TWM Photography // Thousand Hands Elegance

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Have You Gotten Your Google Wave Invite? [Reader Poll]

By Adam Pash, 5:00 PM on Mon Oct 5 2009, 7,556 views (Edit, to draft, Slurp)

It’s been almost a week since Google Wave went live; we’ve toured Wave inside and out, tried to help folks get invites, and even pointed you to the first Google Wave search you should know. But can you use it yet?

Did You Get a Wave Invite?(polls)

So far the only people I know who’ve received their invites were people who were in the dev preview, people who were invited by someone at Google, and the rest of those who were part of the very early 100,000 invite pool. Which is to say, I don’t believe that anyone who’s been invited by another Wave user has gotten their invitation yet. I quickly sent out my Wave invites to my fellow Lifehacker editors as soon as I was in, but as of now none of them have received an invitation.

If you’ve gotten your Wave invite—especially if you were invited by someone who gained access to Wave just last week—tell us about it in the comments.

Update: Apologies for the prematurely closed poll—should be open now!

via feeds.gawker.com

Well, I sure haven’t gotten mine, yet.

10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint – Holy Kaw!

10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint

Posted 5 days ago and seen 7106 times

I suffer from something called Ménière’s disease—don’t worry, you cannot get it from reading my blog. The symptoms of Ménière’s include hearing loss, tinnitus (a constant ringing sound), and vertigo. There are many medical theories about its cause: too much salt, caffeine, or alcohol in one’s diet, too much stress, and allergies. Thus, I’ve worked to limit control all these factors.

However, I have another theory. As a venture capitalist, I have to listen to hundreds of entrepreneurs pitch their companies. Most of these pitches are crap: sixty slides about a “patent pending,” “first mover advantage,” “all we have to do is get 1% of the people in China to buy our product” startup. These pitches are so lousy that I’m losing my hearing, there’s a constant ringing in my ear, and every once in while the world starts spinning.

To prevent an epidemic of Ménière’s in the venture capital community, I am evangelizing the 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint. It’s quite simple: a PowerPoint presentation should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points. While I’m in the venture capital business, this rule is applicable for any presentation to reach agreement: for example, raising capital, making a sale, forming a partnership, etc.

Ten slides. Ten is the optimal number of slides in a PowerPoint presentation because a normal human being cannot comprehend more than ten concepts in a meeting—and venture capitalists are very normal. (The only difference between you and venture capitalist is that he is getting paid to gamble with someone else’s money). If you must use more than ten slides to explain your business, you probably don’t have a business. The ten topics that a venture capitalist cares about are:

1. Problem
2. Your solution
3. Business model
4. Underlying magic/technology
5. Marketing and sales
6. Competition
7. Team
8. Projections and milestones
9. Status and timeline
10. Summary and call to action

Twenty minutes. You should give your ten slides in twenty minutes. Sure, you have an hour time slot, but you’re using a Windows laptop, so it will take forty minutes to make it work with the projector. Even if setup goes perfectly, people will arrive late and have to leave early. In a perfect world, you give your pitch in twenty minutes, and you have forty minutes left for discussion.

Thirty-point font. The majority of the presentations that I see have text in a ten point font. As much text as possible is jammed into the slide, and then the presenter reads it. However, as soon as the audience figures out that you’re reading the text, it reads ahead of you because it can read faster than you can speak. The result is that you and the audience are out of synch.

The reason people use a small font is twofold: first, that they don’t know their material well enough; second, they think that more text is more convincing. Total bozosity. Force yourself to use no font smaller than thirty points. I guarantee it will make your presentations better because it requires you to find the most salient points and to know how to explain them well. If “thirty points,” is too dogmatic, the I offer you an algorithm: find out the age of the oldest person in your audience and divide it by two. That’s your optimal font size.

So please observe the 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint. If nothing else, the next time someone in your audience complains of hearing loss, ringing, or vertigo, you’ll know what caused the problem. One last thing: to learn more about the zen of great presentations, check out a site called Presentation Zen by my buddy Garr Reynolds.

via holykaw.alltop.com

The Most Important Thing You Can Teach

Vin Diesel At a very special lunch meeting today… my father said something so dead on… I wanted to share…

He said…

“Confidence is the most important thing you can teach someone… if you can teach them confidence, you don’t have to teach them anything else.”

Facebook | Vin Diesel (2 October 2009)

 

ThinkGeek :: ThinkGeek Slide Rule

via thinkgeek.com

Damn! I haven’t seen one of these since sometime in the 1980s. I didn’t know they were still in production. Well, for sure I’m getting one of these.

ThinkGeek :: Tac Bac – Tactical Canned Bacon

via thinkgeek.com

Yes. This is a real product. Check it out for yourself.

Cinemagraphic Masturbation

A new age of porn has dawned.

I’m talking about fan pages.

You’ve seen them. They’re everywhere: YouTube, Facebook, MySpace.

Take this video from YouTube: cinemagraphic masturbation. Come on, people. There used to be a time when it was illegal to perform such acts in public. Remember Paul ReubensPaul Reubens?

Sprout Launches Publisher To Help Page Admins Create Engaging Content

Yesterday Sprout launched Sprout publisher, a new tool which enables Facebook Page administrators to create interactive content right within their page. The content is then published directly to your stream. You can publish coupons and well as other forms of interactive content. This is the type of Facebook Pages solution I’ve been waiting to see. Rather than having to go load up tons of applications to customize your page, you can modify everything from within your Facebook Page publisher.

While coupons are the only thing that can be generated from within the publisher right now, Sprout plans to launch a number of other services in the near future. The company is heavily focused on services for Facebook Pages and the strategy may just work out as the quality of content the company is creating is top notch. For example, the company built us our Facebook Page landing tab using the Sprout Builder, an interactive studio for creating branded content, including Facebook page content.

There are a number of other companies providing advanced Facebook Page customization services including Wildfire and Inovlver but Sprout appears to have the most robust studio for letting users create their own content that I’ve seen yet. All of these companies offer more robust services as well in which they cooperate with brands to create custom solutions.

Ultimately the ability to create customized content from the Facebook publisher is an important feature for any application and the new Sprout publisher is a testament to that. In my 30 Days to 3,000 Fans program I’ve highlighted the importance of creating engaging content, and the Sprout publisher helps you do just that. It will be interesting to see what new features Sprout rolls out for this new tool over the coming weeks and months. If you want to try out the Sprout Publisher on your page, you can go install it here.

via allfacebook.com

Some love it. Others hate it. Businesses now have another reason to love Facebook.

About Us | SENATUS

via senatus.net

You have to view the website, because — wow! It’s unreal. Then head over to TechXav.com, the kids — yes, 14 yo kids — they sponsor.

FREAK Shots: How Effective Is Your Cardboard Sign? – Freakonomics Blog

via freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com