Southeast Asia: Untapped potential

I am always of the view that Southeast Asia is an unpolished diamond in terms of market opportunities for startups. Scott Rafer articulated the same view beautifully and I encourage readers to read his entire post if you are interested in this area.
As always, I’m going to look for opportunities where there’s a good-sized market that’s not super fashionable and therefore not overcrowded. Southeast Asia fits that profile a lot better for me than South Asia or Greater China.

To add to his commendatory, I would like to share my views on what are some key opportunities in this region. Things that might be dull but has the potentially to create lots of value and in the process make lots of $ : )
Mobile services
Mobile is definitely an important area to focus on. Many of the users here are likely to use mobile than the pc and it is logical to cater to this market. I mention FrenClub before but it is worth repeating. They are a mobile social networking service that is based on simple SMS technology. They have only 2 million users but are aleady grossing US$2.3 million in revenue. Imagine if you can create a more popular service that brings in, say 10 million users. How much would you be earning?

As additional facts, consider Philippines in its use of mobile services:
In the Philippines it is for example not unusual to receive your whole paycheck paid to your mobile phone account. And you can then make various payments and money transfers via SMS. The various TV show interactivity that we see with American Idol for example and the politicians using SMS in their voter drives - these have been staples of the Philippine market for this whole decade. The Philippines is definitely the most advanced country among the developing world by far, when it comes to mobile telecoms.

So mobile applications and services definitely have potential in Southeast Asia.
Digital advertising
When I say digital advertising, I am referring to online or mobile advertising. By references, digital advertising only constitute a small percentage (less than 5-10%)of the overall advertising spent in many Southeast Asian countries. This a huge opportunity. Ad networks, Ad exchanges, Brand monitoring, Services that help companies listen. All these are wide open areas for startups to take a crack at it.
Online classified
Related to advertising is online classified. In the US, craglist is the dominat player but we have no such companies in SouthEast Asia. This is good news for startups as it implies the availability of markets opportunities. To give you a sense of the market size, let's look at JobsStreet, which is the key player in the Job classified markets for Malaysia and Singapore and maybe part of Philippines. Within one vertical and a couple of countries, they are already a 100M ringgit company. What about other verticals such as car, property, dating, education/tution in other countries? How much are these untapped market worth?

SME market
Many SMES are relatively unsophisticated in their usage of technology. In Singapore alone, only about 20% of SMEs have a basic website. That implies untapped markets in terms of entreprise software. In terms of areas, basic company needs like payroll, accounting, inventory, CRM etc are all good areas to pick on. Alternatively, you can also analyse indiviudal sectors and see what kind of software can deliver value to the SMEs within that sector.

There are many more opportunities than the ones I listed here. I shall go deeper into these in future posts. In the meantime, what other big areas do you see?

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The economics of viral loops

Viral loops are now a big part of product design. In looking at the various ways loops are modeled in various services, I realise there is a big point of failure: the email invite.






Email invites have effectively turned everyone into a spammer. In this age of increasing attention deficit, this current form of email invites cannot be sustained. The attention costs are too high such that people will ignore them all together.

To create better viral loops, we need to rethink about value adding. How can we create loops that benefits the recipients, instead of imposing more costs on them? If we rethink invites as a form of advertisement, can we apply the economics of branding here?

One way is to think of invites (advertisements) as content. Is that possible?

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Mobile Pearls II

Here are 10 more mobile pearls that shows innovative mobile services:

User generated 'explanatory' booksThe book series allows users to create their own “self explanation.” The results, the user’s own explanatory “book” can be forwarded as a text to friends and family.
(Mobile novels or books will continue to gain more market and we will see more innovations such as the above in this space.)

