Last week sometime a few people thought it might be a good idea to do a weekly roundup of elevator pitches. I wanted to start it off this week.<p>So, what's your best elevator pitch?<p>As a bonus question, what makes a good elevator pitch?
Six word pitch for tarsnap (<a href="http://www.tarsnap.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.tarsnap.com</a>): Online backups for the truly paranoid.<p>Longer version: Security is hard. Governments and organized crime are getting increasingly involved in identity theft and corporate espionage. Tarsnap is a backup system designed from the ground up to keep your data out of the hands of the US government (and anyone else who might want to steal it).
A service that allows you to geotag things for your municipal government to fix: pot holes, poison ivy, graffiti, car accidents, dangerous trees, etc. This automatically creates a to-do list online for everyone to see, and lets people with an @town.state.gov email address check items off as they get done. Things like downed power wires would be submitted the same way and then automatically routed to the relevant authority.<p>I'm working on another project already, but if someone else wants to make this then I'll be your first user.
Elevator pitch for my poetry app (not a startup/business): The Internet is encouraging more poets to write and share, but it is not helping them collaborate and improve and most apps wall up an author's content.<p>Clarity and conciseness. Hope I didn't violate my answer to the first one ;-)<p>Of course, almost no one gives a toss about poetry anyway.
Short pitch: NewsCred brings you all the world's most credible news in one place.<p>Longer pitch: Do you trust the news? How credible are the journalists and sources you turn to each day? NewsCred is a digital newspaper bringing you all the world's credible news, from your favorite sources, in one place.<p>Interested in our Alpha? Drop me a line at shafqat[at]newscred.com.<p><a href="http://www.newscred.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.newscred.com</a>
MachineEnglish - a (self-)reflective subset of English which allows computers and robots to describe themselves by explaining their algorithm(s) to their users in natural language. Human-machine dialogue can include, but isn't limited to, the machine answering what, how, and why it's doing what it's doing while it is doing it. If I don't have to spend too much time working for rent and ramen money, the prototype will come online this Christmas.<p>(Disclaimer: No, I did't solve Artificial General Intelligence, nor did I do something equally "magical". I'm not trying to compete for <a href="<a href="http://www.loebner.net/Prizef/loebner-prize.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.loebner.net/Prizef/loebner-prize.html</a>">Hugh Loebner's gold medal</a>. I'll never be able to simulate a human brain which can explain its own workings. A human brain which could write such a simulation would have to be able to describe itself, which mine can't. A machine's "brain", however, can be much simpler, and the information about how it works usually does exist. The difficult thing is in encoding it so that it can be queried and used in coherent conversation. That's what I'm hacking on.)
[Site Name Yet to be Determined] helps you organize, track, and follow up on your search for a [job|apartment|house|car|date|employee|vendor|whatever] on the web.
We all have tons of photos, movies, and music on our desktops that we'd like to share, but don't have the time or patience to upload them all to an online sharing site.<p>We built CloudFire for people that want to share ALL their media...FAST...right from their desktop.<p>Don't waste your time free time UPLOADING.
Snarfbot, a new way to search. It allows you to easily compare results from multiple search engines at once without altering or reinterpreting the results. Create custom search tabs and tab groups that you can share with your friends and colleagues.<p><a href="http://www.snarfbot.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.snarfbot.com</a>
<i>in early alpha, but mostly works :) </i><p>Still working on the pitch... Not sure how to word the last line, it doesn't make much sense until you have used the site which is likely a bad thing. I am open to suggestions...
As an aside here, I watched startup school on justin.tv (all of it) here in Australia on the Monday morning.<p>Greg McAdoo's talk was excellent and included a few words on the elevator pitch; only I missed something.
At one point he used Cisco as an example of an elevator pitch, first he said what they might have done. Then he showed a slide and said, "well I don't even have to introduce this...".<p>Only, I couldn't read the slide!<p>Does anyone recall what it said?
<a href="http://openphotovr.org" rel="nofollow">http://openphotovr.org</a> - 3D photo albums.<p>I didn't invent this pitch myself - it's how other people tend to describe my project. Strangely, all three words are (strictly speaking) false. There's no 3D, only image interpolation. The project is not limited to photographs. And it has no reified concept of "album". A truthful pitch would sound like "images connected by fluid transitions", pretty boring.
"Does your soccer team have problems staying organized? My site fixes that. www.myurl.com."<p>It's good because anyone who has been on a soccer team knows how shoddy their communication methods typically are and will likely ask some barrier-breaking questions to allow me to explain the site further. Any leads the pitch generates is relevant (no one who doesn't care about soccer will want more information).
Super-short version: Tagging that works.<p>Tagging is widespread and well-understood, but somewhat broken. Finding and browsing using tags is slow and clumsy because current systems are pretty dumb – they have little understanding of the meaning or structure behind tags. My app makes tagging work by finding structure and enabling users to add meaning to their tags.
I suck at elevator pitches, but here goes:<p>HubSpot (<a href="http://www.HubSpot.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.HubSpot.com</a>):<p>On demand software for inbound marketing. Helps small businesses get more website visitors and convert a higher percentage of them to paying customers.
We help you get your work done in half the time with better quality. Our application helps you identify the critical path to getting your work done, and focuses you on the top priority tasks that need to be done now with all the information you need to do them.
We make it easy for customers to provide feedback and ideas to companies, and to make it easy for companies to manage these ideas. <a href="http://whisperlabs.com" rel="nofollow">http://whisperlabs.com</a>
We tatoo your ass, you get paid for showcasing corporate logos at volleyball tournaments.<p><a href="http://www.tatoomyass.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.tatoomyass.com</a>