5 ideas for mobile ebook applications

With the rising popularity of the ebook readers on mobile, I think the ebook market might finally be taking off. If you are interested to do something in this area, I have listed some ideas for your you to consider.A marketplace to create and sell non-text based ebooks: Japan has shown that novels which are written on and intended for mobile is a viable market. With the new touch interfaces, it is now possible to create a non text based authoring system on mobile for users to create image intensive books such as children's books, picture magazines, calenders et al. Attach the authoring system to a marketplace and you can create a Wattpad equivalent for non text based ebooks.Mobile advertising in ebooks: Advertising on the mobile can be personal, engaging and useful if done correctly. Blyk...

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Personal network enablers

As I understand more and more about the power of network models applied to businesses (see this article by John Hagel and John Seely Brown for business examples), I begin to see parallels for bringing the benefits of such models to a personal level. This is exciting as it implies a scalable model for microbusinesses.The current crop of social networks have amplify our ability to connect and maintain more social relationships. Within this limited scope, we have already seen the scale and success they have achieved. Imagine taking that to the next level for personal productivity and innovation.There are many specialised social networks like Coroflot (designers), Flickr (photographers), DeviantArt (digital artists) et al that has excellent network of freelancers. Unfortunately, most of them...

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Exploring new concepts

Warning: this is going to be a long rant that possibly can go nowhere. Read it at your peril! (and if you have more than 5 minutes to spare)I have been reading about a bunch of new concepts and I want to take a moment to put it down in some form of order. There is no precise logic except that I feel they will be important areas in the years to come.Measuring the currently unmeasured: More and more, I come to accept that new forms of value creation is taking place without the proper mechanisms to capture and value it. The current reliance on monetary measurement masks some very real value that are being created. A good example is to look at social interactions, which are helping us filter and find the right content and connections. How will these value be captured?Hence, I believe that there...

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5 small ideas for music related startups

I have spent the better part of my traveling finishing 2 very interesting books on the future of music: Music 2.0 and Net, Blogs and RocknRoll. They point to very similar directions: music is going to be like water, and the opportunities lie in creating the products/services that creates, agggregates, filters and recommends the most powerful music experiences for the user.There are great little nuggets of learning in both books and it is from all these that inspire me to come up with a list of 5 possible startup ideas in music. All these are not truly unique, given the hundreds of startups in this area, but they should provide further room for...

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Contours of next generation consumption, production and distribution

I will be on the road for the next few days so blogging will be non existent. While traveling, I will be thinking about how a next generation business will approach consumption, production and distribution. Specifically, these few areas will be on mind:Demand based pricing: This is the most difficult for me. While open pricing reveals true demand, I have yet to understand the value proposition this creates. Back to the economic literature.Viral Distribution: Taylor Davidson's post reminded me of just how important viral distribution is. It is not about making your product more viral. It is about how to create suitable products based on viral loops. One of the important ways to create new viral loops is to understand the context of of sharing: when does sharing occur, under what circumstances...

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The opportunity in blog comments

I have been reading and rereading Umair Haque's paper on user generated context. I have not fully digest its implications but one thing is clear to me: Harnessing context around the content to navigate the abundance of media is going to the key in creating value for users.Let's take that logic and apply to one of the growing areas in social media: blog comments. How does blog comments help to surface the most interesting blogs? I don't think it might be as obvious as the question suggests.First of all, let's understand what kind of complementary value does comments add to the blog posts:Adds additional perspectives, views et al beyond what was offered by the blog authorLinks to interesting examples or other relevant articlesProvide facts or numbers that either refute or verify what the author...

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My office's branding plan is stupid

I have just finished the branding plan for our office. The intent was to increase awareness for the industry and hopefully, attract more attention to the companies and their products.The disappointing part was that we are adapting the 'blasting' approach, rather than having a true conversation with our stakeholders. This is pretty ironic. Our office often talks about disrupting traditional media, and here we are, using a medium than we want to disrupt.My office does not understand that compressing its ideas and messages into 'branded' messages is not as efficient as my CEO talking about it through a blog. The passion and conviction that our office has of transforming the industry simply cannot be conveyed in 'branded' message.We need to have discussions on how to have a true 2 way conversation...