Virtual hairstyle makeoverWith this free service users simply choose a hairstyle from the modeled looks, take their own portrait photo with their mobile phone camera, and enter it into the system to receive a version of the photo modified with the new look.
(Imagine this to be a engagement model where users can opt in to receive periodic updates on the latest hairstyles, with their faces as the model. If users like the look, they can book an appointment with any of the participating saloons. Another example of ads as content)

Adva MobileAdva Mobile provides a software service for music artists to create closer relations with their fans on their mobile phones.
(This is what I was talking about on post on creating mobile music startups. Well, one is now taken. There are still four others to consider...)

NikePhotoiD
NIKE PHOTOiD allows users to customize their own set of sneakers according to their physical surroundings. You simply take a picture of something on your camera phone and then send this pic off to a shortcode via MMS. The NIKEiD website then picks out the two strongest colours from your image and uses them to colour your custom sneakers. Within a minute, you are sent a link with your design superimposed over the original source of pantone inspiration.
(I see this powerful example of offline-online as something that will become more mainstream as more products allows personalization. It fully leverages the unique ability of mobile to be available at the point of creative impulse)

Mobile medical labIt is a new way of doing images of cells and bacteria
(This is something I will be watching closely. Mobile has the potential to disrupt health monitoring devices, the way it is disrupting camera phones and music players. Paired it with an app store model and we will see a truly powerful new chain in personal healthcare.)

Megapixel MicroscopyHaving trouble reading the ingredient list on a small packet, for example? Simply snap it with your INNOV8 (or similar) and then zoom in a couple of notches to see the microscopic text at huge size
(The potential uses for such zooming capabilities will be tremendous.)

Cellphone collegesCyber University, the nation's only university to offer all classes only on the Internet, began offering a class on mobile phones Wednesday on the mysteries of the pyramids.
(Reinventing education on mobile is very cool.)

Nomadic Schools in AfricaStudents can access lessons, revision, careers guidance, cultural and medical information on their mobile phone. It is a means of connecting students and teachers.

SnapNow in Brasil
Educate visitors about Brazil’s tourist product in seconds, simply by taking a photo of Brazil(A new form of search and interaction on mobile. Great example on how image recognition will be a step up from barcodes. See another example here by the same company)

Sponsored ringback service
TonlaKazan subscribers can choose a branded message that people hear - instead of a standard ringtone - when they call that subscriber. The subscribers would then earn free airtime depending on how many people called and how long they listened to the advertisements.
(If the ads are co-created like Blyk, this can be a valuable form of 'advertisements'.)

Related articles by Zemanta

• Mobile pearls: examples of innovative mobile services (ac-idealog.blogspot.com)
• More Engagement by Mobile from Japan - select your hairstyle on your phone (sociallyminded.co.uk)
• Mobilhood - Mobile Content of the People, by the People, for the People (blonde2dot0.com)

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Advertisements as content

One of the interesting trends of advertising is its evolution into content. This is part of the bigger shift in advertising where they must evolve into something that is useful and desirable to users.

The biggest example of desirable advertisement in my mind is MTV:

Back in the 1970s the music recording industry was trying to capitalise on the emergence of pop music TV shows. Global artists like Queen, David Bowie, Abba and the Rolling Stones in the 1970s were finding that they could send "film clips" of their latest hits to be played on the shows, even when the artists themselves did not have time to fly all around the world promoting every new release of singles and albums. These precursors to the modern music video were very clearly developed as the promotional tools for new music. They were advertisements.

Beyond MTV, there are now many interesting experiments in turning advertisements into useful content. Here are some links that show these examples:

Contents and its Discontents
one day cosmetics companies will perhaps start beefing up their own Web sites — with makeup videos and click-to-buy options — just as kraftfoods.com has done with its hugely trafficked recipe site and walmart.com has done with its popular blogs by mothers.

Shows how advertisers are beginning to generate their own content, rather than rely on traditional channels like magazines. This opens an interesting opportunity: is there a market for a service to match independent content providers and advertisers directly?


