Here at ReadWriteStart, we’ve been following the Open Angel Forum closely as Jason Calacanis’ project moves from city to city bringing angel investors and worthy startups together in one room. The first event in Los Angeles was of particular success to Backupify, which provides backup for your online social network data, including Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, Wordpress, Gmail, Basecamp and many other services. Following the event, the company raised a Series A round of $900,000 from Calacanis, Chris Sacca, First Round Capital and a few others.

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Earlier this week, CEO Rob May posted his take on the process of raising funding from VCs, which he likens to dating. According to May, pitching to VCs is not about forcing your idea down their throat and convincing them why they should invest in it; if a startup and a VC are meant to be, it will be more like love at first sight.

“They either like you and your idea, or they don’t. It’s like dating because your goal in dating is not to convince someone who is a bad match for you that somehow you are really a good match. That’s a recipe for divorce,” says May. “It’s really about finding the person that is naturally a good match. Same way with investors.”

One thing that May did much differently than other entrepreneurs seeking funding is that he approached investors without a business plan. While he doesn’t recommend this as a solution for every startup, he does find that in his case, not having a business plan did not really hinder his efforts.

“I sat in front of VCs who thought I was crazy for not having a business plan. I was asked ‘how can you run your business if you don’t have a written plan?’,” says May. “I also sat in front of VCs who said ‘glad you didn’t waste time writing a plan, because we wouldn’t read it anyway.’ It’s really more of an art, not a science.”

Another less standard practice May chose to include in his presentation at the Open Angel Forum was not a special slide on his pitch deck or a certain phrase; May drank a beer while presenting. Again, he doesn’t suggest this is a solution for everyone, but he uses it as an example of how to relax and “be yourself” when pitching to VCs. They are very experienced at talking to startups and any good VC knows how to spot when you are full of hot air, and they will call you on it.

“It’s never easy, not even when you have a good idea. That’s the point. That’s why so few people ever do it,” says May. “If you want to learn to raise money, the best thing to do is go try to raise money.”

Photo by Flickr user apol3.

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Cliqset is a Florida-based technology startup that end-users have had a hard time understanding. The company just released a new product that developers should have no trouble with at all and that could send waves of innovation across the social web.

Called Cliqset FeedProxy, the service consumes user activity feeds from more than 70 online services like Twitter, WordPress, Tumblr, Last.fm, Yelp and LibraryThing and then produces an outbound feed that’s compliant with the ActivityStreams standard format.

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That means activities from all those services can be read in a common language and 3rd party services can slice and dice them to create new user experiences. Several high-profile applications have already begun consuming activity feeds republished through Cliqset and the company says many more consumers are in the works.

The most common analogy for explaining the impact of data standards is the history of the railroads in the US. When all the railroad networks adopted a standard size of track, then transport companies could carry goods cross-country over multiple rail networks. That opened up a new world of commerce.

ActivityStreams is an Atom feed standard under development by many social web companies large and small. It aims to normalize the language that user activities are expressed in across multiple social networks. It’s intended to facilitate interoperability and cross-network delivery of user activity payloads. It’s important, exciting and inspiring work.

Non-standardized activity feed publishing is like creating a high-way that only one brand of car can drive on, with one proscribed type of journey in mind. Standardized feed publishing provides a platform for a world of open innovation.

Facebook, MySpace, Netflix and other services are already making user data available in ActivityStreams format, but there are far more social networks that don’t.

As we explained in the ReadWriteWeb research report The Real-Time Web and its Future:

An extension of the Atom feed format, the spec explains it like this: “An activity is a description of an action that was performed (the verb) at some instant in time by some actor (the subject), usually on some social object (the object). An activity feed is a feed of such activities.”

