10:40
aaronchua
This is another idea on how to reduce healthcare costs using 2.0. One current issue in healthcare isproviding quality medical care for all citizens, even those living in small towns and rural areas. Currently, access to sophisticated healthcare is often restricted to those in major conurbations and people in sparsely populated areas are usually required to seek healthcare some distance from their homes. "These trips can require hours of travel time for a relatively short examination, and thus are neither convenient nor an efficient use of the patient's time," says the team. Conversely, having healthcare workers with specialist knowledge travel to remote areas is equally wasteful of resources at various levels.Through the use of video conferencing as well as the uploading of vital signs data,...
Sunday, 25 May 2008
Saturday, 24 May 2008
Startup Idea #63: Web based immunization schedules For missed childhood Vaccinations
What a cool and important idea waiting for a 2.0 makeover.A new downloadable software tool will help pediatricians, parents and other health care professionals determine how to adjust complex childhood immunization schedules when one or more vaccine doses aren't received at the proper time.What we can further add on is maybe a network to connect the children who need the vaccines to local clinics or hospitals. Another angel is to make it predictive by forecasting users who are likely to miss their vaccination through Amazon-alike type of system i.e. people who are this type tend to miss vaccinations et ...
Friday, 23 May 2008
Startup Idea #62: Networks for group purchase
I have been picking up this idea from various blogs that the next step for social networks (and a possible revenue model) is to organise group economic behaviour such as purchases. See:Carsharing:With gasoline prices eating holes in the wallets of the world’s most vulnerable consumers – young people and single women – EnergyTechStocks.com anticipates that each of these social networking sites will be utilized in what will coalesce over time into a gigantic national (or even international) Internet-based carpooling network.Group buying from 500hats:imagine what could happen if the targeting gets a helluva lot better & we start using the same social sharing / viral distribution techniques to discover cool stuff on the open web... ... and then buy it together at substantial group discounts,...
Thursday, 22 May 2008
Startup Idea #61: Markets for climate risk
I have mentioned in this post that creating new forms of market exchanges are huge opportunities.Given the recent disasters that we see happening in China and Mynmar, why is there no strong interest from startups to solve this type of problems? Problems that are affecting lives and causing series grief to real people.Climate risk is going to get bigger and bigger. There should be a market where such risks can be mitigated and managed. WeatherBill is one such company but how do you take it down to a personal level?Creating such markets can yield many benefits. One of which is prediction. If we take it that the market can better predict forth coming disasters, we can then use the information and feed into a simple disaster management system, such as an alert application on a phone. Such things...
Tuesday, 20 May 2008
Startup Idea #60: Network to create free consumer electronics
Continuing from the previous idea generation post about free consumer electronics, this startup idea is about forming a network for linking cheap electronic manufacturers in China to advertisers willing to sponsor free consumer electronics. This, I think, is one type of non-evil branding that BubbleGen talks about.Free consumer electronics is not like spam. They are bringing something useful to consumers and they are also optional i.e. you are not forced to get it if you don't want it. Hence, sponsoring electronics for consumers is one way of investing in them.Advertisers, by sponsoring electronics, not only builds a brand that invests in their users but for a cheap price, is getting exclusive 'screen' space. Consider the case that if banks sponsor a location device for users. The banks gain...
Sunday, 18 May 2008
Idea generation #29: Free consumer electronics
A thought provoking article on using consumer electronics as marketing tools: you can outsource everything about hardware. You can make sexy consumer electronics. And you can do it very, very cheaply.The fact that hardware can now be a sales tool implies that it has a very, very low price of entry. Low enough that banks could design their own consumer electronics to support the customer experience, if they wanted. You can imagine the situation: you choose your bank because its gadgets are the most desirable.With prices of electronic components getting cheaper all the time, I am sure there will be unexpected uses. As Kevin Kelly said, free fosters greater innovation as the cost of experimenting drops tremendously. If consumer electronics become cheap enough, what other uses can we expect,...
Saturday, 17 May 2008
Idea generation #28 (Part II): Mobile opportunities
Continuing from the previous post on mobile opportunities.The Churchill Club's annual Top 10 Trend dinner also highlight a number of mobile opportunities. In particular, I thought the following are all relevant trends: From Vinod Knosla: The mobile phone will be a mainstream personal computer. With built in projector. Authentication. Credit. Khosla says he keeps pictures of his passport electronically on his phone. He says people will be less likely to carry their laptops. Come near a computer, and physical hard drive will be yours, including half-sent email message you left at home. Lose the phone, and all the information is on the network. Imagine what you want to do, and it should be available anytime. Projectors in cell phones in next two years. More than one camera per cell phone; high...
Thursday, 15 May 2008
Idea generation #28: Mobile opportunities
Saw this ppt a couple of years ago. Still find it aspiring. Plenty of opportunities here. Merge this with Bubblegen's 2.0 models and the mind explodes at the kind of things a startup can do. | View | Upload your ...
Tuesday, 13 May 2008
Idea generation #27: Opportunities in new communication platform
The communication market is expanding. Users now have the option to use anything from s Text Messaging, Instant Messaging, Skyping et al (synchronous communication) to Blogs, Twitter et al (asynchronous public communication) to email, private comments on blog et al (asynchronous private communication).As we line up each of these communication tools, we can see that many of them will evolve beyond their communication purposes. Foundry Group Blog, for example, talks about email and says how it can evolved to social networks and know management. Personally, I have also used Twitter as a news aggregator by reading the links of those I followed, although I do not have a Twitter account.As these different purposes evolve, I believe there will be opportunities for startups to build applications...
Monday, 12 May 2008
Startup Idea #59: Small idea-Coordination machine linking to-do list to globe
Coordination plays are a big part of what the web is all about. Enabling resources to be coordinated via simple mechanisms, rather than through firms is one way to gain strategic advantage.A simple idea (inspiration here:article ) is to build an application that links a user's to-do list to the global marketplaces that have spring up so that he/she can outsource her/his personal tasks.The value proposition is simple: rather than going to the different marketplaces, it is attention efficient for a user to list her tasks and wait for the appropriate respon...
Sunday, 11 May 2008
Idea generation #26: Personal carbon trading
Next big market, IMHO. Once sufficient liquidity has been reached, we will see innovations in this market, not unlike what the financial sector has gone through. All sorts of risk management innovations will come, and along with that, a bunch of new winners in the startup game.Better yet, use 2.0 to create new forms of startups in this game: the Covestor, the Wesabe, the Instant Information of this new mark...
Saturday, 10 May 2008
Startup Idea #58: Open marketplace for advertiser sponsored widgets
The problem of 'evil' ads is getting out of hand. Somebody should really be doing something. Hey, it is not like there is no obvious solution. Bubblegen has already highlighted one: make an open ad platform where brands can sponsor widgets that add value to their customers.This idea should be very implementable. Focus on one industry first: see for example how Nike created useful widgets for its sports community. There are plenty of other industries where widgets can add value; how about the eco-industry? create a platform where eco brands can sponsor widgets that e.g. help users track their carbon footprint, visualise their electricity usage, recommend relevant eco products et al. So many possibilities....Such a platform is the inverse of what Bubblegen has called a 'evil' platform. By choosing...
Friday, 9 May 2008
Startup Idea #57: Network to reduce deaths from car accidents
I have been having goose bumps reading articles talking about the power of being good (this and this). The sheer power of the ideas being articled is nothing less than tectonic.One idea I have after reading an article about Larry Page saying the same things is to reduce deaths from car accidents. Singapore has one of the highest deaths in per capital terms. Many of these deaths occur in highways. Why is that so? Well, because the training and lessons we receive never teach us the dangers of highways. So, the idea here is built a network that connects people who want to teach highway safety to new drivers. Simple but value adding.Of course, we can use all the rich media like video and such to show how highway accidents occur, how to prevent it, how to spot danger et al. However, the most important...
Wednesday, 7 May 2008
Idea generation #25: Spreadsheet 2.0?
Dave Winer had a interesting idea back in 07: spreadsheet calls over the Internet. Together with this platform enabling mashups to be created via importing web data directly into your desktop excel, this idea has the potential to create many interesting applications, or even business.One application, first articulated here, is a automatically updated contact spreadsheet. The idea is to maintain a database in your excel and have the contact data pulled from social networks such as LinkedIn.More ideas in the next pos...
Monday, 5 May 2008
Idea generation #23 (Part II): Product conversations: new form of social mediation
See the first post here and related startup idea here.A useful article that highlights the value of product twittering and lists some examples. This article deepens my understanding of the value of product twittering: it is beyond mindless broadcasting of information. Rather it is about:agents that circulate food for thought, that “speak on” matters from an altogether different point of view, that lend a Thing-y perspective on micro and macro social, cultural, political and personal mattersHence, things will get more interesting when twitterbots goes beyond their one directional boardcast and allows for meaningful conversatio...
Startup Idea #56: Small idea-Platform enabling feedback from micro blogging services
As micro blogging services such as Twitter becomes more mainstream and influential, there will be a need for businesses to engage their customers in this new area. As highlighted by Micro Persuasion, forward looking companies such as JetBlue are already using Twitter as the frontline for their customer service. The opportunity here is for a new type of customer service support company that makes it easy for the rest of the companies to do the same.The bundled services this new company can provide include:Design of template: preferably through a network of designersAutomated search for company evangelists from services such as GetSatisfaction. This person or group of people will become the customer service support for the company's micro blog. Companies can of course assigned their internal...
Saturday, 3 May 2008
Startup Idea #55: Aggregation services for Covestor
Related to my last post, there is another startup opportunity: re imagining the type of successful blog aggregation services such as TechMeme, Technorati, Outside.In et al for other democratizing platforms.For Covestor, if everyone can now be a fund manager, there is value in finding the best fund managers from the rest pf the pool. Of course, this is something I believe Covestor will do itself. However there is always value in chaining the blogs of these different fund managers, like what TechMeme is doing. The interface however could be stock driven, rather than news driven. For example, under the Google stock, we can see which fund managers are blogging about it.Manipulating the tags associated with the Covestor platform is also potentially another game changer. If we can massively distribute...
Idea generation #24: Platforms for democratizing professional services
I always thought that blogging platforms are the end all and be all of democratization. However, coming across this article about Covestor really blew my mind away on the opportunities to build platforms that democratized different types of professional services.What Covestor does is building a platform that allows the average Joe to become a fund manager. The fund management industry is paid with fat margins with no corresponding relationship with efficiency: an industry waiting to be disrupted by platforms such as Covestor.So, the next question is to ask what other industries have a similar structure: fat margins, dependent on a selected 'professional' and relatively inefficient? We have seen journalism being democratized by blogging platforms, and now fund management by Covestor platform,...
