Startup Idea #18: Information intermediaries for new emerging market (tickets, sports)

The technology of the digital age is driving an unprecedented explosion in the ability to create markets in anything. Trade anything. Not just physical goods. Not just financial instruments. But ideas. Events. Outcomes.

The emergence of these kinds of markets will -over time - impact how we view and interact with the world in all aspects of our personal and professional lives. They will fundamentally alter the current world economic and social paradigm.

With the emergence of a market-like system in traditional closed industries, there is a need for information intermediaries that help to make the markets more transparent, more . Think of how the financial markets have spawned innovative research services like research recap, monitor 110

The current emerging markets in my radar are: tickets for events, sports, digital media, online advertising, lead generation and mostly interesting, human talent. The examples of services you can built for say a sports market include:

- blog aggregation: smart aggregation of research oriented blogs with tabs for different types of information (research recap). For sports, this will be blogs that cover player and game statistics, manager strategies et al. We can combine this with the Techmeme model to allow users to read the conversations in addition to the blog posts. See here for a list of such blogs.

- extraction of information from unstructured date i.e. blogs, forums, messaging boards etc: to surface actionable trading ideas (monitor101) from the mountain of untamed data in the web.

- last.fmm model to marry implicit data collection with recommendation services. For sports, this will allow users to find people with similar club/player interests, what they are betting on, et al.

- distribution platform: distribute exisiting aggregated information to different delivery channels i.e. RSS, email, twitter, instant messaging, social feeds et al. This idea differs from the first by focusing on the unbundling and rebundling of aggregated content from channels, rather than on the unbundling and rebundling of content from sources.

- panel forecast (Comscore model): create a large enough userbase to divine outcomes and sell that information.

- blogging platform: the typepad of investment blogging. Come with analytics, market data, and whatever information the blogger needs to do his work. Ad supported of course.

The possibilities are ming boggling.

Updated: 23 Feb 2008
My first idea is to create a reuters for virtual item trading market. See this article

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