Erwin Oliva at the Inquirer writes:

IMAGINE a large group of users who write stories together one phrase at a time. That is actually the simple and yet brilliant idea from a startup simply called Octales.

Unanimously, the panel of experts said Octales is a “refreshing” idea after an afternoon of elevator pitches.

Although it’s not immediately obvious from the writeup, that was syndeomedia’s pitch he was talking about. I twittered a little bit during the elevator pitch sessions yesterday, and one of the things I said was that I was beginning to feel like a rock guitarist at a jazz recital. The 14 other groups before us each had very revenue-focused business concepts, with copious amounts of market research to back up everything they said. We were the only group with a concept that was purely for entertainment, didn’t do any market research, had only the barest idea of a revenue model, and didn’t fall into any of the three general categories for the sessions (E-learning, E-Government or E-Health).

As it turned out, the fact that we stuck out like a sore thumb was a good thing, and the fact that we were the very last group to pitch helped make it really memorable. To be honest, it was really surprising (to me, at least) how easily everybody got it. I’d run the Octales idea by dozens of people prior to this presentation, and all I’ve ever gotten was polite nods. (Ok, maybe the fact that I’d been practicing the pitch over and over while driving to work everyday for the past week had something to do with the clarity of the message.)

After it was all over, I had quite a few people come up and congratulate me, saying that they thought the idea was really elegant and original, and that the presentation was the best one they’d seen that day. I honestly couldn’t have hoped for a better result. (Well, ok, that’s a lie; the best possible result would be if people started whipping out their checkbooks right then and there, the odds of which are probably slim to none, but you never know.)

All that’s left for us to do now is wait and see if this materializes into what I’m hoping for.

(Slight digression: I had a conversation with one of my friends earlier today about it and she asked if I was nervous. I was like, jesus, of course I was nervous. If I screwed this up, I wouldn’t just be letting myself down, I’d be letting the team down as well. So yeah, wow. I think I really lucked out there.)