Last night at the Entrepreneurs Roundtable, Deepak Das presented his startup called Mobow. I've embedded a video of the demo presentation below. Basically Mobow is a contextual address book that works from any mobile smartphone. The service has applications for the consumer and the enterprise.

There is "presence awareness" as part of the application. What this means is that your mobile knows where to call a person based on their desires. When a contact moves from location to location, your phone is always updated. Your phone will ring the person on the right number at all times. There's a mobile client along with a desktop/portal application.

Tonight I attended the Entrepreneurs Roundtable monthly event in NYC. If you are an entrepreneur working in the tech sector in NYC, you should attend this event. Murat Aktihanoglu from Unype organizes the event and the law firm of Fulbright & Jaworski host. There's no charge to attend and there's free snacks and I thought the discussion was lively and well-received.

The discussion featured Howard Morgan, Ph.D from First Round Capital. Here are my notes:

• The amount of venture capital needed to go from idea to first shipping customer has continued to drop. Ten years ago one of their companies needed $20 million, five years ago $2 million and many of their companies today need less than $1 million.
• They hired someone in China to design the First Round Capital logo for $30. They use Rent-A-Coder often for development projects.
• They focus on six items when reviewing a company for investment: People, Product, Plans, Profit, Patience and Persistence
• They like when the founders/execs are located in the same city and work out of the same office. It's ok if the development resources are located elsewhere.
• First Round Capital receives 2,000 plans a year; meet with 500; invest in 20
• Morgan noted that the mobile and enterprise markets are currently exciting; local hasn't been cracked yet
• Areas that benefit from the current economic downturn: jobsites and retraining organizations
• Morgan noted that many early stage VCs are slowing their pace as many need more money for their existing portfolio. He said it is definitely tougher out there but there is money out there as well.
• One important note: Morgan said that they will not fund unless the funding will last to the 2nd quarter of 2010.

I will have some videos from the startup pitches over the next couple of days.

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The NY Times is hosting a developer day in NYC on February 20th. Tim O'Reilly will provide a keynote during the event. It looks like the Times is attempting to create a developer platform and wants to introduce developers to their suite of tools.

They announcement notes, "The Times Developer Network invites you to our first-ever API seminar. Come spend the day with industry leaders, learning about applications, data resources and the trends that will shape the way you work. There will be a special focus on NYTimes.com’s new API releases and development tools."

I signed up but was told that registering is just a reservation not a ticket. They will let me (and I assume everyone else) know if we are confirmed by January 30th. Leave a comment if you signup - perhaps we can get a group together for lunch.

We initially covered NY-based BookSwim when they launched their application and posted a video demo of their service about a year ago. BookSwim is a book rental service similar to Netflix/Blockbuster for movies.

This week they launched a new rental option: college textbooks. You can now rent college textbooks on BookSwim for either a month or a semester. You can search for your books via ISBN and title search options.

In my testing for a variety of accounting textbooks, the semester-rental price appeared to be about half of the Amazon price. From my days working in the college bookstore, accounting textbooks typically returned 40% if they were going to be used in the following semester. So it looks like the rental would work out to about the same as if you purchased and then returned the book to the store at the end of the semester. The benefit of the rental is that you don't have to worry that the book won't be purchased at the end of the semester because then you lost the full value.

Considering the weight of some of today's textbooks, I can only imagine what the shipping costs must be like for this program. But I like the idea overall and anywhere students can save money is a good thing. Check out more on MediaBistro.

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