THE retail entrepreneur John Kinnaird is this weekend finalising a deal to buy struggling shoe company Faith, whose designs are worn by the likes of Denise Van Outen, Claudia Schiffer and Girls Aloud.

Editor’s Note: This post represents the professional advice of Brian Solis who is not formally affiliated with TechCrunch50. If you are a participating TC50 company, resident TechCrunch PR expert Sarah Ross is available to share and review the public relations guidelines with you. It is important to work directly with Sarah to ensure you are in compliance with these guidelines to maximize your PR opportunity while also avoiding disqualification.

——————————————————————————————-

How do you launch a startup at a big tech conference without getting lost in the crowd?  With TechCrunch50, Demo and several other major tech conferences around the corner, this question is on the minds of more than one entrepreneur.  How do you create visibility for your startup, and do you need PR to do it, or just a great demo?

The coming days and weeks will be filled by some of the industry’s most anticipated, attended and watched conferences. They’re all competing for mind share and they are attracting influential attendees and spectators who will report their experiences and observations far and wide. In the next two to three weeks, over 150-200 companies will vie for attention and precious blog and media real estate.

Your story, as wonderful as it is, will need help rising above the flurry of news that will jockey to reach the ears and eyes of bloggers, press, customers, investors, and partners.

Even though some A-list bloggers and high profile entrepreneurs (Jason Calacanis, cough) have publicly implied that any good product or eloquent and outspoken CEO will easily traverse the roads cluttered with inferior startups to quickly rise to stardom simply by existing, the reality is, you really do need a strategic launch plan and some level of PR.  Most importantly, you need a polished, professional, and creative demonstration that will resonate with attendees and compel them to want to learn more.

Public Relations

This advice may seem 101, and in some cases it is. Nonetheless, it’s an important refresher for those companies who are using TechCrunch50 and other conferences to debut their company or new products.

For those 52 companies presenting at TC50,  there is a clear and prevailing rule to participate in the event and it will make the difference whether or not you launch to accolades or you’re disinvited before you hit the stage:

You have to introduce your new company or product, for the first time, on stage at TC50.

Some people are debating the merits of this requirement.  But given this rule, let’s explore a few ways to ensure a successful launch.

What’s Your Story?

Let’s start by determining who your customers and users are and where they go for information and insight. Identifying these groups will humanize the process of crafting your story. It forces you to adapt what you’re introducing specifically to the people you’re hoping to reach.

The next step is to summarize not only what you’re introducing, but distill the value, benefits and extraordinary features that differentiate you from your competition and also highlight how you’re solving real world problems and challenges. This process will impact your press materials, your stage demo, your pitch, and ultimately the perception that conference attendees form.

Demonstration

You have an obligation to attendees and also to your development team to present your company in a way that makes people remember who you are and why you were invited to participate in the first place.

This isn’t a local meetup for startups. This isn’t just another opportunity to practice your everyday company pitch. This is a major production that requires an entirely new level of presentation, probably of the caliber that you may not have experienced previously. The world will literally be watching.  (TC50, for instance, will be streamed live on Ustream, photos will appearon a special Flickr page, and stories will be organized by the audience at large on a dedicated Mixx community site).  And the live audience will be sitting through dozens of demos.  So what are you going to do that will make everyone in the room stop checking email or updating Twitter, pay attention to your time on stage, and more importantly, remember you after the event?  This is your first and best chance to create enthusiasm and support in order to ignite referrals and potential word of mouth for being one of the hottest companies to debut this year.

Ditch the Powerpoint presentation. No one wants to see bulleted lists that say what you do or endure a series of slides that detail your professional credentials and career experience. They want to see what you do and how it was selected over the hundreds of other companies that were hoping to make the cut. Quickly explain the pain that your solving, make us empathize with it. But, get to that demo as quickly as possible. Show, don’t tell.

You may need help and coaching to become an incredible presenter to maximize your time on stage and that’s OK. It’s how we become more incredible public speakers.

