Startup Idea #111: SMS based platform for delivering life saving content to the poor

This is a powerful article that covers a lot what Umair Haque has been saying. It offers a more down to earth (and easier to understand!) perspective of the great changes that we are going to see.One of his paragraphs gives a great idea for startup:Solar water disinfection (SODIS): put water which is contaminated with disease organisms into a plastic soda pop bottle and leave it in the sun all day. You can use a tinfoil reflector, or put it on a black sheet metal heat collector if you want to be fancy. The UV light and the heat kill most of what would make you sick. This is a technique you can teach by well-phrased SMS messages. 5 million people...

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Idea generation #57: Measuring social capital

There has been a couple of interesting posts recently around social capital and I want to take this post to see how they are connected.Following from Loic Le Meur blog post on "Twitter: We Need Search By Authority", Matt Ghuniem had a great insight: popularity is not authority. This then brings out the question of what is authority? It turns out that authority, as defined by the ability to drive responses, traffic and attention, is very much related to social capital.If we loop the argument, then it is clear that social capital is beyond a theoritical concept. It has powerful business applications, with search being one of the examples. It also...

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How to you build better equity?

This question has been bugging me for the past weeks ever since Umair Haque wrote about it in his post on the Great Rebalancing and Four Ways to Build a Better Economy. I thought I would throw it out for those who want to engage in deeper discussions on how do you exactly go about building better equity.Firstly, how does better equity look like? Is it going to in a form that invests in human capital and creativity? If so, will it look like Ycombinator or Sellaband or both. Are they indications of what are things to come? Will this will evolve into markets for human equity contracts?Secondly, how do we evolve better ways to manage equity? The...

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Startup Idea #110: Services to build up social capital

When I was blogging about the idea of using a Zemanta-like service to help independent creators (i.e. musican, authors et al), that idea came out from extending what Zemanta can do. However, given the recent thinking about the importance of social capital (thanks, Ethan!), I think the potential of this idea needs to be re-articulated.Ethan said it best when he posts that:Getting back to my point: it’s likely that, relative to financial capital, connections to nodes on the relevant [human] business networks will become comparatively much more valuable. Startups can create a lot of value with little financial capital, but they need to quickly...

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Idea generation #56: The importance of switch boards

As the social web evolves, the ability to move data around is going to gain in importance. Recently, I have noticed the emergence of such services. I called them switch-board services. They essentially act as switch boards to move your data around different web services. More importantly, they are not aggreators or destination sites. They focused on distribution.TwiiterBoard focuses on integrating your Tweets to other services. Its first application is saving links in your tweets to your Del.icio.us account. I don't use Twitter so I cannot comment on its usefulness.Switchabit is another such switch board service. I am currently using it to take my blog content and post it to Facebook and Tumblr. The service is still young. There are features i wish it has such as for my facebook friends being...

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Startup Idea #109: 6 Twitter ideas

Happy thanks giving and here are some ideas for a lazy post-Christmas morning. They are all based on the concept that Twitter has become a growing platform. We need context to make sense of all the talking that is going on. This, I believe, will spawn many niche opportunities that a startup can pursue.Some of these are trivial and some may seem totally unrealistic, but hey, it is post Christmas right?Sports Talk: A stock twits equivalent for sports. Let users tag their tweets with the club name. MANU for manchester united, LIV for liverpool et al. Create a chart to show the level of support from the strength of the conversations. You might even allow users to place small wagers via tipjoy....A Weebly for creating Twitter-based community sites: This idea came from a Techcrunch post mentioning...

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Startup Idea #108: An open source ebook reader for the BOP

I think there is an opportunity to build a cheap ebook reader that comes with a marketplace like Apple's App store for users to sell and buy ebooks and articles. The current price of ebook readers are too high and lacks a marketplace. It also doesn't enhance the experience even though it is digital.I hope the first market that a cheap ebook reader can reach is the bottom of the pyramid crowd. The kids of the poor have very poor access to information. A cheap ebook reader, with thousands dollars of free content, can be a viable way for them to overcome this.Furthermore, if we can leverage on mobile kiosks in these countries to allow users to buy additional content through digital means, then we have also created a simple way for the poor to participate in the latest knowledge the developed...