IBM Turns Old NYT Editorial and PR Into Ads
The campaign is different in that the ads curate archived editorial on the environment from the Times and displays it right in the unit itself. The reader doesn't need to leave the page he/she is on to peruse the articles. Branding is light and the focus is on content. Needless to say, since all of the articles are by star columnist Thomas Friedman, the writing is strong.


NBC to create product focus shows
The collaboration between NBC and Omnicom offers "a unique way of giving brands a seat at the table with writers and producers in developing episodic programming that ties directly to brand needs,"

I don't know why but somehow I don't think this is going to work...


Bonus link: Advertisements from the past as desirable content

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Mobile pearls: examples of innovative mobile services

I find that real examples are the best way to communicate opportunities and concepts. Nothing beats the fact that you can see and understand. Hence, I will be doing a weekly or biweekly post called mobile pearls that links to real products/services that illustrates the 7 unique benefits of mobile and the opportunities they represent.

(Note: This mobile pearl concept is from Mr Tomi's excellent ebook (which I have given up buying due to the problems in 'PainPal').

Once I have collected 100 pearls, I will complied them into a free ebook for easy reference. If you have examples of mobile pearls, grateful if you can point to them in the comments section.


Event based mobile commerce for fashion shows:
all the fashion items featured in the shows were available for purchase via your mobile phone as soon as they were debuted on the runway. So, if you take a fancy to the red and white CECIL McBee dress that the third model was wearing, you can buy it instantly on your phone and have it delivered the next day, therefore being on the absolute cutting edge of Tokyo Fashion.


Mobagetown: Mobile games, SNS and avatars
MobageTown previously cooperated with Nike: buy a real world Nike item from one of their mobile auction sites or shops and you would get free Nike merchandise for your avatar. For the people that want to match their avatar to their RL appearance, this must be a major ‘yes, I’ll buy it’ reason.

Integrating real world merchandise with virtual items will be a very powerful revenue model. I expect we will see many such models in the near future.


Purohu: A mobile profile service using game mechanisms
The Strategic Purohu service is all about completing personal profiles. By simply answering the questions given by the service, user completes his/her profile. There are nearly a hundred questions including "What's your dream car?" or "Your favorite song at Karaoke" as well as pretty basic questions. While not all of these questions are mandatory, the more questions a user answers, the more complete the user's profile becomes. So it's like Linked In for teens on mobile.


3VOOR12 is piloting a new heat-mapping system at Lowlands music festival
Using familiar web terminology—Hot or Not—the festival's visitors will be able to let others know which of twelve venues is hosting the hottest show at any particular moment. The voting system will run on a mobile app that users can download to their internet-enabled phones.

Now, imagine if we can further engage with the user by letting them become a fan club of the hottest show.....


Pumbby: A cross operator approach to ad supported mobile sms services:
Pumbby pays cash to users regardless of the mobile network they subscribe to. When users sign up for Pumbby online, they simply indicate which network they use and how many ads they are willing to receive each day.


Dance Fabulous
Dance Fabulous is a sort of rhythm action title, in which you create and customise an avatar then build a range of dance moves into your own routine. Apparently, there are plans to integrate with Nokia's music store so you can get the character to dance to real tracks. You'll also be able to upload your dance routines to a community site.

The child of Guitar hero and Cyworld. A very lethal combination.


Chokkan Band
The sensor on the phone detects movement, making it possible for anyone to use the phone as a guitar, violin or any other instrument you can think of.

Totally awesome application of one of mobile's unique ability of being available at the point of creative pulse. You can play Guitor Hero on your console but when you are out of home and wants to party with friends, mobile is your only way to do it.



TV Play Along - The next generation of viewer participation
Instead of the limited interaction of SMS or call-in formats, PlayToTV offers continuous social and massive multiplayer game play for the entire home audience. The majority of viewers that turn into participants today already use their mobile phone as their primary mean of interaction, and more and more people watch TV near or on their computer.

Truly understanding how mobile is can unlock complementary gains to traditional media.