In the current draft spec, you can perform such actions as Post, Share, Save, Mark as Favorite, Play, Start Following, Make Friend, Join and Tag Object. An Object could be an Article, Blog Entry, Note, File, Photo, Photo Album, Playlist, Video, Audio, Bookmark, Person, Group, Place or Comment. These actions can have such contexts as Location, Mood and Annotation. Stream aggregator Cliqset publishes Activity Streams feeds that don’t require API authentication to view. You can see a sample one at:
http://cliqset.com/feed/atom?uid=dbounds.

The aim of Activity Streams is to have multiple social networks use a common language and have a common understanding of what all those things mean, so that messages can be read across different networking sites.

Now the Cliqset FeedProxy tool will normalize feeds from more than 70 other services into new feeds in the ActivityStreams format. It may just be an initial inroad to interoperability between these networks, provided by a 3rd party and not yet extensively used – but it’s an important step none the less.

What does this mean? It means that applications developers could build interfaces to display books read, music listened to, reviews written and more across multiple different services with as much ease as they can display standard RSS or Atom feeds today. It’s a powerful new level of granularity.

Social media center Boxee and a Sun Microsystems community product currently consume activity feeds. Cliqset says many more projects are in development now.

As the ActivityStreams community builds out more sophistication in the standard, there may be things like cross-site reputation included in such feeds.

Cliqset has done a valuable service creating these normalized feeds for developers, but the obvious downside is the reliance on a middleman. Cliqset says it is talking to Superfeedr about creating some real-time feeds as well. That would be great, but would be another layer on top of existing publisher feeds.

Perhaps if the developer community builds the kind of market-moving applications and features ActivityStreams advocates expect from the Cliqset feets, more publishers will begin publishing standardized feeds natively. While Cliqset has put a lot of work into normalizing numerous network feeds, the idea behind standards is that they can facilitate technical integration between parties with no prior knowledge of each other.

Either way, Cliqset is putting the ActivityStreams agenda to the test. The company’s release could have some very significant consequences.

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The estimates for cloud computing can make you wonder sometimes about what to believe. Analyst firms and it looks like investment houses, can be notorious for wild estimates about market sizes.

So we have to wonder about the estimates from Merrill Lynch, which is estimating the cloud computing market to reach $160 billion by 2011.The estimate includes $95 billion in business and productivity applications.

Whoa! That makes cloud computing one of the fastest growing markets in the world.

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But Merrill Lynch is not alone in its lofty estimates. Earlier this year, Gartner pegged the market at $150 billion by 2013.

In their estimate, Gartner included Google Ad Words estimates in their estimates. This seems sketchy at best. Here’s what Gartner analyst Lydia Leong wrote back in May:

“Obviously, one argue whether or not it’s valid to include advertising revenue, but a key point that should not be missed is that in the trend towards the consumerization of IT, it is the advertiser that often implicitly pays for the consumer’s use of an IT service, rather than the consumer himself. Advertising revenue is a significant component of the overall market, part of the “cloud” phenomenon even if you don’t necessarily think of it as “computing”.

What’s at risk is making cloud computing totally irrelevant. How can corporate IT departments make sense of the market when it appears that cloud computing is essentially tied to anything connected to the Internet?

But then you need to look at the dynamics in play. IT is built on legacy systems, custom, built to order environments. Cloud computing provides a level of automation.

From the PriceWaterhouseCoopers summer Technology Forecast:

“Legacy IT soaks up much of the available IT budget and is a primary barrier to IT responsiveness and overall business agility.”

The report goes on to say that cloud will be necesssary for automating the world of IT:

“…IT must adopt an architecture that creates loose coupling between the IT infrastructure and application workloads. It also must modernize and automate IT’s own internal business processes for provisioning, managing, and orchestrating infrastructure resources.”

In other words, cloud computing will be huge but to call it a $160 billion market seems like a form of hype that can lead to all kinds of issues. It’s almost reminiscent of the dot-com bubble.

And look what happened there.

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Collecta, a new search engine, launched today with a unique twist… they’re one of the first real-time search engines.

Searching with Collecta, you get real-time results from blogs, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, social sites and various news outlets.