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Startup Idea #107: Using games to improve financial literacy

I pointed out some time ago about this article from the Economist that highlights the need for people to be financially literate. I think this important, given the current crisis and financial education should start from young. The key challenge is to devise innovative ways to get kids interested.One possible way to do this is through video games. This article from Wired pointed to an interesting direction: turning your piggy banks into arcade machines that help kids to save money.I think this is just scratching the surface of what can be done. What if we link these gadgets to a web service that allows the kids to track, compare, do mashup,...

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We need to empower the parents

Here is a question that I would love an answer to.Is there a site, template, program that I can use to help my son learn to program in? I have some skills but less time to sit with him, and having a 3rd party between a son and father during learning time keeps the testosterone down for both of us. I can be the adjunct but not the primary instructor with him.He is 12 also and interested in computers. I love the angle of him developing a computer game on his own.Originally posted as a comment by Tom Royce on A VC using Disqus.HI Fred. Long time listener, first time caller, er, commenter.Can you publicly or privately give any more details on how you are helping your son and the tools started with?My son just turned 11 and he and I are just starting with Microsoft's new Small Basic environment...

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Micromedia vs Mass Media

I want to share a personal experience today on the massive value of micromedia vs mass media.I spent $15 buying Wired magazine to read on the trains today. At the end of the ride (about 40 minutes), I found nothing new. No new ideas, no inspirations, no new ways to think about the world. While the articles are well written, there is nothing is that I have not read before in a blog.Compare the above experience with another article that I read on the train. It is a blog post by Fred Wilson that talks about disrupting education, with lots of insightful comments made by the community. It definitely gave me more room for thought than Wired. The best...

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Models for next generation financial businesses

How does next generation value chain for finance actually look like?Umair Haque gave a glimpse of that in one of his remarkable posts:The App Store is radical, ultimately, because it atomizes the value chain: where once a handful of scale-driven players could produce and distribute mobile apps, today, any number of players can enter. What was once monolithic is shattered into a million pieces. If the market can coordinate those millions of pieces effectively, the new value chain is hyperefficient.Today, we are seeing startups that are 'breaking up' the functions of banks and distributing them to anyone who has a desire to enter into the market....

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Idea generation #50 (Part II): Markets for electricity

Energy is really just another form of 'content' or data that travels across a network. We saw how businesses in media content have been revolutionized by the Internet. Will the energy sector be revolutionized as well, by the coming of smart grids and smart meters that are plugged into the Internet? If every home and building will have one and it too will be connected to the Net, this will provide energy efficiency and numerous revenue opportunities.Some thoughts:Who is going to be the Dell of the smart meters? Better yet, who is going to be the BugLabs equivalent?Who is going to provide software and applications to connect the Web to the Energy Net?Who is going to manage the data, to filter and provide context to empower users to make decisions? To be the Amazon for providing useful recommendations...

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Social recommendations done right

My wife was browsing through her facebook when she noticed the following comments from one of her friends:She immediately got excited and click through to the photo to find the below. Next thing, she is looking for ways to buy the clothes.I find this entire process enlightening. Now that it is easy to post content, the next step is to find context for which the content is relevant.How do you make it easy for independent designers to find the right context to sell their stuff?Is there a room for a TopSpinMedia for Fashion, and is this one of the building blocks?Can we create A Zynga equivalent for independent designers i.e. to build a context...

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Idea generation #54: Sharing as an edge competency.

Sharing.A simple concept that is taking on new importance in this new economy.I first seriously think about it when Fred Wilson, in one of his comments, mention that sharing is a big part of what social media is. Sharing enables interaction, which is the key value in social media. ParentPermalink Admin Report SpamRemove PostBlock usernameBlock emailBlock IP address fredwilson 6 months ago 1 point Please login to rate. Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment. But the goal of social media should be two fold1) Make it easier to share2) Deliver value for sharingThen we'll get more...

