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Jeff Clavier, a venture capitalist from SoftTech VC, has given some excellent – yet very straight forward tips regarding e-mail pitching to venture capitalists. Here they are:

1. Avoid the cold pitch – meaning that get an introduction from someone who knows the VC. This way you’ll increase your chances of getting through. (src)
2. Starting with “Dear Sir/Madam” when writing to a dude named Jeff is starting off the wrong way. Google the person – whether it is a he or a she.(src)
3. Do the “Monkey test”. Have someone who is not familiar with your business review your email and ask him to tell you what you do. If they don’t understand it – don’t send it. (src)
4. Don’t ever mass mail your e-mail pitch to a ton of investors at the same time. If you want an investment – do take the time to personally approach each one.(src)

Not that obscure to begin with, but since he has to spell these out on Twitter I’m amazed at the quality of communication some people practice.

If you want more tips – have a read at Daniel’s tips on how to approach VCs. Daniel is a partner at Creandum Venture Capital and a good friend so he knows what he’s up to.

Looking at twitter this morning I noticed people going crazy about this new service that combines Twitter and FriendFeed, called Tweetree. The service is pretty much summed up in the picture above. It’s trying to create a platform for discussions from the way twitter works. I had a conversation with warzabidul on twitter about Tweetree just being a bad Jaiku.

The thing that makes it bad is the sole reason why I believe that twitter is still no comparison for Jaiku, even though I prefer twitter these days for the community. The reason is of course the logic of a social object – there are no threads or logical ways in which to direct your tweet to a certain point. If you look at this from another point of view, it’s like trying to create hyperlinks that can only be applied to the domain and not the actual page where the information you are talking about resides on. You cannot create a healthy conversation around that.

I’ll write about this more today in my prognosis for the year 2009. I’ll also look back at the year 2008 in that post and to the two things I was pondering about that will become big in 2008 being video and lifestreams. There’s a lot around this issue, just look at Facebook what it did with its lifestream as you enter the service, it added comments to the individual updates as well as transformed the wall into your personal lifestream. This has also happened in other services such as LinkedIn. However, more on this later.

Nevertheless, I see US reinventing the wheel continuously with services such as Tweetree. They are incremental innovations and fail to disrupt the market in the way such as Jaiku did. However, acknowledging the community and network of the US West coast, they have a chance at becoming the game changer technology/service. It’s a harsh reality we, the rest of the world, have to live with until we create our own hubs that attract enough venture capital money and talent.

Update: Fred Wilson, from AVC, is commenting on the new UI of Twitter over here.

dave – you are right, tweetree is really excellent. i’ve seen the design work that twitter is doing for the next rev of its web app, and some of these ideas are in it but some are not.

as you know, i think its great that twitter supports third party clients, including web clients, and i’d actually be sort of bummed if they copied all of this because it would make a service like this redundant, and that wouldn’t be good.

thanks for pointing this out, it’s a real improvement and shows the way forward in a bunch of ways

What does this tell? Not much, but unfortunately I’m slightly worried about the development of twitter if they fail to see the importance of the social object in conversations.

Update 2: Michael Arrington picks this up at TechCrunch. I’m beginning to think he’s reading my blog as it’s exactly the same point I’m making here.

First Round Capital has done an excellent Christmas card this year, especially during times like these. It’s really simple and even looking at it makes you smile and happy. Hope it has the same effect on you.

The idea is a simple clone of Where The Hell is Matt?

Hot news: Google buys Jaiku!

Read more on the Jaikido blog as well as the FAQ on the acquisition.

Update: VentureBeat reports through Valleywag post that the price tag on the acquisition is rumoured to be around $12M. This is something that I’ve heard as well from a few people.