As TC50 co-founder and co-host Jason Calacanis (yes, the same one who does not think much of formal PR) has recently emphasized in his email newsletter, companies need to attach their brand to a movement, a trend, something bigger than just the next shiny new object, search engine, widget, or next new social network.  He also suggest the following rules for startup demos: Show your product within the first 60 seconds; Talk about what you’ve done, not what you’re going to do; One driver, one navigator; Short answers are best; Leave people wanting more.  It is good advice.  (Read his full list of demo tips here and here).

Have charisma. Express how much you care about your product. Speak clearly with authority and confidence. Move around the stage as you demo your product. Get someone to run the notebook computer and don’t lock yourself in that comfort zone behind the podium. Please don’t subject us to a dry demo of you staring at you notebook screen, clicking buttons and talking monotonously.

Breeze through the frontlines of your demo and and get into crux of what it is you’re launching. We don’t need to see the registration process. We don’t need to endure the discomfort of watching you fumble through typos as you enter unnecessary data to support your presentation.

Have everything ready to go and have it rehearsed and polished. You don’t need slides. You don’t need 3×5 cards. Connect with the audience. Grab and hold their attention. This is your baby and you know it better than anyone. Passion and enthusiasm are contagious and the audience is there because they want to be amazed.

They are there for you, so help them remember why you’ve been singled out from hundreds of applicants to tell your story.

Lobbycon

At any major industry event, there are always scores of people who don’t have passes who want to participate in the can’t-miss excitement and action and also promote their agenda. This adds a new layer of dynamics to an already incredible environment. When combined with the onsite PR and marketing activity of all the presenting companies (both onstage and off), it also creates an additional possibility to promote your company among those networking in the event lobby.

Last year, PowerSet served delicious “branded” shots in test tubes to attendees as well as the huge contingent that formed the unofficial lobbycon. Other promotional items and clever memorabilia were also freely distributed all in the hopes of striking a chord with attendees and rising above the fray.

Make no doubt that there will be an influx of companies competing for attention, whether or not they’re part of the official event. You do need to offer something that helps you stand out. So think of this as your chance to create and distribute something memorable that also correlates with your brand so that attendees not only remember you after the conference is all said and done, but are also reminded to test, and hopefully use, your product.

Put It in Writing

After you’ve run through your messaging exercises and presentation development, document the story in a convincing press release, product/company overview, and unpublished blog post that officially announce the product or service.

Make sure that the solution and the value is upfront.

Assume that the people who will ultimately read your story are short on attention span, whether they’re a blogger, reporter, customer, partner, investor, or potential acquirer. Just because you’re selected to launch out of the hundreds of companies that applied, doesn’t mean your story is a guaranteed success.

In PR, writing usually follows an inverted pyramid format, which recommends that you pack all of the pertinent information at the beginning and conclude with the supporting details. In today’s highly competitive Web economy, solely relying on traditional press releases to tell your story greatly restricts its potential. Time and attention are precious commodities.

Find a way to tell your story as quickly and as compelling as possible. If it’s one thing that Twitter has taught us, it is how to say something significant in 140 characters or less. Twitter and the onslaught of emerging micromedia communities are reinforcing this process of sharing updates and insight through brevity and clarity. In PR and marketing, the study and practice of saying more with less online, is referred to as MicroPR

With every sentence, description, or statement we verbalize or write effectively, we can earn the chance to open the next door.  The goal is to continue to tell the story progressively, gaining momentum and increasing resonance along the way, and continue to open enough doors to tell our story completely.  This helps you tell the story quicker and more persuasively. Just in case someone stopped listening at any point, the important information and market opportunity should have already been communicated.

While paper press kits are long gone, or , digital press kits are still alive and well. Pull everything together in one place, such as a USB key, a downloadable zip file, an online press room, and consider experimenting with a social media press kit or a >social media release.

For instance, a Social Media Press Kit, a.k.a. online press kit/press room, is a dedicated, one-stop destination for your specific news event. This landing page contains embedded objects that help reporters and bloggers assemble the news their way. It can feature an embedded version of the press release and all other related social objects, for at-a-glance viewing and also for quickly grabbing the necessary embed codes.

There are other ways, beyond press releases, summaries and blog posts to break news. With Web video production and screencasting tools readily available, affordable, and easy to use, producing a visual demonstration will only help convey your story and fortify the integrity of your message when you’re not present to personally explain it. Also, short videos and demos are shareable and embeddable to expand the story across the social Web.

