The BBC's Dragon's Den has some eye-opening examples of a broad range of pitches, and is actually quite revealing of the difference in mindset between investor and investor.
Avoid powerpoint altogether. Turn up with a cheap video camera, let the investors shoot video themselves, process it on the spot and show an A/B comparison. Then be extremely prepared to answer questions, pulling up slides and more demos on demand as necessary. It's about business model, not tech. Given YouTube (as just one example) is adding more impressive post-processing options for free - their Calibration-Free Rolling Shutter Removal is pretty cool - what does your stuff do that is so different? How is your product positioned in the market, who are the other major competitors, how do they make money, what is the overall market size for this segment of tools, what is your marketing plan, how will you fend off competitors, who are the business partners, etc etc.
Far better to delay the VC route if you can. Find a strategic, patient, trustworthy and experienced angel partner. VC, from what I've seen, attempt to steer companies to where they perceive the market to be, and this is likely very different from own ideas.
In the article Forbes regurgitates two neoclassical myths - first, that money evolved naturally out of barter systems, and second that money is an expression of fixed material values grounded in processes of production.
On the first point, there is no evidence in history that money evolved out of barter systems, and a great deal of evidence that it did not. As the anthropologist Caroline Humphrey says:
No example of a barter economy, pure and simple, has ever been described, let alone the emergence from it of money; all available ethnography suggests that there never has been such a thing. (Quoted in David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years).
David Graeber adds to this:
We did not begin with barter, discover money, and then eventually develop credit systems. It happened precisely the other way around. What we now call virtual money came first. Coins came much later, and their use spread only unevenly, never completely replacing credit systems. Barter, in turn, appears to be largely a kind of accidental byproduct of the use of coinage or paper money: historically, it has mainly been what people who are used to cash transactions do when for one reason or another they have no access to currency. (David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years)
On the second point, Forbes' asserts that money is "optimal when fixed in value", that "money has only one purpose... buying and selling products", and that it is a fixed unit on the same order as material units (ala "hamburgers"). Here he is recanting the whole neoclassical bible, which states that economics and politics are separable, that government should stay out of economics or (our future standard of living will suffer), and that money is a natural expression of processes of production grounded in material value.
The castle of neoclassical theory is, however, far from complete, as the 2008 crash so clearly demonstrated. Worse, Forbes ignores this and continues to repeat neoclassical tenets as though they are fact.
Take Forbes statement that money is "optimal when fixed in value." At the limit case, this is clearly false. Assuming for a moment that money could be fixed in value, like a kind of physical unit or a determined expression of material value. Of course, this raises two issues: First, there is the problem of which material value to anchor to. Then there is conversion problem: how do we convert all other values into this fixed material unit? Assuming these could be solved, this would suggest that prices remain constant, much the same way the speed of light remains constant. How then do you explain profit, or any market at all for that matter? Clearly, Forbes must allow for at least some level of price setting, which then in turn suggests variability or "floating" of pecuniary value. Unsurprisingly, in empirically terms, no modern democratic currency is based on fixed values. The opposite is the case: currency itself is treated as a commodity that can be bought and sold on markets, and this is only possible because money does not have a fixed value.
But if monetary value is variable and not linked to material goods, what are the units of money? The answer, in neoclassical terms, is to base definitions of money on a fictitious unit, the util. Since the util is abstract and not observable directly, there remains the problem of how to measure it. Current definitions are claimed to be "reasonable" and "generally accepted" but economists. But utils remain an idealization, and hardly the known unfloating physical quantity Forbes suggests. Forbes simply glosses over or ignores the of the uncertainties and shortcomings of marginal utility theory. Nitzan and Bichler make this case convincingly in their excellent if controversial Capital as Power. They summarize:
Neoclassical theory remains an edifice built on foundations of sand. The most questionable of these
A utility service model has a fixed revenue - the number of heads. To add revenue you either have to increase the number of heads, or sell new services to the existing heads one at a time.
Trafficking information has a perceived revenue based on the number of heads times the number of ways you can sell that data. Add a new way to sell data and the revenue leaps. No need to consult each customer. (In practice this takes finesse, as Facebook keeps finding out.)
From an investor standpoint, the potential revenue growth from the second model is more appealing.
Google is therefore unlikely to offer pay-based services.
We've got USB, what I want is UDC - some kind of in-the-wall intelligent DC outlet standard so that we can get rid of all those wall-warts and reap some of the advantages this article mentions. Of course, the one-tonne AC converter is a bit of a problem...
Re:Holy Halleluja! Unbelievable!
on
Sun Releases JavaFX
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Yeah! Java finally made it in the form is was meant to be. We love you Sun.
Oh. Wait a moment. override? bind? def? public-init? WTF.
Texting is popular in the UK (Europe?) because many people have pay-as-you-go phones, on which incoming calls are free (the callee pays extra to call a mobile phone) but outgoing calls are up to 25p a minute - so for a short message SMS is the cheapest option.