Axe's Wake Up Service
Set up personalised wake up calls to mobile via pc. In the process of this, a relevant model appears on screen and, simultaneously, the mobile phone rings and the user can her 'talking to him' and confirming the call.


The BMW campaign
They ran a campaign of under 120,000 MMS picture messages. And that miniscule mobile phone campaign resulted in 45 million - million - dollars in additional business. Business that wes directly attributable - and accurately attributed - to the 120,000 mobile phone messages.

We are just beginning to see how engagement marketing happens on the mobile and the BMW is a great example.

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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 relevant information can be served to the users.

Using this logic, I thought of some startup ideas that I have scribed below for reference. Please feel free to add to them or even do a startup on them:

Build a map-based platform for events advertising. Imagine a map based interface with a sms based input system. Allow event organiser to upload the floorplan into the platform wher users can download them for navigation purposes. Booth participants can then sms their booth numbers and messages such as special 15 min discounts, special events et al to the platform where they will appear as icons on the floorplan (See example : Virgin Festival Buddy). To the event participants, this application offers a map based navigation as well as useful information for special events or promotions.

Ringtone broadcast service for events: Create a service where musicians or sports teams can create powerful engagement through ringtones during concerts or sports matches. Prior or during the events, give participants the options to download the ringtone. The platform can then call these phones simultaneous during specific trigger points. For example, when a band plays the song that was offered as the ringtone, all phones that downloaded the ringtone would ring, creating a powerful crowd effect. If the user picks up the call, they can be offered discounts to merchandise or joining the fan club. All these should be done is a user friendly interface where any event organiser can use. (See Reebok example)

Event based games: Location based games are actually fun (Google for botfighters) but the fact that they need users to be close geographically kills the network effect. However, such a game can be offered during events that advertisers can sponsor. The close proximity of the event participants makes location based games a powerful engagement tool for brands (See World's Worst War example)

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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 and Brand Monitoring: You can also provide analytics service for this new form of 'product placement'. Beyond providing basic stuff like viewership, click rates et al, what is more interesting is to be able to let companies know whether the sentiment of the blog that uses the company's images is positive and/or negative.

Using Image as Context: Create a metalayer for more information and even discounts that can be tagged onto the image. For example, browsing over the image might bring up other blog posts that use this image or news articles that related to this company. The important thing is to use the image as a context to filter the rest of the information.

What other things can you think to build on Dave Winer's idea?

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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 able to click directly to my blog. The tumblr integration also needs some work.

I think these services will be important but we need to create test cases that take them beyond the domain of 'geeks'. We need to imagine how this will impact other industries before we can harzard a guess of the degree of importance of allowing data to flow.

A simple case is to integrate your data with ecommerce services. For example, I can route my travel pictures in Facebook to a travel site, which then intelligently (through tags or image recognition) know what places I have been and recommend other travel locations. Another example, I can route my blog content to Amazon, which then recommends the relevant books for me.

Another application is in marketing. Tubemogul help video makers post their content to various video sharing sites. Switch board services take this idea further by letting you post your content from any location to other locations. If you are a photographer, owner of blog shops, video maker, musician, designer, tutor, financial advisor et al, this means you can distribute your products, services or content widely through the switchboard services, all without having to upload to another site (like what tubemogul is doing).

I am excited by switchbaord services because they are going to shape how we distribute things online. This is an area that that can bring big financial opportunities to whoever can get it right.

Related:
Startup Idea #90: Feeds based advertising
Startup idea #46: News feed opportunities
Startup idea #87: Feeds as the next search

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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 for social shopping?

What else can we do to help independent designers?

Post your thoughts below.

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Startup Idea #92: Ad insertion for self publishing

Ever since I learn about Topspinmedia, I have been researching for such equivalent in other media sectors such as games, video and books. One company that caught my eye is Lulu, the platform for self publishers. Beyond providing a publishing tool, Lulu understands that getting attention, not distribution, is what self publishers need to monetise their work in this age of abundance. Let's look at some of the tools they have put in place.

