Organisation innovation, and its opportunities, are vastly understated

We are shifting from the industrial to the hyper connected economies. The latter is marked by high speed changes that are affecting how we live, communicate, consumer, produce, distribute etc. Unfortunately, most of our current institutions including corporations, government et al are ill-configured to handle the changes that hyper connectivity has brought. The end result is an implosion. Witness how:

- Our family system still caters for one-size-fits-all nuclear family when it is commonplace to see long distance relationships, divorces, single parents, elders living by themselves et al

- Our education system still takes a factory-style approach to learning when creativity , innovations, thought independence, collaborations are going to be key survival skills for the 21st century

- Our companies are getting into more and more serious decay when they choose not to engage with their customers on what they really want

- Our government, with its command and control system, is facing difficulties handling the loosely networked cell-organization of terrorists.

Going forward, the command and control systems need to give way to new forms of collaborations, and here lies the opportunity. Imagining news ways to coordinate and organise resources in our new economy can potentially yield rich returns. It is not that this has not been done before but we underestimated and under celebrated their contributions.

Take for example, the invention of the limited corporation. It was world changing (can you imagine our world economy without it?) but hardly anyone remembers the inventor. Similarly, the first cooperative, the first mutual fund, the first insurance, the first auto club etc were all organisation innovations that has a remarkable impact on our lives but we don't remember who their investors are.

So, there is a great opportunity for clever and bold enterepreneurs to rethink new forms of coordination that create better value than what our current insitututions are providing. Need examples? Here are several models that I think are radical

- Australia's Department of Human Services pioneered a programme where a group of coordinators helps the government to buy and allocated a mix of services for familites with kids with disabilities. This reinvents the notion that family services have to be one-size-fit-all.

- Guild in MMORPGS are a powerful examples of how people can self organised to solve chaleenging tasks. They have big implications on how work teams and even learning will be managed in the future. Imagine classes organised in such a manner.

- Threadless is a classic example of a community powered way of organising how goods can be produced and manufactured.

- Kidney exchange is a using a market approach to solve the issue of allocating scare resources. ReceviablesExchange is using this approach to create liquidity for short term assets.

There are many more examples if you look hard enough. If you want a rich area for innovation, rethinking new organisations and new ways of coordination is a good mine.

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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 about new ways to organise resouces, from your talent to your supplier. However, how to you create a 'site builder' that contains these organised resources?

Scaling organisation designs is one way that I think can fasten the fusion of 21st century economics into our crippled economy. Just like how APIs fasten technology fusion from company to company, we need to think of a scaleable way to uplift the DNA of entire industries. Anyone who can provide that might just have the ticket to the pot of gold at tne end of the rainbow.

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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 for users. This is particularly important for learning, as there is usually a sequential way to pick up knowledge.

The most obvious opportunity is to learn from the media side, and apply successful models such as Last.fm for online learning content. Aggregate content and filter them using your community. Let users see their learning 'neighbors' , their friends and create a community. Let users able to see the content their community is consuming in different ways. Let users discover new and relevant content through recommendations.

However, the more interesting opportunity may be to redefine how educational services are delivered. With the content and the ways to organise it in place, we can think of coordination tools that help users roll up their own leaning classes. Currently, the schools have the advantage of coordination with its administration and facilities. We can easily create scheduling and other coordination tools student need to organise their learning. There might even a VRM angle where lecturers will then bid to work with students.

Online learning is now on the inflection point. What other opportunities do you see?

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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 has the potential to change how people are valued in terms of job applications, fund raising, business networking, dating et al. It will change how marketing can be done (Imagine a person with high capital visits your online store, will you change your offerings to beter catch his attention in the hope that he will let others know?)

All these however, requires a new way to measure and capture social capital. This ties in nicely with a great post entitled: 'future of measurement' that talks about the need to capture things that are important and not well accounted for. I wanted to share the 4 key predictions that I think has absolutely nailed what will be important in the upcoming age of capturing non-financial capital i.e social, human et al:

• We will substantially advance our understanding of individuals and the meaningful connections they have.

• We will identify methods to tap what people are *really* thinking, feeling, and paying attention to, meanwhile gaining insight on what a measurement is truly capturing.

• We will determine how to measure the value of social interactions and attach financial value, whether we’re monetizing attention or a new medium.

• We will build better tools to manage-- analyze and visualize-- massive volumes of data, primarily tapping the evolving social graph.

If you are a startup and wants a rich area to build products/services on, this is one of the things you should think about. If you want examples of how a measurement startup can look like, learn from Amee.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Startup Idea #110: Services to build up social capital
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• What's Your Twitter Influence? Social Network Analysis of Your Twitter Network

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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 and easily access social capital at partners, suppliers, complementors, competitors, and of course customers to win.

