"Send in the [Tag] Clouds ..."

Kevin's tag cloud post reminded me of the old Steven Sondheim song ...

The Angel Capital Summit web site actually has a pretty sophisticated technology underpinning, and the tag clouds are just one part of this.

To begin with, the web site is integrated with the Entrepreneurial Standards Forum's Benchmark Survey scoring and reporting mechanism. That means when you take the Benchmark Survey on this site, your survey is scored exactly as it would be on the Entrepreneurial Standards Forum site. In effect, the Angel Capital Summit is "ESF-enabled".

But there's more. The entire application handling process is an adaptation of the Business Catapult's Deal Flow Management System. This system allows you to attach Benchmark Surveys to your application, and then routes your application to the correct investor partner for review. (This routing is done based on the "Referring organization" selected on the application form.)

Each application goes into a private workspace we set up for each investor partner -- we call these "groups". Only the investor partner's review board members have access to their group; applications are kept strictly private. (Truth in advertising: as site administrator, I have access to all the investor partner groups. I do peek in from time to time, but only to make sure everything is working properly.)

In their group, investor partner reviewers can attach comments to each application and reply to each others' comments, much like you would in online bulletin boards. Reviewers are using this to annotate applications with the questions they'd like to ask of the applicant, as well as recommendations as to whether the applicant should move to the next step in the selection process. There's even a "voting" mechanism, where each reviewer can rate the application on a subjective scale (think "one star" to "ten stars").

Why is this important? For one, it allows the involvement of reviewers from around the world. So far, we have members from four timezones on the Executive Committee. Companies as far away as England and France have expressed an interest in applying.

In addition, it builds efficiencies into the review process. As of tonight, the Angel Capital Summit has nearly 200 users, over 100 Benchmark Surveys, and 65 applications. And that's with a week to go: historically, most applications are received in the last 24 hours before the deadline. It'd be very hard to manually review that many applications by sitting around a table reading business plans.

And the tag clouds? The real power is the underlying keyword mechanism, which is powerful because it's user-driven. The entrepreneurs themselves select keywords that describe their investment opportunity. What emerges over time is an adaptable mechanism that makes deals findable by investors with similar interests.

Make it easier for the right entrepreneur to find the right investors, and you'll see a lot more successful companies.

And that's what this is all about.