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Startup Idea #106: Third part comment system for videos

Taylor Davidson has a useful post on the revenue strategy of Nico Nico Douga, which involves giving its community the ability to interact with each other via embedded comments and links with a video. What is interesting about Nico Nico Douga is not the technology. Video annotation has been around (see veeple). Rather, it is the understanding that in social media, conversations are key. They have also show that it is possible to build a business if you give people the ability to converse, to personalise their conversations and to integrate the conversations around social objects.What we are seeing now for sites such as Youtube is that the comments...

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Startup Idea #105: Virtual items for profile photos

This is certainly a hint at a monetization strategy. Seriously! Thousands of people would pay for virtual goods like this - especially behavioral/functional virtual goods that influence how many people see my tumblog. Virtual items are emerging as a strong alternative to advertising for social media. The quote above hits the point home: people would pay for this! However, platforms needs to open up. I am not sure currently whether it is possible for a third party application to provide virtual items for an user's profile page. For a vibrant virtual items industry, we need that to happen.Alternatively, I wonder if...

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Startup Idea #104: Powering viral distribution

The power of consumer voices on the Net is growing as sites like Tripadvisors are becoming important lead generators. A study conducted last October by comScore and The Kelsey Group of 2,078 respondents, including 508 who used online consumer reviews, found that online, consumer-created reviews have a big impact on prospective buyers. The study showed consumers were so trusting of online reviews, they were even willing to pay at least 20 percent, and up to 99 percent, more if a company was rated excellent or five-star than if a business received a good, or four-star, rating.If consumer are becoming important viral channels, it make...

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Startup Idea #103: Spot.US for blogs

Spot.Us is a non-profit project that pioneers 'community funded reporting'. It is a really good idea that plays on the concept of intention market, where users indicate what they want and vendors respond accordingly. I believe this concept can be applied to blogging as well.Many times, I have wished there was someway I can express my desire to read some topics from a particular blogger. For instance, I wish Fred Wilson can write a series of posts about hacking finance, hacking healthcare et al, and I don't mind putting a monetary value.The idea, hence is create a distributed Spot.Us platform where blog readers can suggest the topics they want to read by the particular blogger and contribute a monetary amount if the topic was written. Other blog readers should be able contribute to the topics...

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Startup Idea #96 (Part II): Topspinmedia for the mobile

The concept of a mobile publishing platform for independent musicians becomes more and more sensible as I look around how the music industry is shaping up. Let's look at some numbers:Mobile music was worth 9.1 Billion dollars in 2007 (source Netsize Guide 2008). Contrast that with the 30 billion dollar global music industry, and we find that 31% of the total worldwide consumer spend on music, is already consumed on mobile. The biggest part is ringing tones, obviously, but there are other billion-dollar markets already in full-track MP3 files and ringback tones sold to mobile. Karaoke, music video, welcoming tones, background tones and music streaming...

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Startup Idea #102: Democratizing games

The Internet has the ability to push the power from organisations to individuals. MetaPlace is providing such a platform for game developers and is threatening to do to the game industry what blogging did to publishing industry.If we think about blogging and the changes it bought, it goes beyond replacing the publishing industry. Rather, it brought about an entire new ecosystem of products and services such as publishing platforms (wordpress, blogger), comment aggregation (Disqus, IntenseDebate), recommendation services (Zemanta), community services (MyBloglog), blog advertisements (Federated Media), delivery services (Feedburner), aggregation (techmeme), search (Google, Technorati), verticals (seeking alpha) et al.Is it possible then to think that platforms such as MetaPlace will bring about...

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Slides on future of mobile

These are useful slides for me as I researched on the potential of mobile. If you are keen to explore this area, these slides can be quite a valuable resource | View | Upload your ownFuture Of MobileView SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: countries developing)Mobile Invisible RevolutionView SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: 2.5g ...

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Visiting Japan and seeing the potential of mobile social networks

Apologies for the lack of posts recently as I am currently on vacation in Japan. I want to drop a quick note here to say that mobile social netwroks will indeed become bigger than online social networks. This was already reflected in a slide presentation (see slide 19) by vinod khosla a couple of years back. However, seeing how the Japanese used it for their everyday communication purposes makes you believe that this will indeed be true. What I see promising is to take the generic social networks concept and apply it around social objects that are suited to the mobile. This is make it easier to come up with mobile viral apps....