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How do we create different forms of early stage investing?

As we look to strengthening our funding ecosystem in Singapore, one of the questions I am always struggling with is early stage investments.Initially, we had thought that the problem was simply the lack of it. Hence, our office went about assembling a group of no less than 60 early stage investors and inviting them to a meet-the-companies sessions. We call this program i.MATCH.However, after 2 rounds of i.MATCH, there are still not much investing activities going on. Hence, I am am beginning to feel that it is the structure of early stage investors that is not conducive for investing in young ventures.This post by Taylor Davidson has done a good job of articulating the same issue.Therefore, as part of 2009, our office needs to explore and support new forms of early stage investing. It is time...

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3 ideas for events related mobile advertising

My study into the mobile sector continues as I am finishing the book "Mobile as 7th of the Mass Media:cellphone, cameraphone, iphone and smartphone" by Tomi T Ahonen. It is a book that gives you great insights into the opportunities of the mobile industry.During the reading, I cam across the idea of events based mobile advertising. This somehow felt right to me, rather than the much hyped location based ads (the over-killed Starbucks example).Events based advertising rely on the same logic as when you search for an item on Google: your intention has been made known loud and clear. When you attend a U2 concert, it is obvious you love U2. When you go for a Man United game, it is clear you are a fan of the club.If intentions are clear, then it makes sense for advertising to take place as more...

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New forms of interaction as value drivers for media

Media industry needs new sources of revenue.New ways on interaction is often the key to unlocking these new values.The success of RockBand has showed us how enabling fans to interact with their music opens up huge revenue possibility. This Wired article showed us others.Even within games, Wii has shown how a new interaction can add tremendous value to a medium that is already interactive by nature.So, if you are a startup in the media space, you can:Think about novel ways for people to interact more with their media. Need examples? See the video below for a cool demonstration.Think about the elements within a media and how to make them interactive. For music, it might be lyrics, instruments, vocals et al. For video, it might be story, characters, fashion et al. How can we enable users to do...

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5 ways to help musicians moblise their music

The mobile music industry is thriving:Music on mobile phones, from ringing tones to MP3 files to music videos to mobile karaoke is worth over 9.3 billion dollars per year. The global music industry is worth 30 billion dollars. (source)How then can we help musicians to take advantage of this opportunity, and in the process, build a new kind of music business that takes the artists and their fans as the centre of gravity? Here are a few ideas:Let's start with moblising musicians current content on the web to the mobile: Create a platform that easily renders an artists' RSS into beautiful mobile sites, mobiles apps et al automatically. These sites or apps should allow easy purchase of music.Alternatively, create a mobile publishing platform such as mobisiteglore but for music. We have seen niche...

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Uplifting our industry (Part II)

I have written briefly about our office's plan to encourage to create more open and shared resources this year.Why are we doing this?We believe that the next generation media will be 3D and have real time flows between virtual and real data. To make it easier for the industry to move into these areas, we need to reduce friction, and that means making common resources open and sharable. Just like how Chrome is laying the foundation for a web browser meant for Web applications rather than pages, we are laying the pieces for a future media that will be beyond 2D and computers.To this end, we have invested in many common resources. I have listed some below:Live video feeds: We are going to plant thousands of cameras in public areas across Singapore and making the video feeds available for any...

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How do you scale organisation design?

It is no secret that Threadless has been regarded as an excellent example of cutting edge organisation design. However, due to the cost of shipping, I don't think Threadless has managed to penetrate every possible country, the way pure digital companies like Youtube and Facebook has done. This is a crying shame. We can all do with more cool stuff in our lives.This got me thinking about the issue of scaling organisation designs.It is now commonplace for companies to offer APIs to scale their product, data or service. However, how do you enable others to tap into your organisation design?Innovators like Threadless is not about technology. It is relative easy to develop a site builder that allows any startup to create a site that is similar to Threadless in functionality. These innovators are...

