Paul Graham has a great essay advising early-stage ventures on critical factors when presenting to potential investors.  One of our portfolio companies, Grou.ps, is going on a quasi-road show to meet with a group of potential funders, so this is timely for us.

The bullet points are:

1. Explain what you’re doing.
2. Get rapidly to demo.
3. Better a narrow description than a vague one.
4. Don’t talk and drive.
5. Don’t talk about secondary matters at length.
6. Don’t get too deeply into business models.
7. Talk slowly and clearly at the audience.
8. Have one person talk.
9. Seem confident.
10. Don’t try to seem more than you are.
11. Don’t put too many words on slides.
12. Specific numbers are good.
13. Tell stories about users.
14. Make a soundbite stick in their heads.

The entire article is well worth reading.

I had touched on this subject before.  And, while I was away on a boat, the news broke that Google has signed a $900 million deal with News Corp that makes Google the default search provider, and the exclusive provider of
text-based and keyword ads on all Fox Interactive Media properties, including MySpace.

Given the traffic numbers, this is of course about MySpace’s current dominance in online media.

The most exciting part of this deal is that it should answer all outstanding questions around value of attention, the monetization opportunities in social networking sites, and most dramatically, whether Murdoch had overpaid for MySpace.

Om Malik, as usual, has a good analysis of the deal.

Seth Goldstein has kicked off a new edition of his Media Futures series.  The first few installments are up.  Anyone interested in new media should give his writing serious thought.

The War for Attention: Summer 2006
1/5 Automata (1)
1/5 Automata (2)
1/5 Automata (3)

Paul Graham brought up the issue of media companies censoring or not covering content that (positively) relate to each other.

Twice now, stories that
linked to reddit have gone out in Digg’s rss feed as frontpage stories,  only to disappear from the frontpage.
…
Digg’s whole point
is supposed to be that users decide what’s interesting.  Does that
merely mean, in  practice, that users get to vote among choices that
Digg approves?

We witnessed a similarly biased coverage in Turkey recently.  My friend Orhan Gorbon competed in the Vakko Cannes Istanbul off-shore sailing race, on a boat sponsored by Sabah, a leading Turkish newspaper.  I don’t read Sabah regularly, and the dailies I read, owned by the competitor Dogan Media Group, while covering the race (because one of their papers, Milliyet, also sponsored a boat), did not mention a word of Orhan’s boat.  Just like Digg, Milliyet was doing a disservice to its readers, who, arguably, are as interested in the Sabah boat as they are in the Milliyet boat.  By the way, Sabah did exactly the same.

I can accept this reporting bias in newspapers – after all, we choose our newspapers partly for their editorial biases.  However, I find it unacceptable in the case of Digg and reddit, since their whole point is a "Wisdom of Crowds-like" filtering of content.

NB. In the photo above, this blog proves its unbiased approach 🙂

Another fair warning is being yelled at the TV industry – I wonder if they are hearing it.  Om Malik reports again that the Skype founders are steadily moving on with their next venture aimed at disrupting traditional TV, much like they shattered some pretty solid walls in the voice world.

What Zennstrom and Friis are exactly up to is almost irrelevant.  They are so many different ways that TV can be attacked, if one is armed with the right arsenal.  TiVo proved that the audience is keen to adopt new technology.  MySpace and YouTube proved that the appetite for microchunked content is voracious.

The Skype team have the credentials and the cash to take it on seriously.  I look forward to the news coming from their direction.

TechCrunch (via Baris) has reported that MySpace has started banning widgets to link to external sites.  TechCrunch concludes:

That’s a major blow against the viral spread of services like YouTube,
RockYou and countless emerging others. I’ve been talking to a lot of
widget vendors lately, and “it works in MySpace” is a now a primary
selling point. Companies are investing large amounts of money in
widgetizing content from one site onto another and MySpace is huge.
This move, in the name of security, will likely do serious damage to
the cottage industry of flash widgets in MySpace. In as much as users
love their widgets, that means this will do serious damage to MySpace
as well.

I am not sure about the potential damage to MySpace.  Baris is right in that MySpace should not care about the widget companies. However, MySpace must care about the user experience.  To the extent that MySpace can allow its users to express themselves on its platform to a degree that satisfies them, there should be no problems, and MySpace should continue its growth.  However, it’s getting more and more obvious that open source development models are more productive than closed systems.

The question ends up being, "just how demanding are MySpace users?"  Now that MySpace is mainstream, I think the expectations of its user base is declining.  The mainstream has tolerated mediocrity in traditional media for a long time.

Even though I am a big fan of open systems, I think I am with Baris on this.

Here’s a thoughtful post about the future of entertainment, by Alemsah Ozturk and Ozgur Alaz, the team behind Marketallica.  I find the mindmap interesting.

I think this is pretty interesting:

L.A. based clothing manufacturer American Apparel
has now opened a store in Second Life. Second Life citizens can buy
American Apparel clothing for themselves in the "real world" as well as
for their avatars in Second Life.

Great example of understanding your customers.

Marc Canter’s new venture PeopleAggregator is launching today (via Techcrunch).  I am curious to see the strides by Canter towards the holy grail of people-interoperability.

There have been moves in this direction by various ventures, such as Grou.ps and Ning.  But, this is the first attempt in creating a full-fledged network that integrates the other networks.  Related to my "Parasites" post today, I wonder how the SNS world will react.

Baris has an interesting post about Jonathan Miller’s declaration that AOL will aim to be more third-party friendly, and the contrast this declaration has with a few recent developments, including:

• eBay’s banning of RapLeaf
• MySpace’s banning of Singlestat.us and DatingAnyone

Baris has a good point that these third party services, in the interest of empowering the consumer, are actually developing a parasitic relationship with the services they interact with, stealing their traffic and converting it to ad revenue, sort of an arbitrage model.

He asks where the line can be drawn.  I suggest it’s the consumer’s choice.

eBay is in the business of creating a trusted marketplace. It offers its own reputation service.  This puts the new eBay seller at a disadvantage.  If she has invested in a strong reputation elsewhere, she should be able to use it on eBay.  In the most extreme case, eBay can demand an additional fee if she’d rather use her RapLeaf reputation instead of the eBay reputation.

Instead, eBay has banned RapLeaf.  Markets want to be more efficient, not less.  eBay, which has generally been a wise enemy of transaction friction, has chosen to dam the market force with their (still) monopolistic power.  In the long run, it’s not sustainable.

If anything, the move validates RapLeaf‘s value to the marketplace.  Congratulations, Auren!