The Launch Is Only The Beginning

Many of the industry’s most influential bloggers, analysts, and reporters will attend these conferences, with many more observing and reporting on the highlights from all over the world.  Remember what your mother said: you only get one chance to make a first impression.  But if you do your job right, you will be repeating your demo many times over in the weeks and months ahead.  What you want to do is stand out so that people will ask you to see it again and again and again.

Good luck to all the startups everywhere who will be stepping onto a stage for the first time next week.  We’ll all be watching.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Une information reprise du site de la Maison Populaire de Montreuil

Tout en questionnant cette saison encore les relations entre art, sciences et industrie, nous vous proposons de naviguer sur un océan virtuel, agité de paradoxes, d'incertitudes et de contradictions. Sur la piste des principes de rétroactions et d'échange de données, artistes, chercheurs, mathématicien, sociologue, économiste... nous aideront à nous interroger sur la part d'initiatives que nous laissent ces dynamiques complexes issues de systèmes préprogrammés.

Captures de mouvements, de sons, d'images, de lumière, de température, de pression... sont aujourd'hui inhérentes aux pratiques multimédia. Ces périphériques, qui deviendront à court terme des centres de décision à part entière, tendent même à intégrer notre corps dans l'objectif de le rendre « plus efficace ». Ainsi, sous l'influence de nos actions, de nouveaux contenus sont générés, laissant place à une écume bouillonnante et perpétuellement changeante, poétiquement appelée « écume de l'espace-temps » et ici dénommée « interaction temps réel ».

Aujourd'hui largement exploités sur Internet, ces allers-retours permanents entre réel et virtuel vont jusqu'à rentabiliser nos mécanismes physiologiques et nos tendances. Métaphore de la société et de l'échange, nous y oublions qu'une machine est un système qui se nourrit d'informations. Des communautés virtuelles à la préservation des données, notre mémoire collective devient contextuelle, l'accès à l'information enjeu de pouvoir pouvant parfois conduire au liberticisme et de façon acquise au contrôle des individus.

Dans leur exploration de ces différents outils de visualisation, les artistes du numérique interrogent ces pratiques et proposent un dialogue entre l'imaginaire et le sens de nos réalités. Tentant de faire Å“uvre par le collectif, la création multimédia génère alors« un vaste ensemble d'idées de tous types, non structurées, non séquentielles », donnant une autre forme au rêve d'arborescence infinie du philosophe et sociologue Ted Nelson.

Soirées multimédia

• vendredi 3 octobre 2008 à 20 h 30 Rétroaction et aléatoire avec Emmanuel Ferrand, mathématicien à l'institut de mathématiques de Jussieu et Sylvain Chaty, astrophysicien à l'Unité mixte de recherche du CEA/CNRS

• vendredi 28 novembre 2008 à 20 h 30 Réseau et création P2P, une informatique participative avec Maurice Benayoun, agrégé d'Arts plastiques, enseignant à l'université Paris 1 et directeur artistique du CiTu et Wendy Mac Kay, chercheuse à l'INRIA (sous réserve)

• vendredi 23 janvier 2009 à 20 h 30 Communautés virtuelles et société avec Stéphan Hugon, sociologue au Centre d'étude de l'actuel et du quotidien – Sorbonne (sous réserve), et Serge Soudoplatoff, économiste, président d'Almatropie

• vendredi 15 mai 2009 à 20 h 30 Outils libres, données personnelles et législation avec Gilles Vercken, avocat au cabinet Gilles Vercken (sous réserve), et Olivier Auber, chercheur et entrepreneur, co-fondateur du Laboratoire Culturel A+H Sarl. et de Navidis SA

Tarif normal : 3 euros / Tarifs réduits pour les abonnés à la diffusion

Salons numériques

• du 3 octobre au 23 octobre 2008 Pendule autopoiétique, par E.Rébus Daily Interpretation, par Berthe Salegos

• du 1er décembre au 20 décembre 2008 IN/OUT X.0, un projet de création connective initié par le CiTu avec Olivier Auber, Emilie Brout, Thomas Cheneseau, Vincent Ciciliato, Dominique Cunin, Florent Di Bartolo, Vincent Goudard, Yves-Maris Lhour, Maxime Marion, Benoît Meudic, Mayumi Okura, Olivier Perriquet...

