YouLiveNow
Show #128 Listen (44:33) Download
Serial entrepreneur Mikel Cvetanovic is driving a new Beverly Hills based company, YouLiveNow. The mission: to deliver live video chat to anyone, anywhere using any web enabled device; that's all. Why doesn't Facebook or mySpace have video chat today? Maybe they soon will. Orange County Tech Coast Angels president, Mike Stuhley, joins me on the interview; he put the software through its paces and has been mentoring the YouLiveNow team since.
Are they fundable? Can the design scale to accommodate millions of users? Is their beta test at a Finland university a suitable market or way off the mark? One thing's for sure, the YouLiveNow team has a tiger by the tail!
In the ecosystem:
Nov 13th I'll be at Green IT on campus at UCI 5:30-8:00pm in the Calit2 Building, "Learn how emerging clean-tech solutions represent the next big wave of innovation..." Register
Nov 16th Join me for the 4th Annual Southern California Entrepreneur Conference at UCI from 6-9pm at the University Club, details and registration.
Nov 29th Join me at UC Riverside from 5:30-9:00pm for the Tech Coast Angels Fast Pitch. Location: UC Riverside University Extension Center 1200 University Avenue, Conf. Rm E, Riverside, CA 92507
Comments
(Of course) I agree with Mikel: I don't quite understand why investors "flinch" so hard when an entrepreneur mentions the education market space?
Perhaps it's because most folks only hear the mass-media sound bites of how cash-strapped our schools are. But that's only half of the picture: School districts and universities control massive multi-million-dollar budgets, and *do* spend money (lots of it) on things they need (key word: "need").
Or perhaps it's the (supposed) "long sales cycle" associated with anything government or education related. But here again, experience has shown me that sales cycles disappear for "needed" services.
In fact, early on, I was always mentored that the Holy Grail for *any* product is to get the government to legislate its use (think building sprinkler systems, earthquake retro-fitting, handicap access, or automatic-gas-shutoff valves, etc).
On another note directly related to youlivenow, I used to own the domain name tokbox.com, and recently sold it to a Sequoia Capital incubated company. Mikel might want to check them out...
Jeff Briggs
Posted by: Jeff Briggs | October 31, 2007 08:17 PM
Not sure how this is different from some of the solutions mentioned at:
http://www.kolabora.com/news/2004/11/18/flashbased_video_conferencing_solutions_on.htm
and http://www.fcschat.com/
I think this space is wide open though.
Posted by: Paul Holcomb | November 8, 2007 07:20 AM