Respectance

So a few days ago I wrote about the website Respectance receiving funding and how it seemed like a preposterous concept. Well, I officially proved myself wrong and wanted to write about my recent experience with the site.

On Tuesday of last week I found out that my Grandpa who had been in poor health ever since he had a mild heart attack several months ago, was being moved to Hospice. My family, who keep in regular contact via email, started to collect photos of him in order to make a video for the impending service. Since our family keeps in such regular contact, I thought using a site like Respectance could be a really cool way to collect all of the photos in one place so that others who have been touched by my Grandfather (he delivered over ten thousand babies during his life) could view them and also add their own. In addition, the Respectance site lets users add videos, memories and create videos from the photos on the site.

In creating the site I was also able to add the text from his obituary to the front page, create a video with one of his favorite songs (Big Rock Candy Mountain) and help others in the family add photos. The site so far has been a bit hit with the family, partly because of its ease of use and also I think because it follows modern web standards as far as simplistic and clean design. I applaud the creators of the site for providing such a hassle free environment to honor the memory of my Grandfather and I really hope they are successful in the future.

Some of the things I'd like to see added to the site are the ability to upload audio without video (my grandfather did a radio interview that a couple of the grandkids set up which I would love to include on the site somehow) and also maybe some sort of forum for families to get together and chat.

We will see how the tribute to my Grandfather evolves over the next few months but so far I'd say Respectance is a hit and I am very happy with the level of innovation this new round of investment in social networks has fostered. So keep it up VC's; even if a lot of these sites flare up and disappear, the web and our social connections will be better for it in the end. I already feel closer to my relatives on that side of the family by involving them in this collaborative effort in honor of my Grandfather.

Bubble 2.0?

Ran across this on Ajaxian this morning, apparently PC Mag has an article by John Dvorak that espouses the new 'Web 2.0' bubble, aka Bubble 2.0. While I share some of his initial sentiment; I think he could have provided a little more backup than six bullet points supported by a sentence each. If you are going to make a broad claim such as: "I can assure you that after this next collapse, nobody will think of the dot-com bubble as anything other than a prelude.", you need to put a little meat behind your justifications. I hate to burst his 'bubble' as it were, but if you just look at the VC funding numbers, as provided yesterday from Venture Beat, you can see we are far from anything near the amount of financial commitment to this new wave of technology sites as we saw in 1999/2000.

So while I do agree we are headed for some sort of critical mass of mobile-user-generated-social-networking widgets I don't think one could expect anything even close to the scale of the 1999/2000 bubble. Unless of course we are only at the beginning...

RIP Business Plans?

So Don Dodge has a post today questioning whether or not Business Plans have any purpose anymore. I'm just as stumped as everyone else in regards to the Twitter deal, but like most others I don't actually use it. Don makes some great points, especially in regards to the people making the business worth investing in rather than the business plan (or even the idea). What I think he is missing is that the VCs do want something to hold in their hands, even if they will nitpick it. The Deck format I mentioned in my earlier post is a great hybrid approach I think and something I'm surprised entrepreneurs don't use more often.

The Deck business plan basically gives you a short document, written in power point with the main details of your business and why you think it will succeed. One could argue that printing the slides to the presentation is enough but the Deck is a lot more than just printed out slides. First of all, you are getting the advantage of a nice looking format that is consistent with your PowerPoint slides. Second, each slide of the Deck may follow a similar format as your presentation but will convey much more detail such as things you may talk about but don't actually list on your slides. Third, it gives the VC the assurance that although they aren't looking at a 50 page plan, you have done your homework. Finally, although it may give them something to nitpick it gives them an overview of your idea for later reference so they can pay attention to your talk rather than take copious notes for later review.

Obviously in the case of a company like Twitter, this might have actually been a bad thing since they have no business model and no idea of how they are going to generate revenue. Once all of these social networking fads have faded away and we have more stability in the market, new businesses will have to be more thorough when pitching a new idea for funding. Right now it seems like all you need is a high user base and buzz factor and you'll get money thrown at your business.

Market research and a good business plans are not gone, the presentation need some tweaking and I think thats where the Deck and other visually appealing presentation formats can be leveraged.

When is it all too much?

Okay, I'm all for this new Web 2.0 and social networking boom we have going on, and I love the fact that we're all so much more connected than we once were, but this site made me do a double take...

VentureBeat is reporting that Respecance a Social Network for sharing memories of people who have passed away just got 1.5 million in funding. I suppose it is just a natural extension of the stories that keep popping up when a kid dies who had a profile on MySpace and his profile is turned into a sort of shrine for his friends.

The more I think about it, it could work; my uncle recently passed away and my mom spent several days putting together a posterboard of his memories for the service. If this site would allow everyone to collaborate on that and come up with a video / photo album of memories from people you might not otherwise be able to contact or get media from, it could be pretty cool.

Okay, I started this post to vent on what the critical mass is for Web 2.0 social networking / collaboration sites and the funding they are getting but this one actually does seem like it might be worthwhile.

Another idea, and I'm sure its being done and has funding, is an online cookbook collaboration site where family members / friends can share recipes and then create a printable cookbook (nicely bound and such) for everyone to share. My Mom just did this with my relatives and produced a nice cookbook that I have in my kitchen right now. The problem was she had to get all the recipes from the family, compile them with some archaic software program and then bring it to Kinkos to bind it. A service for that would have been very handy I think (I'll have to poke around the web and find who is doing this sort of thing right now).