First of all, they understand the importance of search. Tools like online marketing and Google book search enables authors to easily leverage search to gather more attention for their work.

Lulu also enables viral distribution via a comprehensive set of tools such as widgets, banners and linking to social networks and social news sites. Again, these help the authors to easily spread their work across the web and increases the probability of their work becoming a snowball.

Finally, they also provide tools for authors to create press releases, websites et al that assists in the traditional marketing side of the equation.

Overall, if I am an author, all these tools provide a real service to help me gather attention to my work. However, in this age of abundance, the most effective way to gather attention might be giving something away for free is a an effective way to gather attention first. To do this however, you need an easy way to get advertisement. This is where advertisement insertion technologies are needed.

The difficult thing in this business is to gather the statistics and aggregate them in a way that is meaning to advertisers. For the near term, I see a federated media approach might work best, where a startup can gather the best independent authors to create high quality inventory for advertisements. In the middle term, an auction system akin to Adsense might evolved.

Whatever the model, I think advertisments are necessary to provide an alternate way to help self publishers monetise their work. While Lulu is great as it is, I think ads are needed to make this an evenmore healthy ecosystem.

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Startup Idea #91: Open source mechanisms for game monetisation

As I learned about different monetisation methods offered by companies to independent game developers, I am both thrilled and worried. I am thrilled at the way game industry is creating different value chains for the smaller guys. Things like Nonoba's payment API or Kongregate's advertising programme are innovative business models that bypasses traditional value chains.

However, I am also worried that these platforms now control all the information and power. The power imbalance will surely become an issue. What if these services decide not to continue their operations? What if they demand higher commissions?

I think what we need is something akin to OpenX for the game industry where developers can control their monetisation mechanisms. A system where developers can host any of the monetisation mechanisms, can change the code anyway they want and to own any consumer data that is captured.

I think such open approach is critical to truly democratise the gaming industry. It is something exciting to me and I hope someone will work on this in the near future.

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Startup Idea #90: Feeds based advertising

Fred Wilson had a great post last week on opening up our feeds to advertisements. This post follows up on what he was saying earlier about the importance of feeds, of which I had posted

My personal view is that the advertising model for feeds will not be in the form of what we are used to in Google Adsense. Your feeds are too personal for advertisers to insert anything and not pissed you off. I think the advertising model should be the other way around. Rather than advertisements, it should be recommendations. There are important but subtle differences between the two.

I think the recommendation model can work in either or a combination of the two models highlighted below.

In the first model, the service detects your consumption of a product/service through your feeds and offers to you, the option to recommend this product/service to your social network. If this service can detect your sentiment about this product/service and only pops up when the quality is good, then its usefulness immediately shoots up. If it can know the interests of your social networks and recommends only to those who might be interested in the product/service you just consumed, then it is a home run.

The second possible model starts off when one of your friends in your social network asks, via feeds, for recommendations. The service detects what relevant products/services you have consumed and asked if you want to recommend them to this friend. If so, the recommendation appears in your friends' feeds.

Both models work on the principle of recommendations, rather than advertisements. As I said, there are important differences as the former rewards your attention while the latter simply robs you of it.

If you know of other advertisement models, do share them in the comments section. my thoughts on.

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Startup Idea #84: Small idea-Polyvore for brands you hate

I blogged about the genious of Polyvore a couple of days ago about how it is represents the emerging forms of branding 2.0. It is however, one experiment in what will be a new wave of opportunities in remaking branding. How this will play out in other medium (i.e. beyond pictures), other markets (beyond fashion) and other forms (beyond collage) will become the foundations for new powerhouses in branding.

One angle I have is to take the reverse of Polyvore. Rather than giving users the power to put together what they love, how about giving them the ability to show what they hate?

