Slashdot Search Story | Google Unveils goo.gl URL Shortening Service

December 15, 2009 by shkadmin
Google Unveils goo.gl URL Shortening Service
eldavojohn writes “The Sultan of Search is unveiling a new service (currently only available for Google Toolbar and Feedburner) that will tackle a very old problem usually solved by bit.ly or tinyurl — URL shortening. Now, we’ve heard cries for sanity to prevent potential issues (like what if tr.im had shut down and broken millions of links?) but with one of the goliaths of the industry jumping in the ring it looks like URL shortening is here to stay. And a quick note for people who enjoy privacy, goo.gl explicitly states: ‘Please note that Google may choose to publicly display aggregate and non-personally identifiable statistics about particular shortened links, such as the number of end user clicks.’ You didn’t think Google was going to sit back and let bit.ly harvest juicy data on 2.1 billion links that were clicked in November without trying to corner some of that action to make their ad suggestions more accurate, did you?” Google’s shortening service is called Goo.gl.

Ok, so let me get this straight, they have your email, DNS, documents, and now links you share. Thank goodness they are not evil.

Filed Under: News

Kai-Fu Lee, ex-President of Google Greater China’s excellent presentation in Carnegie Mellon

December 15, 2009 by shkadmin

His presentation shows you why US Internet companies continously lose battles in China to local entrepreneurs.
Filed Under: News

Pitch Masters HK Proposed Format

December 15, 2009 by shkadmin

As part of trying to put together the Pitch Masters group, this is an outline of the format for the two kinds of meetings. I would appreciate feedback on it:
  1. Practice Sessions: Open and social, held in an informal environment, such as a coffee shop or bar. If investors want to come to this meeting, they must also play the role of entrepreneur and have a pitch to deliver. 
    1. 15 min – Meet and greet time where people practice delivering their Elevator Pitches. 
    2. 30 min (broken into 2×15 min sessions) – We would split the group into two, one group takes the role of investor and the other entrepreneur, after 15 minutes, you switch rolls. A rapid public pitching round that each iteration is timed, perhaps 4 minutes for the pitch and questions, and then 1 minute for feedback. After each time, the entrepreneurs for the round play musical chairs and go pitch to a new person. You get 3 times to deliver your pitch to someone, and then you listen to other people for three rounds. 
    3. 15 min – Wrap up and group discussion, talk about things that were experienced, new books, techniques, etc. 
    4. Take a video of some of these pitches to use for promotional material as well as for feedback for individuals.
    5. The practice sessions could be quite informal, and would work with as few as 4 people, but would probably be better with 6 or more. 
  2. Matching Sessions: Location could be an office or just somewhere that has spaces that could be used privately. I think a good size for this would be to find 5-10 investors and 15-40 entrepreneurs, but could be sized to fit available resources. 
    1. 30 min – Meet and greet, it would be helpful to have some listing of areas of interest or expertise for all participants so that potential matches could meet socially before the pitching rounds. Investors get “dance cards” that are for booking their pitch sessions. Each entrepreneur gets 3-4 pitch slots and must manage their own sign ups to prevent conflicts (ie. Session A, B, C, D). 
    2. 30 min – Public pitches, 7 minutes each, four rounds per investor. 
    3. 15 min – Recess and arrangements for private pitching. 
    4. 1 hour – Given what private meeting facilities are available, arrange private pitches for investor/entrepreneur pairs or groups. This will facilitate discussing topics that are needed to be covered by non-disclosure agreements, etc. 
    5. Retire to a nearby pub, make announcements if there are any to be announced. 
    6. It would be requested that angels give feedback to the people they interviewed, either catching up with them at the pub, etc. or via a note afterwards. 

Filed Under: News Tagged With: angel investment, pitch, pitch masters
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