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Against my better judgement, last week I signed up to The Midas Touch Dragon’s Den Style pitching event at the Business Startup conference at Olympia today.

The five strong panel had some heavy weight business people on it including Jonathan Jay, Chelsea Baker, Brad Rosser, Rachel Elnaugh and Howard Graham. As it was set up in the middle of the conference, it drew quite a crowd, with 50-60 seated and a crowd of onlookers 3 to 4 back around the side.

To add to my nerves, the first two presenters were torn to shreds with the usual Dragon like comments such as “I didn’t understand any of that; I’ve no idea what you were talking about”.

I was up third. I gingerly took the stand, and, thank goodness, my nerves evaporated. All that G2i eleavator pitch training obviously paid off! I fielded a few tough questions, but generally received a good response. Even so, I can not say it has persuaded me to apply for the real thing.

Image via CrunchBase

I have just been catching up on Fred Wilson‘s blog and was interested to see his post on Joe The Plumber’s Landing Page. The post basically says that Google should improve its Google Local service to provider better landing pages for small businesses (skinning, own URL, call to action etc). Several Union Square Ventures‘ portfolio companies are in the business of helping advertisers target local businesses – so I can see why he would like Google to help solve their landing page problem as this would bring more of them in to the market for being sold online advertising.

Google Local is already a very powerful resource – I can see that if Google does improve its service, this could put traditional directories such as Yellow Pages and Thompson Local under even more pressure. These companies have been slow to innovate, it may now be too late to grab their slice of the online pie.

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