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Uplifting our industry

This year will be an important one for us at the office. For the past 2 years, we have funded 250 projects to build a base. Now that the base is maturing, it is time to venture out.We will be doing lots of interesting stuff this year. Stuff that few people have the chance to do it. I mean, how often are you given the opportunity to shape an entire nation's digital media strategy?One of the things we will be doing is to emulate Google's strategy of relentless experimentation on a nationwide basis. This means we will be consolidating nation-wide demand for our funded companies to conduct radical experiments, using common resources that each of our funded companies have contributed in kind. These include detailed map data, location information, sensor data, cloud computing et al.We are not sure...

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Idea generation #61: Expert networks

The Web has a given us a platform for experts across all areas to emerge. They can range from medicine to technical support to legal. How to identify and enable fluid access to these experts may be the next opportunity in social media. I think peer production only goes so far: sometimes you need expertise beyond what your immediate social circle offers. This brings me to an interesting discussion I read today about measuring Twitter's authority. Able to identify authority is a first step to establishing experts. The next step would be to be able to reduce friction in terms of search costs to allow What kind of businesses can be built from this? Roger Ehrenberg has identified one such segment: financial research. These buyers in particular are particularly willing to try out hard core technology...

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An interesting model that intersects mobile and photography

I am feeling sick today so not much energy to do a full post. I just want to highlight this interesting business model that I have came across.Text messaging helps grow photography business Cape Sessions, a business run by UK born Liz Metcalfe, sells digital photographs of windsurfers from a website. The business recently expanded its business model by adding a location alert service using text messaging. This service is helping drive sales as clients are kept informed of which beach Metcalfe is taking photographs at on a particular day. (See full post here)This is interesting to me as it lies in the intersection between 2 of my favorite areas: mobile and helping independents to earn a livi...

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Idea generation #60: What can you build using Zemanta's API

Zemanta in one of my current favorite service. Added to the fact that we are encouraging our startups to leverage on good platforms, I want to give some thoughts of what kind of services that can be built using Zemanta's API:A newsreader powered by what I blogged: This is a no brainer for me. I find the current crop of news aggregator such as Techmeme very unsatisfying. Now, Zemanta knows my interest through my blog and is already surfacing interesting links for my insertion. Why can't I turn that into a full blown news aggregation service. Better yet, why can't I input all my favourite blogs and let Zemanta recommends related reading materials...

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Sharing links

People powered news are nothing new. We have seen the likes of Digg, Hackers News, Meta Filter et al becoming important venues for us to get our daily dose of important or interesting stories. The problem with these existing news aggregators is the lack of focus. On some days, you get really good reads. On others, it is just noise.Yesterday, I tried Publish2, an infrastructure for links sharing that is targeted at journalists. I found this list of links regarding the future of news very relevant to myself. The high relevance is probably down to the the people contributing to it (a small group of experts) and the focus nature of the topic. Why...

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What fashion needs is new DNA

NYtimes has an interesting article titled: U.S. Fashion’s One-Woman Bailout?Mrs. Obama did something bolder on the campaign trail and, in a sense, less expected. With flashcard clarity, she signaled an interest both in looking stylish and also in advancing the cause of American fashion and those who design and make it. She wore off-the-rack stuff from J. Crew and, at times controversially, designs by fashion darlings like Isabel Toledo, Thakoon Panichgul and Narciso Rodriguez.I don't think what the fashion needs is more marketing. The problems it is facing has the same roots in other decaying industries.Insignificant as this may seem in the larger scheme of things, it is less so when one considers the distressing state in which American fashion has found itself lately, with both chain and...

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A loose network for exchanging traffic

One of our invested companies is in the area of analytics for applications including games. In the course of our discussion in developing a unique value proposition, we realise that current analytics don't do much beyond reporting statistics. That is all fine and good but we think there is an opportunity to do more.We realise that many developers, including those we funded, do not cross leverage on each other's traffic. We think that if the right infrastructure, mechanisms and incentives can be developed, we can enable an open exchange where developers can collaborate to cross promote each other.Our starting point is to treat analytics as a social object that can be shared. An exchange can then be built on top where developers can ask the relevant partners to grow their traffic. For example,...

