Map tiles exposed
When writing an LBS application, you have many different options when it comes to map tiles.
At Centrl, we have licensed map tiles from Microsoft (data supplied by Navteq) for use on the iPhone and BlackBerry. We pay Microsoft per transaction, which is 8 map tiles downloaded from their map tile servers.
And we use Google map tiles (data supplied by TeleAtlas and more) on our website and on the Android (through the native Android Maps component).
Now there is one more option on the new iPhone 3.x SDK: a native Maps component that comes with map tiles from Google. We think this is going to make writing LBS apps on the iPhone much easier since there will be one less issue to worry about.
But no matter where you get your map tiles, you will find that, somewhere in the world, some user will definitely be dissatisfied with the accuracy, detail and zoom level of your map tiles. So you will have to go that country, find a local partner and customize your map tiles for that location to satisfy your customers.
It’s interesting that nobody has thought of creating a network of local partners that someone can just go and choose from, like a smorgasbord of high-quality local content that is aggregated very conveniently.
Furthermore, there are even companies that will fly over a specific area for you and create super high-precision map tiles for you. Now imagine all this were offered as a single menu where you could purchase from 
NYC Entrepreneur Week events take-aways
From ‘Entrepreneurs Roundtable 13′ 4/22 with Albert Wenger (USV)
http://eroundtable13.eventbrite.com
and ‘Roadmap for the Entrepreneur’ panel 4/24 with Howard Morgan (First Round Capital), Albert Wenger (USV), Danny Schultz (DFJ Gotham), Gil Beyda (Genacast Ventures) and Santo Politi (Spark Capital):
http://nycentweekentpanel.eventbrite.com/
* In 2005, VC-backed companies accounted for 17% of GDP & 9% of private-sector employment - so the VC decision process is very important for the economy in general
* First Round Capital gets 2500 plans a year, 500 of these get 1-hour calls, 100 get due-diligence, 20 get funded (0.8% of all the applicants)
* First Round Capital has a CEO-only list of their portfolio companies, a very efficient channel for their companies to get help, suggestions, data, referrals.
* Worst thing in a board meeting is a “surprise”!
* Marketing is all about removing objections to your pitch. While you are pitching, think like the investor.
* The best way to get funding is to ‘not need it’
* VCs help their portfolio companies but they don’t want to feel like they need to help them constantly to get the business going.
* In the current economic environment, deals take longer, rounds are smaller and there are fewer angels (no more extra money because of the stock market)
* Metrics are very important. Track everything. Also present a ‘cohort analysis’, not just active users (1 month) numbers. Cohort analysis show that a user who signed up in January, is still using the service in May.
* There are 13M available tracks available for sale online, 10M of them haven’t sold once in the past year.
* VCs do not like industries with gate keepers where a startup would need permission from a gate keeper (like in health care). Mobile software used to be like this, not anymore.
* Amazon had 35% of their sales through their ‘recommendation’ feature.
* VCs sometimes actively go out there to find ‘a company’. USV invested in ‘indeed.com’ because they went out there and looked for a company with their business model.
* 2007 to 2009, infrastructure costs have come down by 10x.
* Find your value proposition. Targeting many features may end up looking unfocused/not useful.
Unype is now Centrl with a brand new iPhone app and website
As we get more and more users, we have changed our name from Unype to Centrl to reflect the wider userbase we are going after.
After receiving funding late last year, we have been working very hard around the clock and in March we have released our iPhone app along with our completely redesigned website and a brand new scalable backend running on Amazon EC2.
Today a new version of our iPhone app with virtual gifts and extra useful layers (like Yelp and Wikipedia for starters) became available on the App Store: http://itunes.com/app/centrl
We are very excited about our iPhone app and thanks to the easy feedback system that my co-founder Eric Redlinger has put in place in our iPhone app, we are getting great, live, very useful feedback from all of our users. So we hightly recommend to make it very easy for your users to give you feedback inside your application, not just as a ‘email us your thoughts’ line.
Our Android and Blackberry apps are also coming out in the coming weeks and we are looking forward to seeing you in Centrl where you can easily connect with your friends, share and discover places and events, get a lot of useful data on our layers and get special money-saving offers from our partners.
Entrepreneurs Roundtable 7 with Gil Beyda
Last night’s E.R.7 hosted generously by Joe Daniels from Fulbright&Jaworski featured Gil Beyda from Genacast Ventures and provided some very timely and useful information for all entrepreneurs who were in attendance.
Gil first talked about his technical and entrepreneurial background, which includes a series of very successful startups with big exits such as RealMedia (sold to 24×7Media) and Tacoda (sold to AOL). He pioneered the first ad server at Real Media as well as inventing Behavioral Targeting while at Tacoda. He setup Genacast with Comcast Investment Fund after meeting them while closing Tacoda’s E-round. Genacast invests upto $500K (or in syndicates upto $1.5M) in seed and series A rounds and the investments do not have to be strategic invesments for Comcast. It is a very new and open-ended fund with a current size of around $25M. They have made 2 investments so far and they are looking to make around 8 investments per year. Gil and Comcast are the only LP’s in the fund.
After brief introductions by the more than 40 entrepreneurs in attendance, Gil described his deal flow and how he makes his investment decisions at Genacast. His selection criteria include how much money is sought, valuation, if the space is familiar to him (since the fund helps its investments using their knowledge, experience and rolodex), evaluation of team risk, technology risk and execution risk and how realistic and thoughtful the founders are about their business. He usually has a 1-hour call after his initial screening of around 100 deals he goes through in a month. After stressing that the terms on a seed-round usually get carried onto the subsequent rounds, Gil recommended to all the entrepreneurs to become very familiar with the freely available documents (such as sample terms sheets) at nvca.org.
The last half hour of the meeting, we had an open-call for impromptu on-the-spot 3-5 minute pitches to Gil. After Gil promised to have conference calls with everyone who would pitch to him on the spot, we had 5 great pitches:
Manish Vora from Artlog.com
Greg from e-commerce startup
Greg Artz from General Sentiment (Technology demo site at http://www.textmap.com/)
Herman Mazard from Home Shop Technologies
Roger Wu from Klickable.tv
Gil provided great and very useful feedback to each of them on the spot and he will be talking to each startup who pitched to him in the coming weeks. The meeting ended with networking.
Unype featured on the Ning blog!
Thanks to Courtenay Stewart from Ning who worked with us, Unype is featured on the Ning blog!
Unype on Android
With the latest announcements of T-Mobile releasing the HTC Dream phone running Android on October 13th, we deemed it appropriate to show a preview of Unype on Android:
