VC is for Vulture Capital-"Show me the big money"

As a business owner or entrepreneur, one of your main objectives will be to make money. So, relating to Venture Capitalists should be easy. Except, that what they are after is 'big money' and this means saying 'no' a great deal more times than 'yes'.

If you plan to pitch a VC firm, a useful starting point is Guy Kawasaki's 10/20/30 rule of Powerpoint pitches: A powerpoint presentation should have 10 slides, last 20 minutes and contain no font smaller than 30 points. Guy Kawasaki goes on to state that:

“The closest real-world analogy to raising money, whether you are seeking it from venture capitalists, angel investors, or the three Fs (friends, fools, and family), is speed dating. That’s right: In five minutes, people decide if they are interested in you, just as in bars and nightclubs. This isn’t right, and it isn’t fair, but it’s reality.”

The MaRS Initiative in Toronto (an Innovation Park connecting entrepreneurs, businesses and investors) published a set of entrepreneur tools to help with the challenge of raising finance. The presentation, titled 'What VC's want and why they call it Vulture Capital', is shown below. It gives you a good feel for what VCs look for, what it looks like to get an investment and the strings that the money tends to be attached to.

The morale: think big and start honing those negotiation skills.

What VCs Want (and why they call it 'Vulture Capital')

View more presentations from MaRS Discovery District.

Mobile World Congress 2010-#mwc10 Summary Part 2

Time precludes me from going into more detail about my Mobile World Congress experience, but as a second part of my earlier post, here are some observations about the past event:

NOTABLE ABSENCES

It was widely announced prior to the Congress that Nokia (and later LG) would be absent as exhibitors at the event. Nokia's cheeky move was to locate their Barcelona event HQ 100m from the entrance to the show at the ONCE Building on Gran Via. It is anyone's guess whether this actually was a money-saver (hiring a whole building is not cheap) but perhaps the bigger irony of the location was lost on others. In fact, the ONCE building is the Spanish Association for the Blind. Given Nokia's loss of traction in the key smartphone market, it was perhaps apt that they should be headquartered in a 'blind spot'.

LG's absence was hard to understand, but allowed Samsung to take all the glory from fans of Korean technology. Their App Store strategy is even more baffling, as LG launched a LiMo App Store (in some countries) but is looking to scrap that for a more generic store.

Another notable absentee was Palm.Those present last year, will have witnessed a great hoo-hah over their Palm Pre..clearly, all is not well at Palm, as they were near-invisible at this year's event

IT'S GOOGLE TIME!

It was to be expected. Google stole a great deal of the limelight at the show. Partly, it was the excitement caused by the NexusOne giveway (want to get developers frothing with excitement for hours?Give them a new bit of hardware to play with!). Partly, it was Eric Schmidt's captivating keynote speech, where he laid a clear stake in the ground (and is continuing to do so in Abu Dhabi at the Abu Dhabi Media Show) when it comes to mobile. Simply put, Google is now placing mobile at the centre of its strategy.Could not be clearer than that. Everyone else playing in the yard has been warned!

Android NDK r3

The third release of the Android Native Development Kit (NDK) is now available for download from the Android developer site.

It can be used to target devices running Android 1.5 and higher. In addition to a few bug fixes and improvements, this release includes the following new features:

Toolchain improvement

The toolchain binaries have been refreshed for this release with GCC 4.4.0, which should generate slightly more compact and efficient machine code than the previous one (4.2.1).

Note that the GCC 4.4.0 C++ frontend is more pedantic, and may refuse to compile certain rare and invalid template declarations that were accepted by 4.2.1. To alleviate the problem, this NDK still provides the 4.2.1 binaries, which can optionally be used to build your machine code.

OpenGL ES 2.0 support

Applications targeting Android 2.0 (API level 5) or higher can now directly access OpenGL ES 2.0 features. This brings the ability to control graphics rendering through vertex and fragment shader programs, using the GLSL shading language.

A new trivial sample, named "hello-gl2", demonstrates how to render a simple triangle using both shader types.

Name simplification

This NDK release is just called "r3", for "Revision 3", to indicate that it is not limited to a specific Android platform/API level. Some developers thought that the previous release's name (1.6_r1) was confusing and indicated that it could only be used to target Android 1.6, which was not true.

Enjoy!

Speech Input API for Android

People love their mobile phones because they can stay in touch wherever they are. That means not just talking, but e-mailing, texting, microblogging, and so on. So, in addition to search by voice and voice shortcuts like "Navigate to", we included a voice-enabled keyboard in Android 2.1, which makes it even easier to stay connected. Now you can dictate your message instead of typing it. Just tap the new microphone button on the keyboard, and you can speak just about anywhere you would normally type.

