More thoughts on how emerging companies can make best use of limited IT money.

The VC community wants to invest in companies which will take their cash and turn it around as quickly as possible in revenues and value.  This means limited cash needs to be dedicated to activities that are actually producing product, getting product into the market, and the sales book to bank process.

The more overhead and expenses are eliminated from the process, then more cash available to revenue-producing activities. 

There are several really good organizations around southern California supporting startups and entrepreneurs, including the Tech Coast Angels and Tech Coast Venture Network.  One of the more endearing activities is the grand old tradition of "Fast Pitch Competition."  The Fast Pitch Competition brings a large group of enthusiastic, energetic, and hopeful  young entrepreneurs into the lion's den of venture capital and investment banking critics.

Here's how it works.

The Fast Pitch.  30 seconds to accomplish the following:

Spent Wednesday in Santa Clara with Sun Microsystems attending a seminar on cloud computing and modular data centers.

One of the highlights was having an opportunity to walk through and kick the tires on their container supporting the Internet Archives (http://www.archive.org/index.php ).  This site basically tries to index media from as far back as the Internet goes in an attempt to preserve the history of the Internet.  My personal favorite feature of the internet archive is the "Wayback Machine," which has a collection of web pages  harvested from search engines and other sources.  If you have a favorite website and want to know what it looked like, or what it had for headlines in 2002, you can pull up many of those images.  I've noticed it clips some pictures and graphics, but all the text is there for you to remember.

Quite a few old guys (like me!) from the early days of the Internet showed up to hear Lew Tucker, CTO Cloud Computing for Sun Microsystems, talk about Sun's vision of cloud computing.  Great presentation, great ideas, but one discussion really hit home.  The effect today and into the future on startup companies looking for venture capital.