As you may now, I’m currently raising a seed round for my latest venture, VR-WEAR (For those whom I didn’t yet pitch, VR-WEAR designs produces and sells Virtual Reality devices for video games). As the French seed market got pretty hard to address since the September crisis and as I’m looking for quite a lot of money (500-700k€ which is pretty big for seed in France) I though I might give a try to those dating sites between angel investors and entrepreneurs and I must confess I’m a bit troubled by the results.
I registered on two of those, Capital PME which is edited by OSEO, the French Innovation agency, and Capangel from a local startup.

First of all it feels always a bit strange to fill so intimate data about your project in those “public” places. I almost feel like now that it’s there I should make a video of the presentation and post in on my blog while I’m at it… and that definitely sounds wrong.
What’s even more puzzling is that a lot of the people viewing my company’s profile obviously are newbies in both technology startups and angel investing which basically leads to pretty heavy differences of point of view. For instance I had a funny talk with one guy who did not spend one sec trying to understand what it is we’re trying to achieve with VR-WEAR but instead only was worrying how we are valuating the company after the September crisis…

While I was thinking those kind of initiatives were pretty meaningful for private investors willing to find some fun projects to invest in as heir risk is really limited thanks to the latest tax savings regulations, after that kind of interactions I’m getting pretty worried that the lack of experience in that very specific field of expertise which is investing in technology startups is going to be a real problem both at the investment phase and afterwards…

What is your opinion ? Should a startup looking for seed be on those uncontrolled websites where anyone can register as an investor and were no check is done on wether one has any capacity of investment and any expertise (or has understood the risks and the usual dynamics of how things usually work) over that specific type of investments?

Update : On CapAngel it seems that I must send out an invitation code to anyone willing to access my company profile – sounds reasonable… It’s not how Capital PME handles it though.

See you for CES2010 !
This year I spent quite a lot of time in the wynn, either for diner/fun times or for CES itself with Showstoppers and cntrstg being held there. It’s funny how every year another place gets the strong focus, I bet that next year if the huge resort being built south of the Bellagio is finished it will be the place to be.

Just got my Android g1 dev phone and having a little fun getting to know the device and the OS. As you can see on the screenshot I already started downloading too many apps… First impressions : the “notification” feature is killer – I like being updated in real time about what’s happening on my social network – but regular sync *does* drain battery pretty fast…

By concentrating you are able to change the intensity of your mind’s theta-wave and thus change the altitude of the ball… a button lets you move the ball left and right and by combining both controls you con complete the whole circuit.

Believe me, the TV *IS* huge (150″)… and this picture can’t really show how huge it is. Can I haz the same in my living-room? Oh wait we need to remove ceiling first…

Spotted on Panasonic’s booth was this intriguing remote composed of a touchpad and a couple of buttons. I guess now that we have widgets on the TV, we can use a touchpad to navigate our TV.

I remember Sony was doing the same kink of laptops back in 2002 (the next door lab back in the days when I was doing research in Japan was using tens of those), so it’s kind of a reborn for that design now that netbooks seem to have evolved into a solid trend. Prices from 899USD to 1499USD (with an SSD drive), this piece of art comes in various colors and has a full-sized keyboard and a wonderful wide and high-definition screen. This is totally the kind of laptop I would have preferred carrying around during CES instead of my heavy MBPro. It also has built-in 3G but it only works on Verizon and there is no SIM-card inside, thus buying one and bringing it to Europe won’t work… and there is no date for European release yet… the world is not perfect after all !

This solar tower by LG is not for sale (I asked!) but it’s being used to educate people on the use of clean energy. Inside the tower are tiny lockers where you can find plugs to recharge your mobile phone by using the energy from either the solar panel or the windmill.

Saw a demo, really not got convinced, the lady was trying to show how easy it is to join and leave a network group… like my parents will know what that is and why it’s good for… come on people try to be more end user focused, limit the number of clicks and make it simple!
Oh and by the way Windows 7 just fucked up Surface !