Twenty three great ideas

A few weeks ago more than 40 of Australia’s most exciting innovators showed off their products at Tech23. Twenty-three of those business were selected to give a four minute pitch to industry leaders in front of several hundred spectators at a Sydney auditorium.
All the inventions were great – the highlights included Heard Systems; a bovine pregnancy detector, We Are Hunted; a music charting system that tracks a work’s popularity across the Internet and Posse; a ticket seller that harnesses a band’s fan base to fill venues.

The intriguing thing about two of these companies is they rely on communities. The fact that both of these businesses come from the music industry isn’t surprising. This is a sector where social and peer power has been long understood through sales charts and fan clubs.

With all of us having grown up with Top 40s and music videos we have an intuitive understanding of how these communities work.

An advantage all three businesses had were passionate, informed presenters who believed in their product and who could explain the benefits in 240 seconds. Those 23 presentations showed just how important a good pitch is to communicate how a great idea is going to change the world and make investors happy.

Another thing that stood out was how a well done Powerpoint presentation enhances a speaker while a poorly done one distracts and irritates the audience. Interestingly only one of the three pitches mentioned had a memorable overhead, which shows how a passionate speaker who believes in their product trumps even the most elaborate presentation.

In some ways it’s another variation of the rule of threes in that you have a three second pitch, a 30 second pitch and the three minute extended version. Indeed the ReadWriteWeb site has an extended rule of threes, describing how an “insanely great” service is being spoken about after three days, three months and three years.

While you can’t control what people will say about your business three years after hearing about it, you should be able to get across what your business does in three seconds.

Funnily enough, that’s pretty close to how long it takes to read a 140 character SMS or Twitter message. Can you describe your business in one tweet?

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Paul Wallbank is a writer, speaker and broadcaster on technology issues. He founded national support organisation PC Rescue in 1995 and has spent over 14 years helping businesses get the most from their IT investment. His PC Rescue and IT Queries websites provide free advice to business computer users and his monthly newsletter has over 3000 subscribers.