Media, in other words, is not only a tool but a kind of change predictor and instigator. We're going to learn more about this tomorrow. But one thing is sure - we have entered into a new world of doing business, the likes of which we have never seen before.

We need all the change predictors we can get!

Report from July - New VC Vistas iBreakfast

2009-07-29T08:12:00.000-07:00

"Who Moved My VC?"

Steven Arnold, Arnold IT
Allan Young, PCMexchange
Slava Rubin, IndieGoGo

Open Season for Open Source
Entrepreneurs looking for new funding got an eye-opener to the future at the July iBreakfast. Top of the list - according to Steve Arnold, is that open-source is becoming a mandate for all government-related RFPs. If you are going after of City, State or Federal money - these are the magic words.

Crowdfunding
For Entrepreneurs looking beyond the tight VC market - where many, many deals are chasing very selective investors offering low valuations - PCMexchange holds hope for the future. Here Entrepreneurs can raise money directly from pools of investors online. While this technique has been tried (Wit Capital to Prosper) sooner or later the SEC has moved in to shut them down.

But now we are seeing a new way of dealing with this.

PCM Exchange uses a new combination of techniques - it is founded by a broker-dealer and only accredited investors get access to the site. But it is it open to all entrepreneurs. The advantages for investors are that they can vet the entrepreneurs as a group - saving them from multiple due diligences. For the investors, the site will offer a kind of stock exchange thereby offering liquidity for their holdings.

IndieGoGo offers a crowfunding source for film and digital content. The trick here is that the pubic does not buy equity on the film only the equivalent of sponsorship or bragging rights.

Additional report by Guilherme Cunha

Film Funding iEvening Report

2009-07-27T08:45:00.000-07:00

Picture by Seitu Oronde

Michael Salort, Symbiotic Pictures
Martin Feinberg, Winner Media
Slava Rubin, IndieGoGo

As the first in a new series of events that cover the funding of content - this iEvening got off to a rousing start. 3 investors spoke to a packed house about the opportunities and difficulties of raising money for a film project.

The key today is audience and distribution - and most of it is digital. The old days of having a screenplay and a prayer and more or less over. There are exceptions but most indie filmmakers have to contend with using the Internet to build a pre-audience, and distribution and marketing methodology.

Symbiotic Pictures, a new veteran-driven enterprise is actively looking for close-to-completion projects that they can place and leverage into a compelling deal. Marty Feinberg, talked about his movie investments with Penny Marshall and Martin Scorsese and the film projects he is looking at today. Slava Rubin showed how his site, IndieGoGo can help moviemakers raise money from fans and build an audience at the same time - a critical ingredient in getting studio attention. And money.

A variety of projects were pitched making a powerful impression on the investors. The star of the evening was Frederic King of Fountainhead Films, two of whose projects - Manuela, about Simon Bolivar's mistress (hints of Evita) and B.I.K.E a film about counterculture cyclists - got the judges' attention. We will soon be posting these pitches online through an arrangement with IndieGoGo.

Additional report by Guilherme Cunha