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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