So, what's your best elevator pitch?
As a bonus question, what makes a good elevator pitch?
Longer version: Security is hard. Governments and organized crime are getting increasingly involved in identity theft and corporate espionage. Tarsnap is a backup system designed from the ground up to keep your data out of the hands of the US government (and anyone else who might want to steal it).
You'd probably have to go around asking people to get an idea that's more than just guesswork.
To me it reads more like backups for the nonconformists that are singled out by an american mindset eager to declare war on anything unexpected.
Is Airbus a company of criminals? They have a perfectly good reason for wanting to keep their data out of the hands of the US government: Every time the US government gets some information about Airbus, Boeing has it the next day.
Sadly, industrial espionage is something which many governments are actively involved in; wanting to make sure that your foreign competitors don't have access to your trade secrets does not make you a criminal.
Isn't it possible to encrypt already and then backup?
Yes, but if you do that, you lose the benefits of snapshotting (performance of incremental backups, convenience of full backups).
I think that misses the point though. From a rational perspective, of course, companies don't want the US government grabbing their private data. But from an emotional impact perspective, which seems to be the idea of a pitch, it makes it sound sketchy.
Possibly more emotive, and catering to the (annoying) zeitgeist would be "[...] designed from the ground up to keep your data out of the hands of hackers and cyber-terrorists [...]"
I'm not good at marketing: I'm too honest. I simply can't grossly exaggerate threats like that. Black hats, sure. Cyber terrorists? Not a very real threat.
No. As anyone who works in the field can tell you, the first step in any security work is to analyse what threats exist (which involves assessing both opportunity and motive -- if you're the US Air Force, you probably don't consider the NSA to be a threat even if the NSA is able to break into your systems).
Given that I have trouble with dumbing things down for a non-security-literate audience, I think the right solution here is for me to work at educating people -- I'm already planning on doing this, actually, by providing information about all the potential attacks which my code is designed to prevent (and which other code isn't).
I'm working on another project already, but if someone else wants to make this then I'll be your first user.
There are likely many people who would be interested in your service to whom "geotag" and "@town.state.gov email address" mean nothing.
Clarity and conciseness. Hope I didn't violate my answer to the first one ;-)
Of course, almost no one gives a toss about poetry anyway.
This is a labor of love. Google will not buy me, and I probably won't make any money.
If I re-read your statement and use "work together" instead of collaborate then it sounded much better to me. For some reason... strange.
Longer pitch: Do you trust the news? How credible are the journalists and sources you turn to each day? NewsCred is a digital newspaper bringing you all the world's credible news, from your favorite sources, in one place.
Interested in our Alpha? Drop me a line at shafqat[at]newscred.com.
(Disclaimer: No, I did't solve Artificial General Intelligence, nor did I do something equally "magical". I'm not trying to compete for <a href="http://www.loebner.net/Prizef/loebner-prize.html">Hugh Loebner's gold medal</a>. I'll never be able to simulate a human brain which can explain its own workings. A human brain which could write such a simulation would have to be able to describe itself, which mine can't. A machine's "brain", however, can be much simpler, and the information about how it works usually does exist. The difficult thing is in encoding it so that it can be queried and used in coherent conversation. That's what I'm hacking on.)
We built CloudFire for people that want to share ALL their media...FAST...right from their desktop.
Don't waste your time free time UPLOADING.
http://www.snarfbot.com in early alpha, but mostly works :)
Still working on the pitch... Not sure how to word the last line, it doesn't make much sense until you have used the site which is likely a bad thing. I am open to suggestions...
Greg McAdoo's talk was excellent and included a few words on the elevator pitch; only I missed something. At one point he used Cisco as an example of an elevator pitch, first he said what they might have done. Then he showed a slide and said, "well I don't even have to introduce this...".
Only, I couldn't read the slide!
Does anyone recall what it said?
I didn't invent this pitch myself - it's how other people tend to describe my project. Strangely, all three words are (strictly speaking) false. There's no 3D, only image interpolation. The project is not limited to photographs. And it has no reified concept of "album". A truthful pitch would sound like "images connected by fluid transitions", pretty boring.
It's good because anyone who has been on a soccer team knows how shoddy their communication methods typically are and will likely ask some barrier-breaking questions to allow me to explain the site further. Any leads the pitch generates is relevant (no one who doesn't care about soccer will want more information).
Tagging is widespread and well-understood, but somewhat broken. Finding and browsing using tags is slow and clumsy because current systems are pretty dumb – they have little understanding of the meaning or structure behind tags. My app makes tagging work by finding structure and enabling users to add meaning to their tags.
HubSpot (http://www.HubSpot.com):
On demand software for inbound marketing. Helps small businesses get more website visitors and convert a higher percentage of them to paying customers.
Our system also expands the idea of a Project. Rather than an isolated silo of work that you have to do, a Project integrates all of the people involved together with our collaboration system, from customers to vendors to subcontractors. The goal of a project is the complete value being created for the customer or for yourself.
The system allows you to create workflow templates and capture process knowledge of commonly recurring sets of task steps so that you can assign many tasks with a single click. The system also automatically tracks all of your time and associates the work you do with what you've worked on.
Books I Am Reading: A Book Reader's Tool
ezLearnz: this is your textbook on the internets