Bletchley Park reminds me of the Churchill War Bunker in London - http://cwr.iwm.org.uk/. One closet in the bunker was disguised as Churchill's private toilet and contained a transatlantic hotline to the US. It used another early cypto device called SIGSALY (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIGSALY), an amazing victorian/modern franken-machine which used records with pure noise as a one time random pad.
Visiting these sites in person is chilling, and nothing like looking at a few photos online. The sites act as a focal point for community and expertese. They are authentic pieces of history, not Disney theme parks.
A Walmart-on-your-block to all those who think we should not preserve these kinds of places!
CSS is at its roots a declarative rules-based language, just shy of being a full general purpose programming language (anyone with conjectures on whether CSS will one day be turing complete?)
To date, nobody has created a comprehensive direct-manipulation style GUI experience for declarative rules-based languages. It's a UI-hard problem. I am not sure it will ever be solved.
For example, how do you represent:
table tr:nth-child(2n + 1) td > p { color: red; }
within a GUI paradigm, except through a code editor?
Instead of addressing this UI-hard problem, authoring tools invariably support a subset of the full language via direct manipulation (and offer a code editor for the rest). That subset may be super for a large number of use cases. However, its hardly surprising that operators of a large complex site like the NYTimes skip the GUI and write to the metal. Why limit yourself to a subset when a hand-coded ruleset can take full advantange of the elegance, compactness and expressiveness of the language?
I do find it sad that in the first generation WYSIWIG publishing tools like Frame, Quark, Illustrator etc, had good GUI-based styling systems, but on the web we have regressed to a code editor.
The JavaScript 2.0 standard has been floating around for a long time now, it's old news. Flash's ActionScript has already moved well beyond JS2. Yet in browser land, support for JS2 remains blotchy, and will for the foreseeable future.
The sad part is all I wanted was -one- component from JS2: getters/setters. With that, you can go a long way in hiding the differences between browsers, by adding appropriate getters/setters.
FireFox supports getters/setters now, so does Safari, even the iPhone! But IE7? Haha.
We need a law requiring all surveillance recordings by companies/government to be destroyed after 30 days, unless a court order is issued to preserve the recordings, or the parties have given written permission. This would go some way towards balancing company/government "security" requirements with an individual's right to privacy.
While we are at it, the same law should govern web usage logs...
What the web is crying out for is a standard that supports a rich data hierarchy, a rich presentation hierarchy, and a databinding mechanism to connect these two (preferably without using CSS, but that's another debate).
That's exactly where the next-gen UI frameworks have gone (Flex from Adobe, XAML from Microsoft). These frameworks represent the wave of the future and that's where the web needs to go too.
Meanwhile, the web standards community spouts all this rhetoric of "separating presentation and semantics" in HTML/CSS, which is nonsense. Both HTML and CSS are precisely concerned with presentation. And they are not at all separate. You need to know and love both to coax good looking pages out of a browser. All this huffing and puffing, yet the best they can offer for application-specific data models is microformats!
As far as I can tell, both HTML 5 and XHTML 2 are icing on the cake, and missing the main course altogether.
Slashdot Mirror
They would have doubled their budget.
The BBC's Dragon's Den has some eye-opening examples of a broad range of pitches, and is actually quite revealing of the difference in mindset between investor and investor.
Avoid powerpoint altogether. Turn up with a cheap video camera, let the investors shoot video themselves, process it on the spot and show an A/B comparison. Then be extremely prepared to answer questions, pulling up slides and more demos on demand as necessary. It's about business model, not tech. Given YouTube (as just one example) is adding more impressive post-processing options for free - their Calibration-Free Rolling Shutter Removal is pretty cool - what does your stuff do that is so different? How is your product positioned in the market, who are the other major competitors, how do they make money, what is the overall market size for this segment of tools, what is your marketing plan, how will you fend off competitors, who are the business partners, etc etc.
Far better to delay the VC route if you can. Find a strategic, patient, trustworthy and experienced angel partner. VC, from what I've seen, attempt to steer companies to where they perceive the market to be, and this is likely very different from own ideas.
In the article Forbes regurgitates two neoclassical myths - first, that money evolved naturally out of barter systems, and second that money is an expression of fixed material values grounded in processes of production.
On the first point, there is no evidence in history that money evolved out of barter systems, and a great deal of evidence that it did not. As the anthropologist Caroline Humphrey says:
David Graeber adds to this:
On the second point, Forbes' asserts that money is "optimal when fixed in value", that "money has only one purpose ... buying and selling products", and that it is a fixed unit on the same order as material units (ala "hamburgers"). Here he is recanting the whole neoclassical bible, which states that economics and politics are separable, that government should stay out of economics or (our future standard of living will suffer), and that money is a natural expression of processes of production grounded in material value.
The castle of neoclassical theory is, however, far from complete, as the 2008 crash so clearly demonstrated. Worse, Forbes ignores this and continues to repeat neoclassical tenets as though they are fact.
