Over the past few months, we’ve spent a lot of time learning about the various types of financing that is available to businesses.  In fact, we are working on a significant partnership that will allow us to help a lot more entrepreneurs obtain unsecured lines of credit.  For those of you that are interested, here are a few tips that you’ll need before you approach any bank/lender:

1. 680+ Credit Score (if you don’t quite have that high of score, that’s ok too… we’ll just start off helping you repair your credit)
2. 2+ years in business
3. Make sure that all of your personal and business credit is accurate with the credit bureaus
4. Obtain a DUNS number for your business
5. Obtain credit maturity (length of time) and credit diversity (credit lines with multiple types of credit — home, auto, revolving, etc.)

I could probably create a list with about 30-40 items, but those 5 will get you started.  The two “biggies” are the first two — if you have a great credit score and you’ve been in business for at least 2 years, let us know.  We are very confident that we’d be able to help you obtain an unsecured line of credit somewhere between $10k-$350k.

The standout presentation for me this morning was DimDim.  This is a new web conferencing provider which isn’t exciting in and of itself, but there is something that is exciting about it.  It is free.  Not only is the software free, but their hosted service is free.  The service is built on top of an open source project and has been load tested at 500 users.  This could be a huge disruptor in this space.  Additionally, they are currently building a recording and archiving feature that will be released in the near future.  Other companies in this space need to watch out for this.

These afternoon presentations haven’t been as “exciting” purely because of the product categories, but overall I have been more impressed by the companies. All of the companies have been pretty strong, though some of the company presentations have been more like a press release than an actual launch presentation.  Some of the interesting presentations came from Propel Software which is a personal desktop app that prioritizes bandwidth on your computer so that applications like voip connections still perform while under network stress. Fusion-io has a new pci express storage card that is supposedly 1000 times faster than a hard disk drive. Qumranet is a desktop virtualization system that seems very well done and has some very good technology backing it up. It seems like most of these companies are already very well funded.

I forgot to mention this earlier, that if you are going to be putting up an end user website especially in the “web 2.0″ space, name your company the same thing as your website or at least close. I hate when I see some name of a company like Adventis and then their website is yourcoolpage.com. There have been a few companies like that here and it just kills me. It is hard enough to remember one name let alone two names together. Simplify it and don’t be so egotistical that you need some fancy company name.

Here are some thoughts on some of the copies I have seen at Demofall so far.

The standouts:

Digital fountain – Video delivery network using Amazon S3 services. Improves video delivery by using “video repairing” technology so that packet loss and other problems doesn’t affect the end result of the video. Polished presentation, but there are a lot of questions about whether this is any better than the other things out there. Will be a solution for video providers as they are not an end user company itself.

Motion DSR (fixmymovie.com) – Site powered by patent pending algorithm that improves and fixes low quality video from camera phones and other sources. I think this could be huge hooked with cell phone providers and could be used to improve all those crappy youtube videos. One of my favorites.

Your Truman Show Inc – video network that organizes similar videos into a visual map and is a great tool to share videos within a social network style interface. The way this thing works is pretty cool, and it has to be seen to understand why it is different than what is already out there.

Here are the blah ones -

Clipblast! – Just a normal boring video desktop widget. It could go somewhere, but it isn’t that innovative and could very easily be duplicated by any of the big boys.

Metaradar – Cooling looking web mashup client, the only problem is AOL did this for a long time. That failed, we aren’t going back. People use the open Internet, closing it down again is a waste of time. Felt bad, Demo screwed up their presentation. They should get a refund.

Here are the “you wasted your money!” presentations

Global communications – We are gonna change the world but we won’t tell you how! (Internet over simple copper wiring)

Proxure – They looked like they wanted to run away. Don’t spend your money if you aren’t ready. Simple video desktop sharing software.

So, I am at demofall at the beginning presentations. I expected it, but it still amazes me how many entrepreneurs feel the need to promise to basically take over the world with their tech as well as cure baldness. Sometimes doing one thing really good is plenty good enough. Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T

The Internet as we all know is a hype machine.  With all the tech blogs and pundits out there, it is hard to really know what sites/companies are gonna make it over the long haul.  What I would like to know from everyone, is what companies you have heard about in the last few months that you think are going to make it in the long term and why you think that.  Please be specific, since we don’t just want the answer, “Facebook Apps”.  Also, please give specific examples of sites or ideas even if it is not a new company.

Quote of the day:

” … cash is more important than your mother.”

I love it.

Here’s the rest of Fred Wilson’s insightful post.

Summers are pretty dang slow in the investment world.  It’s weird that almost everything (including new deal introductions) almost come to a stand still during the summer.  Most angel investment groups don’t meet during the summer and personal meetings are few and far between.  As a result, I was anxious for the fall to come around to see some of the deal flow pick back up.

I think that we are off to a great start for the Fall of 2007 because there are already a handful of exciting companies that we have seen here in Utah.  Tomorrow’s our first SpeedPitching luncheon since June 6th and I’m excited to see how things turn out with the companies that are presenting.  We have a nice mix of companies and industries — including technology, telecom, wholesale retail, energy, and food.