As a leader in the Pittsburgh investment scene, long-time entrepreneur Mel Pirchesky is now using his experience to coach startups on fundraising and business strategies. According to his company Eagle Ventures , Pirchesky has raised over $45 million in his 35 years of structuring deals. In a recent guest post on the site Pittsburgh Ventures , Pirchesky breaks the art of the elevator pitch – a tool every young entrepreneur needs to learn to use – into an exact science tailored for the best results. Sponsor An elevator pitch is a term used to describe a short (usually about 60 seconds, or the time it takes to ride in an elevator) description or pitch of a product one is trying to sell or raise funding for. Pirchesky says an effective elevator pitch is more valuable than a well-written business plan. After all, who’s going to read a business plan when the pitch didn’t hook them? “Elevator pitches have two components – the first ten or fifteen seconds and the remaining forty-five or fifty,” Pirchesky writes. “The objective of the first ten or fifteen seconds is to have your prospective investors want to listen to the next forty-five or fifty seconds differently, more intently than they would have otherwise.” Pirchesky adds that the first section of the pitch should include two things – what it is that you or your company does, and something that adds validity to your or your company’s value proposition. Finally, he suggests that you avoid trying to fill your pitch with too much information, to stay away from buzzwords and jargon, and to continually iterate and revise the pitch until all of the money is in the bank. If there is a great deal to be had, and no investors are biting, the problem isn’t a lack of available funds – it’s in how the deal is being communicated, Pirchesky says. “The key to effective, successful fundraising is to have your prospective investors hear what you say and understand the significance of what you say to depths of their bones,” he says. Discuss

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Going Up! How to Ride An Elevator Pitch to New Heights

“We live in public” isn’t just the name of a film; it’s an Internet truism. For the past ten years, more and more of us have been using blogging platforms to share the details of our personal and professional lives. With the advent of microblogging, the sharing has escalated to include the most intimate, immediate, and even mundane details of one’s daily grind. When pressures abound, venting online is second nature; but oversharing can bear disastrous consequences. The cure? Penzu ’s private-by-design, sharable-by-choice blogging software. Sponsor Unlike most modern CMSs (and actually somewhat reminiscent of dotcom-era systems such as Livejournal), Penzu focuses on personal journaling and privacy. The company, a small Canadian outfit which launched last summer, says its posts are private by default. An in spite of its focus on privacy, the system is hardly antisocial. Flickr photos can be imported, and each entry comes with an optional URL for sharing on other networks. The new Penzu Pro features, available for the relatively low price of $19 a year,are pretty useful, as well. With the free version, users can create, save, search and share journal entries. The paid version of the software allows users to also import entires from just about any kind of blog (in case oversharing has been a problem in your past) and export Penzu entries, as well as giving users a slew of customization options, offsite backups and military-grade 256-bit AES encryption for maximum data protection. And just in time for the holidays, Penzu Pro is giftable for the oversharer in your network. We gave Penzu a spin and were impressed by the interface and the entire concept of private blogging. The company has taken something old, given it a beautifully modern UI, added beneficial features and made a useful product that addresses a common problem. Certainly, WordPress, Blogger, and other CMSs allow for locked posts. But the idea of having a separate destination for one’s innermost thoughts gives the end user a little more comfort to express himself freely. Give it a spin, and let us know in the comments how the experience feels to you. Discuss

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Is Oversharing a Problem? Try Penzu

