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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