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Short blogs and Tumblr are my news filter

I myself enjoying short blogs and tumblr more and more. On my iGoogle, you can find the following; Betaworks Music, Technology, Art, Technology Scott Heiferman's Notes Everything you can imagine is real Scott Rafer They are becoming my news filter. They helped me find the most relevant news, articles, quotes, thoughts, ideas et al on the Web. I checked them out religiously to satisfy my reading needs.What they recommend is something that cannot be done by algorithm. The main reason they are interesting because they point to different things, different perspective and ideas that a machine will have a hard time learning. This speaks to the difference between people powered and machine powered recommendation systems. I think the future of media will be driven by the former, rather than the...

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Idea generation #59: Blog clipart as advertisements

Blog clipart as advertising: Dave Winer has an absolutely cool idea: make it easy for bloggers to make use of your company's logo, product image et al. This is another great example of making your advertisements useful for your users.There are several things you can try as a startup to build on this idea:Aggregate: aggregate all the logos, products images et al of companies and tag them with useful metadata. Link your service to content recommendation service like Zemanta so that they can help to channel your images to bloggers who want to use them. Create a affilitate link whenever possible to each of the images. That will be the revenue model.Analytics...

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Startup Idea #81(Part III): Enabling game developers to connect to fans anywhere

Taylor left a great comment about my post on connecting game developers with their fans.Where are the traditional game publishers failing?What is wrong / inefficient / unrealized value with the existing distributors?How should game developers connect with their fans and customers? Isn't the game itself the best way? (e.g. should the connection be through a third-party site similar to Epinions or Get Satisfaction, or a more community-oriented site like the above music examples, or should it be directly through the game, the game developer's website, etc.?)My biggest question, though, is what is different between the way people use games and music?Originally posted as a comment by Taylor Davidson on wild illusions using Disqus.They are great questions which I wanted to comments on.The first...

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Startup Idea #81(Part II): Enabling game developers to connect to fans anywhere

The revolution of the music continues as I am constantly amazed by innovative music services created by small startups. It is a powerful learning journey for me as I see how these startups are rewritting the value chain of music, from distribution to market research. Here are a few recent ones I noticed:SoundCloud: Enabling a new form of direct distribution, all wrapped up in an easy-to-use package. Helping to move data around, i.e. the distribution, is going to be more and more important.Bandmetrics: The Google analytics of music. It crawls the web for semantic data indicating name recognition, music trends and fan interests. This allows artists...

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Idea generation #58: Ideas in m-health, publishing and monetising photographs

Here are some random ideas from what I have read on a tired Monday evening: Scientists Hack Cellphone to Analyze Blood, Detect Disease, Help Developing Nations: The democratization of health tools. How long will before we see the rise of amateurs in the medical field? I am not surprised if somebody creates a community for people to compare, discuss, debate, track et al about the results of their blood analysis. Personalised travel books blend search and curation: This post spawned a related idea in self publishing: What if we combine the loose network structure like Glam to create content, with a publishing and printing layer. Bloggers...

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Startup Idea #112: Organising the world's online educational materials

The amount of online educational materials coming on to the Web is going to be, if not already, staggering. This site alone tracks the number of services offering free educational materials in medicine. With iTuneU, the amount of materials is going to get many, many times larger.With so much content, the user runs into the classic attention problem: which one offers the best lectures in a topic that he/she should listen to? Many of the current educational offerings don't offer reviews, ratings et al of any sort. Without a way to filter the content, the user faces a uphill task of separating the good from the bad.This, however creates an opening for anybody to take shot at solving this problem. We need services to help pull together discreet pieces of content into coherent streams of attention...

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Markets as new organisation design: case studies

Markets, networks, communities. The 3 new organisation designs that Umair Haque has arguedAmong the three, I have been most fascinated by markets. As a result, I have been studying examples of how such an organisational design can be applied in industries that needs transparency and a more efficient way to manage scare resources.Markets are difficult to built because you are trying to solve a simultaneous equation of bringing together both demand and supply. However, once they are created, they unleash powerful incentives that spurred more innovations. Just take a look at the current markets we know: Apple App Store, Ebay, Google Adsense, Carbon trading et al. Not only have they created more value in themselves, they have enabled entire sub industries to be build on top of them. Just think...

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