• du 27 avril au 16 mai 2009 Psychic, par Antoine Schmitt

Entrées libres

• Du lundi au vendredi de 10 heures à 21 heures
• Le samedi de 10 heures à 16 heures 30.
• Fermé les dimanches, jours fériés et vacances scolaires

Workshops de création

• du 3 octobre 2008 au 26 juin 2009 Caméra stylo animé par C. Ravussin Durée : 96 heures Tarifs Montreuillois ou travaillant à Montreuil : 233 € / non-Montreuillois : 281 €

• du 28 octobre au 29 novembre 2008 Haïkus multimédia, poésie audiovisuelle générative animé par Maxime Marion Durée : 24 heures Tarifs Montreuillois ou travaillant à Montreuil : 188 € / non-Montreuillois : 227 €

• du 13 décembre 2008 au 07 février 2009 Images et gestes animé par Wolf Ka Durée : 24 heures Tarifs Montreuillois ou travaillant à Montreuil : 188 € / non-Montreuillois : 227 €

Renseignements : Jocelyne Quélo - ecm arobase maisonpop.fr

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Interesting post by Echo's Mark Montgomery about his dinner with Topspin's Ian Rogers. Less on the actual meeting and more on strategies and the evolution of the business. A sample:

the reality of today is that several models are going to emerge, and the folks that add value are going to stay in the foodchain, the folks that don't, will be eaten. we intend to be the hungry one for the foreseeable future.[music jobs] Director of Content at Dada Entertainment; New York, NY.

Fitness Together franchisee Craig Collier has opened a second fitness studio in the Knoxville area at 7240 Kingston Pike, according to a news release. SlimBeans: Entrepreneur claims his coffee blend can help with weight loss ...

BusinessWeek: "The Japanese Net entrepreneur Joichi Ito makes a case for free-content distribution on the Internet. Nine Inch Nails is an early adopter."

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Amazon’s Video on Demand is the latest service that will attempt to have you turn off your TV and turn on your PC when you want to be entertained. But Amazon is jumping in to an increasingly crowded market, so how does its service fare compared to similar offerings from Hulu, iTunes, and Netflix? I gave all four a spin under similar conditions to evaluate their strengths and weaknesses.

EASE OF USE (THE BASICS): All of these services are simple to use, and Amazon is no exception. All of them let you browse available titles, and — in most cases — begin watching a video with just a few clicks. Amazon and iTunes offer TV shows and movies for rental and download. If you rent a movie online, you have 24 hours to watch it; if you download it, you can watch it whenever you’d like. You are limited in what you can do with the file you’ve downloaded, though: You can only transfer it to a certain number of computers, set-top boxes, or mobile devices.

Hulu doesn’t offer content for downloading; it aggregates streaming video, including movies, TV shows, and video clips. Netflix Instant Watch is only available to Netflix subscribers, and lets them watch movies on their PC or on a Netflix set-top box.

SELECTION: Amazon’s selection is impressive: It offers more than 40,000 titles. In comparison, Netflix’s Instant Watch has about 12,000 (up from about 1,000 when it launched in early 2007); Apple says its iTunes store has more than 2,000 titles available (up from 150 titles in January 2008). Neither they — nor Hulu — can compete with Amazon in terms of sheer volume.

That volume extends to its collection of TV shows: Amazon offers all the episodes from the first four seasons of The Office. Hulu, meanwhile, has five complete episodes available. (iTunes doesn’t have any, because The Office is on NBC, and NBC and Apple still don’t get along.)

Both Amazon and iTunes have a very good selection of recent titles — both in TV shows and movies. iTunes recently announced that it would be offering some movie titles the same day as the DVDs are released, and Amazon seems to be doing the same thing. Amazon will let you, for example, register to watch Made of Honor (starring Patrick Dempsey) on Sept. 16 — that’s the same day it will be available on DVD.

Amazon is lacking a few key titles, though. The service seems to offer almost every show from Comedy Central — except The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. Hulu, meanwhile, offers full episodes of only two Comedy Central shows: The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. If those are your favorites, Amazon’s breadth won’t matter.

