New Ventures, Pitches, and SJSU

Last week I wandered over to SJSU to listen to their panel on "The Entrepreneurial Experience: what starts up start ups?" as part of their gearing up for their Neat Ideas Fair. One of the panelist, Derinda Gaumond, workit.com founder (a business events calendar) is also a FWE member, and I and others wanted to cheer her on.

I'm actually quite familiar with the SJSU College of Business business plan competition, since I was a volunteer last year and saw a lot of interesting posters and heard some fun student pitches. I'm pleased they're doing it again.

Last year's SJSU New Ventures Fair pitch competition was quite interesting, since you can be more open to ideas and more forgiving of mistakes when presented by someone young and inexperienced.

Student groups were each given a PDA and TabletPC from HP and encouraged to create a company. And what a variety there were. There were complex (and actually quite difficult to implement) ideas of "hotblock" WiFi using active interaction (no, these kids weren't technologists - just business idealists). There was a ticketless reservation business using hotspots and downloaded movie ads. Again, nice dream, but not there yet for real technical and business reasons.

There was an etextbook pitch, since books are expensive and heavy on-campus. Actually, I liked this one because it was based on real student experience and was bounded by who is the vendor (the campus bookstore) and who is the buyer (students) and what (assigned textbooks for courses) from who (major textbook publishers using encryption and key technology supplied by vendor at time of purchase). It actually could work, mainly because keyword search is very useful when writing papers.

There was a hotel maid management system, but I had to laugh thinking about how hotels didn't trust their maids to clean the rooms but they were willing to put $200-$400 PDA's into their hands? Seemed a bit optimistic to me. But no more so than the "lifesaver" pitch. Now, CPR training for businesses is a good idea, but it seemed more like a good sensible small business than a venture pitch.

Of course, being Silicon Valley there just had to be a parking pitch, in particular, how do you find a parking spot when the garages seem to be filled? Well, using our magic PDA and TabletPC combo, we can get "realtime parking updates" and direct the car to the right location. Seemed a bit "scifi" to me, though.

Finally, there was the "interactive philosopher", an elearning tool where through dialogue with a computer program you explore such epistemological questions as "What is virtue?" Interesting that an "ethics" package is pitched to VCs. Perhaps this student understood his market need better than he thought.

A LISP programmer by the name of Joseph Weizenbaum many years ago (in the 1960's I heard) wrote a program (aka ELIZA) called "Doctor" that RMS put into EMACS as a game. You'd talk to the Rogerian shrink and it would say things like "And why do you say that?", and "listen" endlessly and patiently. Reputedly, his secretary got so involved with the "Doctor" discussing her concerns that she asked him to leave the room so they could have some privacy.

The winners - the maid monitoring system took the prize, followed by the mobile parking monitor, and third went to the etextbook. I think we should discuss this with the Doctor. "How do you feel about that?"