Take Forbes statement that money is "optimal when fixed in value." At the limit case, this is clearly false. Assuming for a moment that money could be fixed in value, like a kind of physical unit or a determined expression of material value. Of course, this raises two issues: First, there is the problem of which material value to anchor to. Then there is conversion problem: how do we convert all other values into this fixed material unit? Assuming these could be solved, this would suggest that prices remain constant, much the same way the speed of light remains constant. How then do you explain profit, or any market at all for that matter? Clearly, Forbes must allow for at least some level of price setting, which then in turn suggests variability or "floating" of pecuniary value. Unsurprisingly, in empirically terms, no modern democratic currency is based on fixed values. The opposite is the case: currency itself is treated as a commodity that can be bought and sold on markets, and this is only possible because money does not have a fixed value.
But if monetary value is variable and not linked to material goods, what are the units of money? The answer, in neoclassical terms, is to base definitions of money on a fictitious unit, the util. Since the util is abstract and not observable directly, there remains the problem of how to measure it. Current definitions are claimed to be "reasonable" and "generally accepted" but economists. But utils remain an idealization, and hardly the known unfloating physical quantity Forbes suggests. Forbes simply glosses over or ignores the of the uncertainties and shortcomings of marginal utility theory. Nitzan and Bichler make this case convincingly in their excellent if controversial Capital as Power. They summarize:
A utility service model has a fixed revenue - the number of heads. To add revenue you either have to increase the number of heads, or sell new services to the existing heads one at a time.
Trafficking information has a perceived revenue based on the number of heads times the number of ways you can sell that data. Add a new way to sell data and the revenue leaps. No need to consult each customer. (In practice this takes finesse, as Facebook keeps finding out.)
From an investor standpoint, the potential revenue growth from the second model is more appealing. Google is therefore unlikely to offer pay-based services.
We've got USB, what I want is UDC - some kind of in-the-wall intelligent DC outlet standard so that we can get rid of all those wall-warts and reap some of the advantages this article mentions. Of course, the one-tonne AC converter is a bit of a problem...
Yeah! Java finally made it in the form is was meant to be. We love you Sun.
Oh. Wait a moment. override? bind? def? public-init? WTF.
On page 24, Glen Murphy says:
Translation:
Texting is popular in the UK (Europe?) because many people have pay-as-you-go phones, on which incoming calls are free (the callee pays extra to call a mobile phone) but outgoing calls are up to 25p a minute - so for a short message SMS is the cheapest option.
The Republican party.
The change to a contract-based solution is yet another admission that software-based protection systems fail in a world of hackers and the net.
Visiting these sites in person is chilling, and nothing like looking at a few photos online. The sites act as a focal point for community and expertese. They are authentic pieces of history, not Disney theme parks.
A Walmart-on-your-block to all those who think we should not preserve these kinds of places!
http://www.traceencounters.org/
ArsElectronica 2004 project to track 900 people at a conference.
CSS is at its roots a declarative rules-based language, just shy of being a full general purpose programming language (anyone with conjectures on whether CSS will one day be turing complete?)
To date, nobody has created a comprehensive direct-manipulation style GUI experience for declarative rules-based languages. It's a UI-hard problem. I am not sure it will ever be solved.
For example, how do you represent:
within a GUI paradigm, except through a code editor?
Instead of addressing this UI-hard problem, authoring tools invariably support a subset of the full language via direct manipulation (and offer a code editor for the rest). That subset may be super for a large number of use cases. However, its hardly surprising that operators of a large complex site like the NYTimes skip the GUI and write to the metal. Why limit yourself to a subset when a hand-coded ruleset can take full advantange of the elegance, compactness and expressiveness of the language?
I do find it sad that in the first generation WYSIWIG publishing tools like Frame, Quark, Illustrator etc, had good GUI-based styling systems, but on the web we have regressed to a code editor.
The sad part is all I wanted was -one- component from JS2: getters/setters. With that, you can go a long way in hiding the differences between browsers, by adding appropriate getters/setters.
FireFox supports getters/setters now, so does Safari, even the iPhone! But IE7? Haha.
The exaspam!
We need a law requiring all surveillance recordings by companies/government to be destroyed after 30 days, unless a court order is issued to preserve the recordings, or the parties have given written permission. This would go some way towards balancing company/government "security" requirements with an individual's right to privacy. While we are at it, the same law should govern web usage logs...
What the web is crying out for is a standard that supports a rich data hierarchy, a rich presentation hierarchy, and a databinding mechanism to connect these two (preferably without using CSS, but that's another debate).
That's exactly where the next-gen UI frameworks have gone (Flex from Adobe, XAML from Microsoft). These frameworks represent the wave of the future and that's where the web needs to go too.
Meanwhile, the web standards community spouts all this rhetoric of "separating presentation and semantics" in HTML/CSS, which is nonsense. Both HTML and CSS are precisely concerned with presentation. And they are not at all separate. You need to know and love both to coax good looking pages out of a browser. All this huffing and puffing, yet the best they can offer for application-specific data models is microformats!
As far as I can tell, both HTML 5 and XHTML 2 are icing on the cake, and missing the main course altogether.
Once we can get this one basic feature of JS 2.0 working on all modern browsers, then we're ready to talk about things like ES4.