They are tons of bad services and products in the market. Give people the ability to voice their bad experiences through a simple application like Polyvore, where they can make fun of the brands. A sort of anti-polyvore.

Through a feature like recommendations, we can then allow the community to suggest better services or products to replace that was complaint about. A lead generation business can then be created based on these recommendations.

Finally, we will allow these bad services or products the opportunity to 'redeem' themselves by communicating, through public video or text, that they have improved their services.

What do you think? Will this work?

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Brand 2.0 in action!

Polyvore absolutely rocks! I talked about branding 2.0 in my previous posts (post1, post2) but to see in action is truly mind-blowing.

Polyvore enables users to mash and create their collage using brands' sponsored items. This is plasticity at its best i.e. enabling people to mix and mash. Beauty of this model is that brands are not doing any 'talking'. Instead, they are 'listening' by enabling users to do what they like. If companies are smart, they will be looking at what users are mashing their brands with.

This is really a re-invention of branding as we know it. By all means, Polyvore is not there yet but it is what it can be that is truly exciting. One to watch!

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Idea generation #42: Information gap in healthcare, mapvertising opportunity, connecting fans through tangible interface

Information gap in healthcare: This is great series of NYtimes articles examining the lack of evidence-based choice of treatment. One particular article on hip replacement pointed to the lack of a national database as the cause of rising problem of faulty replacements. The database acts as a early detection system for unproven products and missing such a system severely handicaps the abilities of doctors to know what works and what not.

A 2.0 solution is to create a community where users can input their conditions after certain medical treatment. The community can be seeded with opinions already existing in message boards and other communities. With such a community in place, the information it produces can be used by healthcare practitioners in general.

Mapvertising opportunity: I wonder if it is possible to create a plug-in where google map users can specific their map 'ad inventory'. An ad network can then pick up these inventory for processing and ad targeting. An adsense for maps. Worth a thought.

Tangible interface: This is cool idea! Embedding online media through a card interface is brillant. Imagine if we layer an authoring layer on top of this where fans can create, remix, mash and combine such cards for their favourite bands, artists, designers, celebrities, anime, game characters et al, we are enabling a new way for fans to connect to each other. If all these can be massively distributed through widgets at social networks, we might be able to give companies like Moo Cards a run for their money.

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Startup Idea #12 (Part II): Branding 2.0

A very nice post breaking down branding 2.0 into 5 different components:

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Listening. Communispace now has hundreds of private communities that its client companies are using to learn about their customers (.....). The other class of listening companies are the brand monitoring companies, and the track record here is great. Research giant Nielsen bought BuzzMetrics (...)

Talking. Talking with the Groundswell is tricky, but there are plenty of agencies ready to help you with it. After building dozens of campaigns and sites, Blast Radius was bought by mega-agency Wunderman. Brains on Fire ignited the spectacular success of Fiskateers (...)

Energizing. Ratings and reviews are the easiest way to energize customers to sell others, and the companies that provide them are taking off. On behalf of its clients, Bazaarvoice's clients have generated over 10 billion customer reviews has served over 10 billion reviews to consumers. PowerReviews works with over 200 retailers (...)

Supporting. Support forums work -- they please customers and they reduce costs.(...) The community space is crowded, but other companies with growing client lists include Jive Software, Awareness, and Mzinga/Prospero.

Embracing. Startups that enable clients to source ideas from their customers have a bright future, because customer-generated innovation is hot right now. Salesforce.com bought Crispy News and turned it into Salesforce Ideas, which powers idea sites for Dell and Starbucks (...)

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So, there will basically 2 ways for startups to get into the branding 2.0 game. First is to be a tool provider like these guys above. The list, however is getting crowded. The opportunity is in the aggregation area. Sort of like a Reuters equivalent to help marketing people track the conversations in all these different places in a single dashboard, using graphs and charts to highlight trends.