PRICE: Hulu wins hands-down in this category: It’s free, though ad-supported. Amazon does offer some content for free, but most of it is priced in line with what you’ll find on iTunes: single TV episodes cost $1.99 (they’re available for purchase only) and movies cost $2.99 to $3.99 to rent, and $9.99 to $14.99 to purchase. The Netflix Instant Watch feature lets you watch an unlimited amount of video, and is included with most Netflix subscriptions, which start at $9 per month.

PERFORMANCE: Video quality across all four services was very good, and all loaded videos quickly and smoothly. I noticed the most freezing and buffering when watching video content from iTunes, and some of the clips on Hulu were not as high-resolution of the majority of content I found on Amazon and elsewhere. High-definition content viewed on Amazon looked great, though I did notice when watching some titles that the formatting seemed off. It seemed as though video that should have been seen in a 16×9 ratio was squished into a 4×3 window.

Both iTunes and Netflix require that you download software to play back video content: iTunes requires the iTunes client, and Netflix provides a proprietary player. Both Hulu and Amazon play videos right in your browser window, though they require Adobe Flash.

COMPATIBILITY: None of these services are restricted to your PC, but they vary in the devices they support. Amazon lets you send videos to a networked TiVo box or to a Sony BRAVIA TV with a Sony BRAVIA Video Internet link. Content that is rented from the iTunes store can be transferred to a compatible Apple device, but it cannot be stored in two places at once.

Netflix works with Windows PCs only, but Hulu, iTunes, and Amazon all support both PCs and Macs. Netflix also works with some set-top boxes, which allow you to view Instant Watch titles on your TV. The Roku Netflix player is available now; the LG BD300 Network Blu-ray Player is coming soon, and later this fall the Xbox 360 will be compatible with the Netflix service as well.

Amazon’s Video on Demand seemed a bit pricey to me — $2 for a 22-minute TV show is more than I want to spend. But its ease of use and excellent selection impressed me enough that I’ll be back again.

Liane Cassavoy has been writing about and reviewing technology for the past 10 years. She was a staff member of PC World magazine and has contributed to Entrepreneur, About.com, and other publications, and recently authored a book that will be published by Entrepreneur Press later this year.

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They completed the project within the agreed 30 days and have exercised extreme diligence in maintaining the website since then.
Check out my website at www.ventureden.com

Ventureden is a global meeting place where entrepreneurs connect with angel investors and venture capitalists in order to secure startup or expansion funding for their business venture.
Entrepreneurs post their business idea or invention and instantly gain worldwide exposure.

Angel investors and venture capitalists leisurely explore investment opportunities, all from the comforts of office or home.

No matter if you?re an entrepreneur or investor, thanks to www.esolz.net our system is simple to use. Make www.esolz.net your outsourcing partner, you won?t regret it.

Regards,
Dan
www.ventureden.com
www.esolz.net

Generoso Pope Jr was the oddball New Yorker who created the National Enquirer, the rag that gave the world headlines like "Mom Uses Son's Face for an Ashtray" and sold 6.7 million copies in August 1977 with a sneaked cover photo of Elvis Presley laid out in his coffin at Graceland. Pope, who went to the Horace Mann prep school in New York and to MIT and worked in psy-ops for the CIA before starting the National Enquirer in 1952, is the subject of a respectful biography that argues that he belongs in the populist-press pantheon with William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer.     His interest in journalism started early: Pope's father, a gravel entrepreneur who was cozy with the Mafia, founded Il Progresso, the Italian-language daily in New York, and helped bankroll Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia. Casting around for something to do after MIT and the CIA, Pope borrowed money from mobster Frank Costello to relaunch the Enquirer, then a Gotham scandal broadsheet with a circulation of 17,000, as a national tabloid.     Over the next 36 years, Pope tinkered with the formula to suit the times and economic realities. Murder, hard-core gore ("Digs Up Wife's Rotting Corpse and Rips It Apart") and grotesqueries like Lee Harvey Oswald's autopsy photos took him to a circulation of a million or so, but no further.     he even beat austria's infamous neonazi press czar Hans Dichand (Kronenzeitung) in vulgarity but not in circulation