We believe speech can fundamentally change the mobile experience. We would like to invite every Android application developer to consider integrating speech input capabilities via the Android SDK. One of my favorite apps in the Market that integrates speech input is Handcent SMS, because you can dictate a reply to any SMS with a quick tap on the SMS popup window.

Speech input integrated into Handcent SMS

The Android SDK makes it easy to integrate speech input directly into your own application—just copy and paste from this sample application to get started. Android is an open platform, so your application can potentially make use of any speech recognition service on the device that's registered to receive a RecognizerIntent. Google's Voice Search application, which is pre-installed on many Android devices, responds to a RecognizerIntent by displaying the "Speak now" dialog and streaming audio to Google's servers—the same servers used when a user taps the microphone button on the search widget or the voice-enabled keyboard. (You can check if Voice Search is installed in Settings ➝ Applications ➝ Manage applications.)

One important tip: for speech input to be as accurate as possible, it's helpful to have an idea of what words are likely to be spoken. While a message like "Mom, I'm writing you this message with my voice!" might be appropriate for an email or SMS message, you're probably more likely to say something like "weather in Mountain View" if you're using Google Search. You can make sure your users have the best experience possible by requesting the appropriate language model: "free_form" for dictation, or "web_search" for shorter, search-like phrases. We developed the "free form" model to improve dictation accuracy for the voice keyboard on the Nexus One, while the "web search" model is used when users want to search by voice.

Google's servers currently support English, Mandarin Chinese, and Japanese. The web search model is available in all three languages, while free-form has primarily been optimized for English. As we work hard to support more models in more languages, and to improve the accuracy of the speech recognition technology we use in our products, Android developers who integrate speech capabilities directly into their applications can reap the benefits as well.

Android at the Game Developer's Conference

Tuesday, March 9 marks the start of the 2010 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, and Android will be there! There has been a lot of interest about Android from the game development community, and our presence at GDC is intended to provide developers everything they need to get started with the platform. We are hosting several technical sessions and participating in two industry panels.

We also want to meet you and answer your questions about Android game development, so we've set aside time for "office hours." Android team engineers will be on-hand to answer your questions, and if you have a game in development for Android, we'd love to see a demo.

Below, you can see the technical sessions that we're hosting and industry panels that we're participating in. We look forward to seeing you at GDC2010!

Technical sessions

Tuesday, March 9

Bootstrapping Games on Android
Chris Pruett
Everything you need to know about games on Android in 60 minutes.
1:45 PM - 2:45 PM
Room 309, South Hall

Wednesday, March 10

Bring Your Games to Android
Jack Palevich
An in-depth look at writing and porting C++ games using the NDK and a thin Java shell.
10:30 AM - 11:30 AM
Room 302, South Hall

Get the Most out of Android Media APIs
Dave Sparks & Jason Sams
Tips and tricks for optimizing your sound, video, and graphics for compatibility, efficiency, and battery life.
11:45 AM - 12:45 PM
Room 302, South Hall

Android Office Hours
The Android team
Come meet the team, ask us your questions, and show off your games!
3:00 PM - 4:00 PM
Room 302, South Hall

Industry panels

Wednesday, March 10

GamesBeat2010: A sea of mobile devices
Eric Chu
Industry experts weigh in on the future of mobile game development.
4:30 PM - 5:30 PM
Moscone Convention Center

Thursday, March 11

After the iPhone...what?
Dave Sparks
Audio experts discuss the nitty gritty technical details of alternative gaming platforms.
10:30 AM - 11:30 AM
Room 112, North Hall

XConnect looking to dominate IP Interconnectivity

BARCELONA -I met Eli Katz, XConnect CEO, during the Mobile World Congress two weeks ago, for a priviliged insight into the VOIP star that is looking to shine bright in the new universe of digital voice and IP communications.

Eli discussed some of the XConnect's innovative products and enthused over HD voice. Today's analogue calls lead to a deterioration of sound quality which is notable to VOIP users when they make peer-to-peer calls (as on Skype, for example). With HD voice, intonations are much clearer and the jump from analogue to HD voice can be compared to that between mono- and stereo- sound: once you upgrade, you don't feel like going back.

XConnect also signed a deal last year under the GSMA Pathfinder initiative to enable interoperability between mobile operators and fixed telephony registries. This basically opens up next generation IP networks to telcos with legacy network infrastructure.

With Tier 1 VC funding of $22m, XConnect is well positioned for further growth as it seeks to out-compete companies like Synverse in its key markets of South Korea, Netherlands, USA and South Africa.