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Startup Idea #101: New models for photography industry

I had a great time reading Talor Davidson's blog post on the changing landscape for the photography industry and what are the opportunities that such a changing landscape brings.Some of the points he raised seem right for startups to build something upon.Publishing Platforms: Rather than rely on sites like istockphoto, photographer should start to build relationships directly with their fans and community. A open source publishing platform like BandCamp will be needed. Photoshelter is a good start but I feel it is not geared sufficiently towards helping photographers better connect with their community, such as the lack of viral distribution and analytics capabilities.More importantly, an open source platform will allow other developers contribute to make the platform better for everyone....

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Startup Idea #100: Improve virtual world merchandising

As virtual world items becomes the default business model for many free to use social networks, games and virtual worlds, there is an opportunity to improve the sales conversion through a sophisticated merchandising platform.In the real world, there are many product strategies that are devised to improve sales ratios.A 'razor and blade' strategy, for example typically involves selling a item for less than its costs in order to sell more peripherals that this item needs to operate. We can use this technique in the virtual world as well. Why not give away a virtual radio or game console, and then charge for music or games to be played in these machines?Packaging is also important to a physical product but why is there no effort made to package a virtual good? This is especially important when...

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3 cool startups

I read about some really cool startups during the past week so I thought I will share it here with everyone:Boxee: Fred Wilson called it the 'firefox of media content'. I find Boxee utterly intriguing because there are so many powerful concepts in it. It allows users to reorganise their content into streams of attention, making it one of the few reconsturctors. It is also able to become the 'RSS reader' of media and in the process, able to conduct profile based targeting ads. Finally, it is able to become the 'wordpress of the media center OS' and such openess is becoming the defacto business strategy.Ocarina: A cool iphone app that turns your iphone into a flute, with the ability to share your tunes around the world. Beyond the coolness of the app, this also shows how the iphone is less of...

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Startup Idea #94 (Part 3): Bandcamp

I just discovered Bandcamp and was pleasantly surprised that we have a Topspinmedia competitor in the making. I think this just the beginning of a trend. Soon, we will see startups that provide such tools in many different industries.What I hope to see is Bandcamp taking the concept further and putting it on the mobile. I see this channel as offering more interaction potential between bands and fans. For example, I can foresee that fans will like a Twitter like streaming of their bands' daily activites.Mobile is also a media where there are already in-built payment mechanisms. This makes mp3 commerce more viable. In addition, ringtones and ringbacks are already proven business models. So, why not start with that and allow your fans to purchase this immediately?I definitely like BandCamp as...

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Idea generation #53: Social Q&A services on your phone

I found this fascinating quote today:The reason I am blogging about this, other than to get all of you to go download the app, is because Live Poker is the first first application to leverage Facebook Connect to allow iPhone users to play with their real friends and access social information such as real player photos. Just think about that for a second. We've now got apps on open mobile phones connecting with apps on open social nets. It's only a matter of time until we see more of these live mobile apps running on iPhone, Blackberry, Android, Windows Mobile, Symbian, and connecting to Facebook, MySpace, and other social nets.A VC, Nov 2008The ability to tap on your social graph with your mobile has immense potential. One area is taking the concept of Aardvark and applying to the mobile phone....

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Startup Idea #98: Parents sharing teaching experiences

This idea was inspired by the book 'Disrupting Class'. The thesis of the book pointed out that we need flexible and modular teaching tools to fit the different learning styles of children. There was an interesting paragraph that mentioned how parents might already be doing this via their own initiative. For example, a parent might be stringing alphabets into music for his/her children who are musically inclined.I found this concept very intriguing and did a couple of Google searches on how parents are teaching their kids. It turns out parents are indeed devising their own teaching methods and posting about them through blogs. This blog post for example writes about how a parent is teaching her kids the meaning of financial planning via through the use of bricks.So, is it possible to create...

