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Make your presentations 237% more awesome with Twitterfall

I was recently at the MobileX conference in Cincinnati and in preparation for the conference I told the organizers to check out Twitterfall, which they did in a big way, putting it up on a side screen in the auditorium.  It was awesome, and although I just made up the 237% cooler figure, it is truly a powerful way to make your events interactive.  For example, in my keynote I referenced Twitterfall for realtime tweets to be able to work audience questions into my presentation in a seamless fashion.  It's also great for introverts (you know who you are!) who want to ask questions but don't want to disrupt the event by raising their hands.

Here's a video showing how the experience was for attendees:

I was recently at the MobileX conference in Cincinnati and in preparation for the conference I told the organizers to check out Twitterfall, which they did in a big way, putting it up on a side screen in the auditorium.  It was awesome, and although I just made up the 237% cooler figure, it is truly a powerful way to make your events interactive.  For example, in my keynote I referenced Twitterfall for realtime tweets to be able to work audience questions into my presentation in a seamless fashion.  It's also great for introverts (you know who you are!) who want to ask questions but don't want to disrupt the event by raising their hands. Here's a video showing how the experience was for attendees:

Mega Trends, Social TV, Liberating Data & More at the Mobile Outlook 2013 + ApolloMatrix Happy Hour

Paul Sherman, the editor of Pototmac Tech Wire, puts on an awesome Mobile Outlook panel every year.  I participated in 2010 and 2011 and again this year at USA Today's Gannett HQ in McLean, VA.  It's funny to go back and watch the older panels when we asked for a show of hands -- back then, everyone was using Blackberry phones and only a few early adopters had Android phones.  Oh, how quickly things change -- at this year's panel the ratio was reversed.  And interestingly, nobody was using a WindowsPhone device.

As I get into angel investing, I'm creating a framework with which to evaluate potential opportunities, which I presented as a keynote at the event.  My main message:  Find the good ideas that are masquerading as bad ideas -- therein lie the billion dollar exits.  This is a tip I picked up from Paul Graham's excellent Black Swan Farming essay.  Here's a Venn diagram of what these "good ideas in hiding" look like:

This is super counter-intuitive, because we all tend to look for the good ideas, both as entrepreneurs and as investors.  In the slides below, you'll see that the framework I'm developing focuses on teams that can prototype & iterate quickly, are doing something in a meaningfully large market, and can "dump the poop," or pivot quickly when it turns out that a bad idea is actually just that:  A bad idea, and not a good idea in hiding.