Brainnovate

On Friday I attended a “LivePitch” event put on by FundingUniverse.com This was very similar to speed pitching events, but was open to the public. In case you are not familiar with the concept of speedpitching, it follows the same format as speed dating, where a number of entrepreneurs get to pitch their startup, but they only have 4 or 5 minutes to do it. In an hour, potential investors can quickly see if they want to “date” any of the entrepreneurs. Typically these are closed door affairs, meaning unless you have money to invest, you aren’t getting in.

FundingUniverse decided to change this paradigm up and created the “LivePitch” format to allow anyone to come and watch. Everyone in attendance was give $100 dollars in fake money to invest in any of the five companies who were pitching. In addition, there was a panel of “celebrity judges,” made up Steve Grizzell (Innoventures Capital), Stan Kanarowski (Park City Angels), Jeremy Hanks (DOBA), Mark Bonham (Ray Quinney and Nebeker), Kent Thomas (Olympus Angels) who judged the entries and gave feedback on each idea.

The five companies that pitched are summarized here, along with their approximate investment totals:

1. Dolphin3D: A new web browser with many new features not found in IE ($250)
2. Egghead Intensity: Social network for new college graduates ($350)
3. InciteWorld: Social network and resources for medical associations ($500)
4. iSecureMyNet: Portable security product to protect your passwords on any device ($1100)
5. ISYS Technologies: Patented computing technology that promises much smaller CPUs that run cooler and can easily be grouped together ($3000)

Congrats to each of the presenters for getting up and sharing their concept. ISYS was the clear winner among the audience “investors” and also was the top pick of the expert panel. You can learn more about their technology at their web site or Youtube channel.

Prebuilt software like Wordpress (which this blog uses), Drupal, Joomla, and other similar systems are bad for innovation. There… I said it. I love Wordpress after avoiding it for years. The past 2 weeks have been the best 2 weeks of blogging in my life. And these tools are great for 95% of use cases- most sites will benefit immensely from putting them in the engine box.

Although I haven’t used it, Drupal sounds like Wordpress on steroids, with an attached boat anchor to slow you down. My friend Jeremy over at QuitYourDayJob lost two weeks of his life trying to teach it to sit, stay, and fetch. Now it works great.

These tools are immensely powerful, don’t get me wrong. But they are really optimized for doing something that has already been done. If you want a simple blog, brochure site, forum, simple social networking features, etc, then this will get you there quickly. Not a bad strategy if you can find a corner of the market without good coverage yet. But this blog is about innovation, and doing things that haven’ t been done before.

If you really want to do something unique and revolutionary, relying on a CMS will kill you dead. Imagine if the guys who built Twitter started out with a CMS platform and went from there. You think Twitter has problems now There are a lot of people “gunning” to be the next Facebook, Myspace, etc. They are not using a CMS either.

So if you are new to all this, step back and think about other tools that are available. Personally, I recommend and use Ruby on Rails extensively. Python with Django is quite strong as well. The main difference with these things is that you can write applications that do things that haven’t been done before, or at least haven’t been done by thousands of other people.

So I had an idea as I was writing the previous post for a “TwitterStumble” type site.

Like Stumbleupon but with peoples home page links in Twitter. It may (probably already exists so let me know if it does.)

What is interesting is that the audience on Twitter represents the 1 million earliest adopters, and crawling through peoples links you are bound to find something good.

It would should be easy enough to build using the Twitter API. I just added it to IdeaCV:

I was reading the “Public Timeline” at Twitter yesterday and found a rather interesting web application. Many of you may be wondering how I have the time to read the public timeline… and well, I don’t. It was a moment of shameless self indulgence and Twitter exploration. I find it interesting to click people links to try and gain an understanding of who is actually using Twitter beyond my own network. As I have mentioned in my past posts, Twitter is currently made up of 1 million of the earliest adopters, so you are bound to find something interesting. Does TwitterStumble exist yet?

What I found is IdeaCV- sort of a social brainstorming and innovation tool. This is almost identical to my original vision for Brainnovate, before I decided to just build a blog with it. In fact it was the reason I registered this domain name in the first place.  Ultimately I identified a number of reasons why I didn’t want to invest the resources to do this, so it became a great name for a blog about innovation and brainstorming instead.

Here is how it works and why its an interesting idea: Brainstorming and coming up with great ideas is tough, and its seldom a solo endeavor. With IdeaCV, you post your idea to the site and get immediate feedback from other users, hopefully helping to refine the concept. Other users post their ideas, and you can help them by offering suggestions, criticisms, etc.

The site is well executed and appears to be built using one of my favorite innovation tools- Ruby on Rails.

The company behind this site, Increo Solutions claims on their site they are just getting started and expect to have more on the way, but their site just says that the software is in alpha. We’re looking forward to seeing what they come up with. I am guessing some kind of enterprise version where you can lock down outside access to the system.

Personally my biggest complaint about sites like this revolves around intellectual property, and that people are generally unwilling to share their ideas publicly. If I have a great idea, the last thing I am going to do is go and post it in a public forum for other entreprenuers to “cherry pick” and then become my competition.

Then there is the whole concept of who owns what. If you post the next Facebook, and the core concepts are developed collaboratively, isn’t that like wearing a target on your back that says “Sue me?”

The best part for me anyhow, is that I no longer feel compelled to build something like this.