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Startup Idea #97: A marketplace for volunteers and charitable organisations

If you like to be a volunteer, where would you go? That is the question I was asking myself when I thought about volunteering the other day. There is no information source where I can assess where can I volunteer, what kind of help are organisations looking for, the organisations' environment, the type of people I am helping et al.There should a marketplace of sorts where these information can be assessed and volunteers can be matched to organisations looking for them. Moreover, volunteers should be able to share their stories, be they words, images or videos such that these stories can be told to the rest of the community. In fact, volunteers and organisations can even rate each other to create some form of reputation mechanisms.Such a marketplace is exciting to me because it is a form of...

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Idea generation #52: Internet of things

The Age has an interesting article on the Internet of Things. I deeply believe that as more and more atoms become connected to the web, it makes it easier and easier for virtual to affect the real and vice versa. This is kind of amazing becasue we can start to build things that really matters, that will help improve people's lives in the real world. Fitbit is one interesting example.To prepare for the Internet of things, we need new foundations.On the infrastructure side, we need a new backend to support data transfer between physical and virtual. As more and more data becomes connected, a new form of GNIP will also be necessary. Finally, we also need new ways of identification and security.On the browser front, we need to create a new form of browser fot this Internet enabled world. Currently,...

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Peer to peer financing

Finance is one of the cornerstone of the modern economy. However, the current crisis is showing us how distorted the financial system has become. What can we do as innovators to make the system relevant again? To make it value adding, rather than sucking the value away?I believe there is an emerging class of financing that is going to become more and more important: peer to peer financing. The likes of Kiva, Prosper, Zopa has shown us the first glimpse of how such a system will look like. These p2p networks will not replaced VCs, IPOs, loans et al but instead complement them as an alternative to finance what I believe to be the emerging independent...

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Startup Idea #96: Topspinmedia for the mobile

My fascination with topspinmedia continues as everything I read is constantly coloured by this great concept . Such is the case as I stumbled across this article on how powerful mobile is and how much revenue it is already generating for the music industry.the mobile internet has already innovated in this music area. Ringing tones. They are worth over 6.5 billion dollars (already over six times larger than the size of digital music downloads such as iTunes). .....All kinds of music innovations have been dismissed by older generations as "not being real music" such as rock n' roll which was supposedly not music, and rap which many said was not music, and the recent innovation of sampling and mashing existing music, etc. Ask the person forking over the money. If that teenager spends two dollars...

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Startup Idea #94 (Part 2): Helping independents to earn a living

Continuing my posts about creating tools to help independents earn a living, I will be talking about software ideas to help the independent t-shirt designer. Before going further, I want to share this statement from Six Part. I didn't notice this before but what they are saying fits very well into how we can create tools to help independents become more successful:T-shirt designers are proliferating and yet no tools exit to help them become more effective at what they do. One immediate thing that comes to mind is a tool that helps independents upload their designs to multiple aggreator sites and then tracks their comments.A cross between tubemogul...

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Startup Idea #95: 4 ideas to turn beautiful interfaces into meaningful applications

I saw some great interfaces recently and was wondering if they can be adapted to solve some real economic issues and create value for its users. This is by no means an implication that these current sites offer no value. Rather, if we can alter the content or context, they can deployed to realise raically different values.1. Determining the independence of a company's boardThis site has a great interface to allow users to flow from one topic to another. The power comes from the relevant topics that pops up when you click on a post. Rather than topics, why not make them people? Related people can pop up whenever I click on a particular, and when...

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10 random startup ideas

Here is a list of 10 random ideas, in no particular order or relevance.- A tumblr for inspirational web design: a light-weight service that enables users to 'copy' any parts of a website you like and share it in a tumblr like service, that is easy and beautiful to set up. A place for 'river of news' style of web inspiration. A bit similar to PatternTap with a flow to it.- Daily inspirations: A service where daily or hourly pictures of inspiration are posted. Have a big comment box where users can post, in 100 words or less, their reactions to the pictures. Comments are limited to the first 50 users before they are closed. Think this is stupid?...

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