Bantam Live

The kickoff session at last Friday's Real-Time Stream Crunchup (where Bantam Live launched) organized by TechCrunch featured Ron Conway and John Borthwick discussing with TechCrunch's Michael Arrington "The Real-Time Opportunity" from entrepreneur and investor perspectives. Ron Conway (seated in the middle in pic) of Baseline Ventures was a seed investor in Google and, literally, about 500 other startups (recently including one of our favorites, CoTweet) and John Borthwick (seated at right) CEO of Betaworks, has significant investment positions in a host of real-time players, including Twitter.

Ron Conway spoke of building a new industry around this relevant "spontaneously developed content" and two of his "Top 10 Monetization Opportunities" in the real-time stream are "lead generation" and "CRM."  John Borthwick, when asked about just what the real-time web is, said, "In my mind there's this collision between synchronous real-time data streams and social interactions that is creating something fundamentally different." When asked what's the most valuable data passed around in these real-time streams, Borthwick replied, "I think that the social relationships is the most valuable piece of data that relates to the stream." ...These words by Messrs. Conway and Borthwick were music to our ears.

In Bantam Live the real-time stream can capture content from other other 3rd-party streams such as Twitter. For instance, in Bantam a user can search Twitter, import a new contact with one click, initiate task workflows with team members to engage this new contact, converse with the new contact for various CRM purposes, and maintain all annotations and live feeds of this person from a single contact page in Bantam Live. All of this activity cascades in the real-time stream of the Bantam Live dashboard, where team members interact. For lead generation and CRM, Bantam Live makes the filtered and captured "spontaneous content" of Twitter transformative and valuable for sales and biz-dev people. Thar's gold in them thar tweets!  ...Update: See a video demo of this.

- photo credit: (cc) Kenneth Yeung - www.thelettertwo.com