Collecta’s homepage gives the following description of the new search engine…

"Collecta is not like other search engines.
The web is alive with real-time information. So why search a stale archive? Collecta monitors the update streams of popular realtime blogs and sites like Twitter, Wordpress, and Flickr, so we can show you results as they happen. Give it a try."

What do you think of Collecta’s real-time search? Tell us.

Collecta’s UI is very simplistic and easy on the eye. No frills, just search. Upon doing a search, your term shows on the left (with options), results appear in the middle and selected/highlighted content appears on the right. (click the image below for full size view)

With each search users have to option to include/exclude certain search parameters such as Stories (blog posts, articles), Comments (on blog posts), Updates (Twitter, Jaiku, Identica), and Photos (Flickr). Collecta even has an option to pause a search stream (not really sure why).

Under the hood Collecta uses the XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) technology, which keeps tabs on information as it happens.

Collecta, so far, has had a very so-so launch day. The search engine was down for quite some time, leaving the company having to explain themselves via Twitter to potential searchers.

I guess they could argue that the demand for real-time search was so great their servers couldn’t handle the traffic.

It’s no secret that search is evolving, and real-time search is the future. Google’s own Larry Page has even said, "I have always thought we needed to index the web every second to allow real-time search".

Twitter, for example, already employs real-time search… and it works wonderfully. I often find myself using Twitter’s search over Google, just for the real-time aspect.

So, with the launch of Collecta… when do some of the major players jump on the real-time bandwagon? Let us know what you think.

Everybody’s talking about Bing today since the Microsoft’s new search engine became unexpectedly available on a widescale. That includes Google, and more specifically Matt Cutts.

An interesting conversation took place on Twitter today between Cutts and Betsy of the Bing account. Cutts was apparnently doing a little ego searching on Bing and does not appear entirely impressed with the results. SEO Services Group has transcribed the conversation:

Matt Cutts: Congrats to @bing on the launch! Sad to see this not-so-relevant result at #4 for [matt cutts] though: http://bit.ly/4a8Q1Y

Bing: @mattcutts anytime you want to give feedback to @bing, we’re here. I’m sitting with the devs at present. ^betsy

Bing: @mattcutts I know you are disappointed in ego search stuff tonight w/ @bing, but try ‘mtv movie awards 2009′ and see what you get. ^ba

Matt Cutts: Ouch. The #5 Bing result for [matt cutts] is spammy too: http://bit.ly/B2r5F It’s a YouTube->WordPress autogenerated blog.

Matt Cutts: @bing okay. First web result was from 2008 instead of 2009, even with 2009 in query: http://bit.ly/SToK1 . Google nails it.

Matt Cutts: @bing but doesn’t it bother you that [mtv movie awards] on Google gives great news results and 2009 url, but w/Bing I only see 2008, 2007, ?

Bing: @mattcutts Uh – the first answer folks see is the news answer, not what you circled. Apparently twilight won. ^ba

Matt Cutts: @bing by the way, Twilight did rock. I’m not ashamed to say it–glittery vampires rule!!

That’s about it for the conversation between the two (so far), but Cutts referenced that number 4 result again later:

To me, this just looks like Cutts stepping up to market Google in the wake of Bing’s launch. Bing’s getting a lot of attention right now, and it only makes sense that Google would want to make sure they don’t go thinking its better than their own search engine. It’s about protecting the brand.

Whether this is Matt’s intention or not, Cutts pointing out shortcomings in Bing’s search results is going to resonate throughout the industry. He is practically the posterboy for Google, at least among the search and tech savvy crowd.  A lot of people follow Matt Cutts. A lot of people hang nearly everything on what he has to say (search-wise).

Cutts has shed some light on some issues with Bing though. It’s a little early to burn the search engine at the stake. After all, it’s not even supposed to be launched yet, but after trying an ego search for myself (not something I performed in my first Bing runthrough), I am also much happier with Google’s results.

What are your thoughts on Bing? How do you like the search engine’s results compared to Google’s? Share your thoughts.

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