The Berkeley business plan competition finals were last Thursday (you can see our coverage of the event here). Kebima didn’t win any prize, but we’re still quite pleased about finishing in the top 8 of over 100 entrants. We also gained some extremely valuable feedback, and are definitely incorporating it into our plans to grow and improve the site.

The event coverage was the highlight for us. We had roughly 10 contributors, and the level of interaction was the best we’ve had for any event so far. We also had a few people watching from outside the actual venue, and they were quite happy with the level of coverage they got. This was the strongest validation of our idea we’ve had to date, and we’re looking to build on this momentum going forward. We also performed a live demo as part of our presentation, which was very well received by the several hundred people in the audience.

Seven other teams also presented as part of the finals. Reporterist gave an interview-style presentation, and showed a video with some strong user validation of their platform. Titan Medical (drug delivery system), Omniox (oxygen delivery system) and Glycometrix (glycan-based cancer screening) are bio companies, and quite honestly their presentations were over my head. They all won a prize of some sort, so I suppose they are onto something. LReady and Carsala were much more understandable, but unfortunately, like us, did not place. The final winner was Implicit Interfaces, which had some very impressive software IP. From the results it appears the judges placed a high value on defensible IP vs. businesses like ours with lower barriers to entry.

Overall it was a great experience for us. We came out of it with a polished business plan, a much crisper pitch, and a solid plan going forward. Congratulations to the winners, and many thanks to the Lester Center for organizing the event!

First it was the Web 2.0 Expo which for us was more about the Web2Open experience than the Expo itself and perhaps rightly so. Whilst the mainstream expo was mostly about high powered corporate presentations focused more on Enterprise 2.0, we found the Web2Open to be more grass-roots, entrepreneurial and like-minded.

The sessions themselves were a great learning opportunity, you can view the snippets on Kebima. One of the more informative sessions was “Q/A with VC” hosted by David Hornik from August Capital, Christine Herron from First Round Capital and Jason Schwartz from AngelSoft.

We got some great feedback on Kebima’s value proposition from some of the attendees. For example the ability to enable transient connections over the life of the conference as well as to improve the quality of the real-time communication by being event-centric were well-liked. Needless to say we also got some good feedback on areas of improvement which validated some of our future plans.

Then all of yesterday was spent in a class taught by Andreas Weigend at Berkeley on “Web 2.0 Marketing”. Although after the class, the gaps and opportunities facing the Enterprise as a result of Web 2.0 were quite clear.

So it was a welcome overdose overall. We hope to attend next year’s Expo manning the Kebima booth!

The bad news: this was a missed opportunity for us. The good news: I think it validated several of our ideas.

A quick recap: on April 9th, the Olympic torch made its run through San Francisco, and a fairly sizable protest followed. The interesting thing was that the protest took two sides… those protesting China’s treatment of Tibet, and those protesting the protest of those protesting China’s treatment of Tibet. This set of demonstrations caused the route of the torch to be modified, resulting in an entertaining running commentary of the events played out over the internet.

Validation came in several flavors

1. Coverage played out live on the internet. I followed this with twitter, mostly from @laughingsquid and @davewiner. Route changes were broadcast, photos were posted… far before major news outlets had a decent story.
   
2. This was an event that had multiple sides. Some of the coverage tried to be balanced, but there were definitely two distinct sides. The ability to collect all the info and then slice it into different views would have been very interesting in this instance. I’d be interested in seeing the pro-China side of the debate, which I feel is fairly quickly dismissed here.
3. Grass-roots coverage is fragment. Sfist had a collection of tweets they displayed. LaughingSquid put some pictures up on Flickr. Having a unified place to collect coverage from people on the ground would be very interesting to me.

So while we’re disappointed we missed out on this particular event, we’re very excited about the potential use of our platform going forward. Stay tuned!

What exactly does Kebima mean?  Well, just like 90% of the web 2.0 companies out there, the name does not mean anything in particular (actually, after over 3 months of weekly brainstorming for a killer brand name ala Google/Youtube/Yahoo/eBay, we the founders decided to go super creative outside-the-box by using the first syllable of our first names–Ketan, Billy, and Mark!).  By chance or destiny, the word also means “trip” or “journey” in Estonian (at least according to Google’s search), which is exactly what we are set to do–a journey to change the way how people interact, connect with their mobile devices, and social network!

At the core of our concept, Kebima is an experience-sharing platform that leverages the ubiquitous access of mobile devices, harnesses the collective perspectives of users, and establishes an event-based online community.  Our mission is to create a crowdsourced open-content platform where individuals can contribute, read, and consolidate the latest snippets related to an event while interacting with each other live. 

You can learn more about our vision at kebima.com or through our help page.  As we work hard to launch our official alpha later this year, be sure to check back here for what we are working on! 

One more thing, we submitted our idea to the 2008 UC Berkeley Business Plan Competition and were selected as one of the finalists.  The event was covered here  during the semi-final round live and we will continue to provide “real time” coverage during the Finals on Thursday May 1, 2008.  Competition will be tough against several biotech start ups; we figure that while we “truly” believe we are going to change the world (at least the social networking world), our idea is not (yet) life saving enough compared to some of the finalists.  So we are just going to have fun and try to entertain at the same time during the public presentation, hopefully enough to sway the audience for the People’s Choice Award of $5,000.  If you are at Berkeley stop by and vote for us!!