Last Tuesday we went to a BayCHI meeting in Palo Alto to hear Guy Kawasaki’s presentation about ”How I built a Web 2.0, User-Generated Content, Citizen Journalism, Long-Tail, Social Media Site for $12,107.09” (Yes, tongue in cheek here).

First of all Guy Kawasaki is a great presenter - we really enjoyed his presentation. He has the right mix between presenting and entertaining :)
So, what was this headline filled with so many buzzwords all about?
In his talk Guy introduced his new startup Truemors. Well, at the first look you may think “What’s the point of this site?”. To be honest, when I saw Truemors a couple of days before the event, I was also a bit confused and did not really see the value of this website. But after that event I changed my mind…
Guy’s presentation was mostly about showing how Truemors works and what his intention was to found this company: It is all about democratization of information - access for everyone to everything. He also talked about how the 12,107.09 USD came together. For me it is a user-generated news site, where you can find interesting and very diverse news - quite different from the normal newspaper stories or the yellow press - and that’s why it’s much more interesting.

As a use case Guy mentioned this: imagine that you wanna go on a date, but you don’t know what to talk about. So, check out Truemors first and there you are. A good way to impress your date with your broad knowledge. (I actually use it when I’m bored or need a break from my work.)

All in all I like this idea/concept and the user base is growing as I can see. I hope there will be more and more international news, too. It would be really exciting to read what’s going on in China, New Zealand or India at this time right now.
I also would like to add some statements Guy made during his talk:

• “If you read Truemors every day, you will be a more interesting person.”
• “Life is good for entrepreneurs these days.”
• “12.000 USD goes a very long way these days.”
• “You can work with a team that is thousands of miles away.”
• “The blogosphere is full of angry people.”
• “I spend spent about 3 to 4 hours deleting posts containing ‘vagi*a’ every day.” (bummer)
• “My second round of raising capital will be another presentation.”

And did I mentioned The Inquirer called Truemors the ”worst website ever”? Oh and it’s based on WordPress (it can’t be so bad then).

As a mobile oriented person I would love to see a mobile version. Because when you meet someone e.g. at a conferene and you are running out of topics, wouldn’t it be cool to check Truemors through your mobile and look up for special topics quickly?

One thing that we would like to know more about: running costs. While we learned that the site costs roughly 1500 150 USD a month for hosting, however we came to think about what the real costs of the employed services such as SpinVox (for leaving a voice message that gets transcribed automatically) or GoLive! Mobile (for sending inbound SMS/text messages to the site) add up to - maybe Guy reads this (he seems to follow blogs closely) and can elaborate on that?

We also had a nice and informative talk with Awais from KPMG prior to Guy’s presentation. We talked about the AO 100 List, a top list for start-ups that is compiled once a year by KPMG and AlwaysOn. as well as the Churcill Club.