Idea Generation #4: Web as a banking platform

Making the web into a banking platform (whether they like it or not)Last week, my company, Wesabe (which makes a personal finance community site), launched a REST API that allows anyone to get their bank or credit card data in XML, Excel, CSV, or a bunch of standard financial formats. Tonight, we launched an open source Firefox extension that allows anyone to automatically extract data from their bank every night, and upload it to Wesabe, regardless of whether their bank provides automatic download or not. Both of these features work for any bank in any country, as long as they support one of our export formats (OFX, QFX, QIF, OFC, Quicken, Money, and a few others coming soon). Data in, data out, free and easy.There's a basic Web 2.0 story here, which is simply that opening up APIs and embracing...

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Startup #10: Personalised Brouchures

Online advertising is personalised and targeted (Adsense). The idea is to build such a system for direct mail brouchures, which currently is mass produced. The current technology infrastructure allows such a system to be constructed. The components of this system conmprise:i) Build a digital library of assets to create thousands of versions of the brouche for the same company. This library can be built up either through offshore outsourcing or through automated software.ii)Using data about consumers and computer algorithms, the server will allocate the relevant advertising message to be printed at the brouchures to every person.iii) A printing system that can print individual brouchures that is economical. Companies like Moo have proved that such a printing system is feasible.More simply put,...

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Startup idea #9: Next google

Updated 7th March 2008Too similar to the first idea for toys 2.0 so decided it.This is a great idea. As content distribution convergences and users view content on multiple devices, the application or devices or pipes that sits on top on all these distribution have the potential to be come the next Google.Updated 10th March 2008A list of companies already doing this:NebuAd, Phorm, Project Rialto, Front Porch Adzilla...

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Startup idea #8: Market exchange for media and other service/products

Updated: 30 Nov 2007: Scrapped the previous idea and have replaced it with this one.This idea is about defining new market exchanges between media producers and producers of other services/products. Some recent examples of startups in this area includes:Firepoll: free iTunes, ringtones etc in exchange for taking surveysMochilia: free mangazine/newspaper content for bloggers in exchange for advertisementsBrightSpot Media: free movie rental from BlockBuster in exchange for viewing advertisements.What we can do to one up these examples is to further notion of markets. These startups do not provide coordination mechanism i.e. price, liquidity or information transparency etc. All these are vital points for us to hit.As an illustration, let's take price. By simply doing a model where users decide...

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Startup Idea #7:Platform for user generation enterprise applications that goes beyond APIs and includes RFID, GPS

Mash ups in the consumer and enterprise space are now common. Most them, however have focused on using APIs as the 'ingredients' in creating applications. A future extension, and one that would definitely yield more interesting applications, is to go beyond APIs and include more technology blocks such as GPS, RFID, sensors et al. A platform that allows users to simply mash these technologies with web APIs would be interesting to say the leastThere are a couple of resources here that talk about enterprise mashups. While the focus is in mashing up web servcices or data, we can see that there is definitely potential for mashing up the above with additional technology pieces. A mash up for example that take sales data and GPS data on their customers would give marketing managers a useful application...

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