In an interview with TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington at LeWeb today, Google’s Marissa Mayer discussed some of the new product that Google announced over the last year, including the recent integration of real-time news streams into the default search pages, Google Music Search and Google Wave. Talking about the future of search, Mayer expects that people will soon do searches by talking to their phones, or through services like the newly announced Google Goggles . Sponsor Going Beyond Text While Mayer expects the search market to continue to grow, she also thinks that a lot of additional growth can come from introducing new ways of searching the web. Translation and personalization are also a major issue for Google. Asked about SearchWiki – which Arrington considers a failure – Mayer said that Google wants to morph the user experience a bit, but didn’t go into any details. Regarding the Google Goggles and Google’s current dependency on text to power its search, Mayer noted that the application looks at more than just location data and image recognition algorithms. Speech recognition, however, is still easier to do for Google than image recognition. Mobile Search Talking about mobile searches, Mayer said that the number of mobile searches doubled last year. Mobile searches make up slightly more than 5% of all of the search queries that Google processes. Chrome and the ChromeOS With regards to Chrome, Mayer noted that Google wants to focus on the user experience with features like the new tab page. She described the ChromeOS as an anti-operating system. In total, Google sees “tens of millions of Chrome users,” though characteristically, Mayer did not go into any details. Google and the News Media Google wants to increase users’ engagement with news. According to Mayer, if we were to reinvent the news today, it would look very different from what we know today. She cited Google Living Stories as an experiment that tries to reinvent the news for the 21st century. Currently, readers tend to come to articles from Google and only read one article. To increase engagement, Mayer wants to create more personalized services. In addition, she also thinks that newspapers can do a better job at keeping users on their sites. Why, for example, do most sites not offer links to related articles? The Future of News Mayer’s vision of the future of news is a personalized stream of news that is portable. The personalization would take into account stories that your friends read, location and a knowledge of the topics a user is interested in. Asked about Rupert Murdoch, Mayer noted that Google partnered with MySpace to aggregate real-time status updates from MySpace users. She hopes that Murdoch will not pull all of his content out of Google. Surprisingly, Mayer didn’t completely deny that Google would be willing to pay publishers for their content. Music Search Mayer said that she was happy with Google Music as a start, especially because it includes song lyrics. Mayer sidestepped any discussion about the future of Google’s Music search feature. Google and Social Networks Asked about Google Social Search, Mayer noted that search can help social networks by helping users to find experts in their circle of friends. Mayer noted that users are more likely to trust their friends when it comes to certain queries (snow conditions, for example). The perfect search engine would also be able to crawl private updates that a user is credentialed to see. Mayer also noted that Google might be able to help to create an authority ranking system for real-time updates from services like Twitter and Facebook. Google Wave Arrington asked Mayer if users need to be trained better to understand Wave or if Google plans to tweak the experience. Permanent URLs are one of the features that Google plans to add. The fact that Google Wave doesn’t have critical mass yet is also hindering the experience. Some teams at Google are currently using Wave for their internal communication. Mayer did not make any announcement regarding the future of Wave. Discuss

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Marissa Mayer Talks About Wave, Music Search and the Future of News

My6sense just anounced a new version of its iPhone application that can automatically highlight the most relevant tweets from the users you follow. The mytweetsense feature learns from the user’s implicit and explicit actions and builds a model of what is interesting to the individual user. Mytweetsense works best for tweets that include links. The app’s features are clearly geared towards these kind of tweets and include previews for links, videos and images. Sponsor The default view in the app displays all the recent tweets you received according to relevancy. You can also switch to a chronological view of your timeline and the app allows users to easily reshare content on Twitter, Facebook and Friendfeed, as well as by email. Finding Relevant Tweets The app trains itself. My6sense just watches what links you click on and which articles you retweet or share on other social networks. It takes a little bit of training, but if our experience with the my6sense RSS reader is any indication, the results are surprisingly good. We got a chance to talk to Barak Hachamov, the company’s founder and CEO at LeWeb earlier today. According to Hachamov, my6sense creates an extremely detailed personal profile of every user. It’s important to note that mytweetsense mostly looks at the content of the links that you receive in your Twitter stream. While the app has an option to turn on the relevancy algorithm for tweets without links, the service works best when it can work with the additional information that is implicit in these links. Twitter lists and smarter real-time search engines have made it easier to keep up with the constant stream of updates on Twitter, but this is still a random stream of information. My6sense’s iPhone app may not replace your favorite Twitter app right now, but it’s a great tool to catch up on your tweets if you have been offline for a few days. You do, however, have to use it for a few days before you can get the best experience. The app first has to get to know you, after all. Discuss

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Finding Tweets that Matter to You: My6sense Launches New iPhone App

