SW Marketing: Effective Sales Pitch for VCs / Girlfriends / etc?

Hi All,

Hopefully more and more of you are meeting up with VCs or selling
internal projects using semantic web technologies.

I sold my first RDF based project 5 or 6 years ago and lately I have
had some tough VC/fund raising presentations. I realized that I have
definitely improved my sales pitch over the years, so I thought I
would share some brief thoughts with you guys and hopefully get some
feedback and novel ideas.

My current approach when selling a project that includes Semantic Web
( specifically Linked Data ) technology is simple. I only use only TWO
slides to talk about Semantic Web per-se:

1) I replaced the web layer cake for this slide[1]
2) Then I jump to the LOD cloud diagram by Richard Cyganiak[2]. I
emphasize on the size of the datasets and how this is something that
has never happened before.
3) That's it. No more semweb talk. Focus on the value proposition and
answer questions as they appear.

The other useful diagram I have found useful is Nova Spivack's web
evolution timeline[3] ( very buzz friendly ). The problem with that
particular diagram is that it imposes an abritrary classification
(1.0, 2.0, 3.0 ) and you will most probably run into some friction.


So... I am sure lots of you have learned and mastered their own sales pitch...

What is yours?
Any new diagrams that I don't know of?


And two suggestions:
1) I think Mr Cyganiak's diagram could use some numbers ( how many
"records" are there in this giant database? )
2) We could setup a space devoted to marketing. Maybe in some of the
community wikis ( does this exist already? )

And don't tell me that marketing is not important. This whole Linked
Data / SW re-branding has really made some noise.
( I know LD is not the SW, but it is a visible part of it ).


Thanks!
A

[1] http://blog.aldobucchi.com/2008/07/how-to-explainthe-semantic-web-in-3.html
[2] http://richard.cyganiak.de/2007/10/lod/
[3] http://novaspivack.typepad.com/RadarNetworksTowardsAWebOS.jpg

-- 
:::: Aldo Bucchi ::::
+56 9 7623 8653
skype:aldo.bucchi
http://aldobucchi.com/

Received on Wednesday, 9 July 2008 20:03:21 UTC