Pirillo's New Idea

Chris Pirillo pitches the Gnomedex audience as well as VCs Jeff Clavier and Brad Feld on his new idea, which he calls TagJag.

He starts the pitch by talking about a few problems, like searching for RSS feeds on a mobile device. He wants the search to return the maximum amount of results with the least number of keystrokes on a mobile device. We see a draft page design that shows us a partial list that output feeds, whether they’re open search or a tag folksonomy. Says Chris, “if the tag is visible, we will be able to generate it.”

The idea is that you can make your own tag and then can organize it by category. “As a user of this service, you wouldn’t have to do all these searches that output RSS. You put in the word or phrase you want to search, then we parse that key word and push it through. It’s completely open, its their feed not ours, so we push the user back to the original content.”

He shows us using OPML how he can import all of his search feeds and how they could be automatically populated to Outlook. Sweet.

Chris continues, “it’s great that you’re throwing user generated content out there, but what about sharing revenue from the content you’re generating. You as a user generating content get 50%. People should get paid for traffic they’re sending out.”

He emphasizes the next sentence by looking up and directly at the audience and repeating it, “I want to structure this so that you Gnomedexers 2006 get a stake in it.” The audience claps. What that would look like at this point is unclear, but he appears to be serious about it.

Feedback from Clavier and Feld, “should your company be funded and by who? Why do you need funding? You can bootstrap small companies without funding sources. This notion that we, the VCs want to take your money is wrong. There are some businesses that don’t make sense for us, ones where we may not be able to make a lot of money.”

Clavier asks, “what is less clear to me is what you want to achieve and what your objectives are, so it lacks focus. I also want to know why you are the best person to do this. How does this compare to Wink and how will this be better than what they’re doing?”

Feld asks, “why do you need money?” He adds, “show your vision visually, whether its through a demo or where you want to go. I need something I can connect to. I think you have that. The disconnect between what you have and funding, is that its rare to dump money into a couple of people who have a vision and an idea. Try to use the least amount of resources you can to get you to where you need to go, quickly.”

Both agree and suggest to Chris that he think about this as a process and not an immediate hit, “think about funding is a process that happens through time. Just because funding doesn’t happen today, it doesn’t mean that capital can’t come in the future. Start engaging and starting the discussion early on. Take advantage of feedback from investors and the community over time. The better we can learn how you work over time, the easier it is for us to invest in the future.”

Tag: Gnomedex
Tag: Gnomedex 2006
Tag: Chris Pirillo
Tag: Brad Feld
Tag: Jeff Clavier
Tag: TagJag