Outside.in is a hyper-local news aggregator and when they say hyper-local they mean it – the site captures news, blog posts and other resources right down to the neighborhood level. The company announced tonight that it’s raised a nice round of funding, $7 million from CNN, the super-hip VC at Union Square Ventures , real-time savvy VC shop Betaworks and several other organizations. Both of the aforementioned are existing investors re-investing. Tonight the Outside.in site told me about a new real-estate valuation report for the neighborhood I just bought a house in, a city permit request by a local college planing to subdivide a big residential lot on the beautiful old street I walk my dogs on and some cool jobs in the neighborhood. What more could I ask for? Long term viability and an expanded staff for a service like this? That sounds great. Sponsor Outside.in says that its headlines will soon be run on CNN’s website, much like MSNBC has said it will run hyper-local news from the related site it acquired this year, EveryBlock . EveryBlock tends to discover a lot more information than Outside.in does. Its public records discovery is especially good. It’s a lot of fun to read health department inspection reports from neighborhood restaurants (in a perverse sort of way) and that’s not something Outside.in unearths. EveryBlock has to date been limited to a handful of big cities around the US, though. Outside.in has no such limitation. Things not to love about Outside.in include a garish new advertising-filled page layout (just subscribe by RSS feed) and a heart-breaking iPhone app. That app discovers your location and brings up area news – lots of fun to use when house-hunting in different neighborhoods. Not so much fun when it fails to work, which is more often than not in my experience. If you want a good local news iPhone app, check out Fwix . I’m eagerly awaiting the launch of Nozzl Media , a related service we profiled in our report The Real-Time Web and Its Future . These kinds of data parsing services, tied to real-life experiences like geographic location, are becoming an important value add now that more and more data is coming online. Everyone wants to discover the future of news – these kinds of services could well be an important part of it. Note: Outside In is also the name of a 40 year old youth social services agency that also deserves respect, speaking of local. Discuss

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I Love Outside.in & It Just Got CNN Backing

Firefox gets distributed social networking and identity management. The good people who work on the revolutionary, open-sourced, and occasionally maligned browser have been hard at work on making cross-site navigation and portable IDs a solvable problem. A discrete button to the left of the URL that can tell users whether or not they are logged in to a particular site and allow them to log in without further navigation? Accuse us of punning, but definitely sign us up. Google Chrome: Start taking notes. Sponsor Our friends at Mozilla posted this teaser back in the spring, when they touted a way to eliminate clicks and keystrokes between navigating to and being recognized by a given website. Our own Marshall Kirkpatrick enthused, “Earlier this week, we argued that browsers and social networks were fast converging, and that with more users and some feature advantages, Firefox could be the best real competition for Facebook… This is just one more chapter in a much larger story – but look how easy this makes OpenID to use!” But now, Mozilla’s UX chief Aza Raskin has posted more updates to his personal blog that indicate new hotness is coming soon. The new feature will harness the power of Mozilla’s Weave to make your online identity something that’s stored in your back pocket more than it’s stored in your cookies or a third party’s server. Decrying redirects and iframes , Raskin tells of a brave new world where an in-browser button that defies navigational difficulties allows for something closer to true identity portability than we’ve seen yet: Identity will be one of the defining themes in the next five years of the Web. Nearly every site has a concept of a user account, registration, and identity. Searching for “sign in” on Google yields over 1.8 billion hits. And yet, the browser does nothing to make this experience better save for some basic auto form filling. The browser leaves websites to re-implement identity management, and forces users to learn a new scheme for every site… Your identity is too important to be owned by any one company. Finally! They said it! And now, we give you screenshots: So, what’s the verdict, readers? Does this surpass Chrome’s identity-porting capabilities? Does this create massive privacy issues for users who don’t want their personal traffic tracked? Discuss

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Firefox’s Plan to Kick the Login’s Butt

A few weeks ago, I spoke to someone who had finally reached the end of her rope with an obdurate boss. Having suggested a series of social media initiatives, only to see them wither on the vine as he refused to either push them forward or cancel them, she was ready to move on – not just to another job, but a whole different organization. (Possibly the mob. She has recently dreamed up some innovations on the homicide front that she’s eager to try.) Sponsor One of the reasons social media can be so challenging is that it often challenges hierarchies… and people at the top of those hierarchies have grown comfortable there. Some see the potential advantages of an engaging, open online presence, but others feel threatened and vulnerable. They have a wide range of hostile responses at their disposal: from the passive-aggressive (my friend’s boss) to the outright belligerent (see below). What’s your experience? Have you found yourself inadvertently threatening the powers that be? More Noise to Signal. Discuss

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