Another opportunity I can see in the tool space is in the virtual worlds. Many of the current startups in the virtual space are helping businesses build virtual representations of their real products. In other words, same old way of pushing marketing messages. What we need are tools to help companies 'listen' in the virtual space. I have stated the reasons why this can yield more benefits here.

The second area for startup to play is to use these tools and change the structure of the industry, rather than helping somebody else to do it. Build a new value, based on listening and enabling collaboration. Threadless has done it for t-shirts. Lego factory has done it for lego. What other industries need to listen more and is begging for startups to create new value chains?

See the first post here.

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Startup Idea #65: Transreality product placement

Product placement is becoming a dominant theme for in-game advertising. Spending on in-game advertising and product placement, $56 million in 2005, will reach $730 million by 2010, predicts Yankee Group, a Boston research firm. As virtual and physical worlds begin to converge, I believe product placement will take on new meanings and offer plenty of opportunities for clever and forward looking startups.

reBang has casually suggested Transreality product placement as a label for such dual reality type of product placement. However, what exactly is transrealit product placement? They can be three types which are as follows:

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Product placement: placing physical products into virtual environments. The most common type of produce placements

Future product placement: creating physical versions of virtual products. The focus here is only selling the physical products that have sufficient interests when they are in virtual forms.

Reverse product placement: using physical products to sell virtual content/services.

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So, with these kinds of ideas in mind, I think the following applications, products and services that help realise these markets is going to be achieve some success.

Market exchanges for product placement: Product placement is currently a time consuming and highly inefficient process. Companies like NextMedium have created marketplaces like Google's Adsense to automate and streamline the value chain. I think such a approach can be applied to future & reverse product placement as well. Take the latter for example. The virtual content owners in this scenario act as 'advertisers' while retailers provide the 'advertising inventory' aka shelf space. It is not difficult to construct an exchange where retailers input their available shelf space and its relevant price for virtual content to bid. The exchange also connects the virtual content owners to 3D manufacturers for the physical production of the virtual content.

Metrics agencies: To be the Nielson equivalent. For future product placement, this means collecting statistics on the popularity of the virtual items including their usage, the most popular model, the users' demographics et al. For reverse product placement, this means numbers of the retailers' 'eyeballs' equivalent such as units sold or given away, the traffic of the retail, demographic information on the retailers' customers et al.

Item aggregation site: rebang has suggested a 3D shopping site to sell virtual items created across different virtual worlds. Users can enter a virtual world to browse virtual items they have seen in the physical worlds.

Community site: An etsy -like community where users can hand-made the items that the virtual content owners want to promote. A startup can groom such a community or develop white label solution for virtual content owners to do so.

In summary, I think this is an interesting area and I am certain I have not even touch on ideas that will surely surface in the future.

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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 both the branding recall due to the device and the invaluable information about users, including where and what types of services/products they are seeking at what time. All these will enable banks to better tailor their products/services to match users' needs. Of course, banks can also regularly 'spam' their users but that is evil unless done in a way that provides really useful services.

As costs of components continue to slide to zero, it is plausible to take the idea of offering consumers free web applications to physical devices.

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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 to be open and focus on value adding widgets, it will avoid the adverse selection problem like what Facebook is facing now.

Somebody pls do this. I can't stand ads!

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Startup idea #44 (Part II)

Part one of the idea is here

As ad serving technology becomes more open (see post1, post 2 by BuzzMachine), it is now possible for anyone to easily pull together a network of blogs and create their own ad network. In order words, anyone can be a Federated Media.

What is needed to get us from now to there is have an open source platform (like PeopleAggregator but for ad network, rather than social network), where anyone can take the source code, modify them, and even run if off their own servers. Such a platform will need to incorporate the open ad calls of either Google or OpenX, create open standard metrics as well as the bidding infrastructure and make all these into a user-friendly interface. The end result will be a platform where anyone just curate the network of blogs, select this open source platform on top of the blog network, and viola, their very own federated media.

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