Hence, in this hyper connected new economy, making solid connections is going to be a strong competitive advantage. So, there is a need for better tools or software to help people, especially individual entrepreneurs or creatives, to create more social capital. This is where I think Zemanta can be very useful. For example, they know whose articles I have posted here. How then do they make it easy for to connect to these people. How can they alert the writer of the articles that their articles have been used? This simple form of notification is a start to building up relationships, and why I find service such as Disqus very useful.

I am beginning to see such servics emergencing. Mr Tweet is one cool example started by a friend. I think there are opportunities for many other such services:

• Who is going to make it easier for me to connect to the RIGHT people? The current recommendation systems of Facebook, LinkedIn et al tells me to add people whom I have ALREADY known. I need systems to tell me who I SHOULD know. That does not mean I should immediately add that person to my contacts. It means I should start to check out his blog, his twitter, his tumblr, the event he is going to et al. Who is going to make it easier for me to do that?
  

• Who is going to make it easier to enhance existing relationships? Once I am aware of a useful contact, how do I enhance my relationships with them. A simple scenario: why can't I have a dashboard that tracks all the person's writing and allows me to respond to that directly. Disqus currently aggregates what I have commented and what others have comments on my blog. I need something to tell what conversations I SHOULD have participated in to increase my social capital. I need a combination of a feeds reader + comment system.
  

• Who is going to make it easier for me to make a physical connection? I think dopplr is a right direction but it has limited users. Is there something that taps the status updates from services like Facebook and alerts me when I have the opportunity to physically meet someone I should know?
  

I think these are just the beginnings of what can be done. Applying them to verticals such as independent musicians, book authors et al is going to be another rich area for providing real value. Anybody doing this already?

Related:
Startup Idea #93: Contextual recommendation for self publishers

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• Will "social capital" be the next big industry to emerge?
• Social capital and building a quality social graph

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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 are not fully integrated into the media. It does not match the velocity that the video medium is capable of. Is it then possible to build a third party comment system for videos, similar to what companies such Disqus have done for blogs? An open system where any video can be embedded into and start enjoying the type of commenting system Nico Nico Douga has.

I wonder if the commenting system will be more useful if we throw in some Zemanta-like recommendation service that recommends the right kind of product image (that has an affiliate fees attached) for embedding into the videos. For example, a fashion video site will have fashionn product images, a car video site will have car parts, a anime video site will have figurines, CDs et al.

What I have outline above is a very rough attempt in exploring business models around the concept of conversations and new forms of referrals. This is such an exciting area to be innovating it and I look forward to any examples, feedback et al you might have.

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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 there is a demand for a light weight app that adds a layer around your pictures. The user can then controls how his/her picture can be integrated with other applications, using the layer as the door.

Anyway, I am intrigued by the tumblr experiment and look forward to seeing how it will develop in the months ahead.

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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 sense that companies will need new tools to help them engage with their customers. Hence, there is an opportunity for a platform play that decentralised companies' commission or referral fees and pass them to customers so that they can help market the services they love.

In the hotel industry, for example, hotels tend to pay out anywhere from 10-25% commissions on retail rates to 3rd parties and travel agents. A web based application can take these commissions and reward guests who have referred customers to them. This not only results in lower distribution costs, it also help companies to retain the customer relationship and also gain a lot more guests they want to attract, referred by trusted sources who’ve experienced the product and service.

How would this platform look like? I have a few possible scenarios:

The first scenario is for the more conservative companies. The platform can offer an online review form similar to reviewscale. Customers can fill the review form while the platform does the heavy lifting for embeddeding the referral fees mechanism into the reviews and distributing it to different sites.

A more decentralised approach is to have a plug-in extension where users can embedded the referral links within any reviews they have written anywhere, from review sites to their individual blogs and/or social networks. Skimlink has a nice example of how it could look like:

















If such a referral platform is in place, we can then see the blossoming of viral distribution. Just like how RSS liberates content from their destinations, we should also liberate referral fees and allow them to flow to consumers who are passionate about the products/services they love and will want to promote.

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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 that was suggested in a threaded format. Of course, the blogger will have the ability to delete any topic he/she doesn't want to write about.

The platform will be more useful is all the different topics that were suggested across different blogs can be aggregated, Disqus style. This can then create intention markets where bloggers can see what are the topics readers want to read about and how much they are willing to pay for it. It is also a good way to see trends in readers' interests.

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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 services round up the numbers. (from the communities dominated brands blog).

As the music market moves to mobile, musicians will need an easy to use publishing platform where they can connect with fans. This platform can and should be built on top of Twitter APIs, to both take advantage of network effects as well as to focus on the extra stuff that Twitter does not provide but is needed for a music publishing platform. For example, a mobile commerce engine is clearly needed as part of the platform to allow the selling of music.The Twitter platform allows for easy community building and is ideal for building a musician's fan base.

This platform will allow musicians to post updates on their daily activities as well as to post their music in the form of ringtone, mp3, live recording, sample music et al. These different forms of tweets should be marked by different icons as well as different dynamic action buttons. When user scroll down the tweets, different actions will appear on the mobile button. For example, when user scoll to the mp3 tweet, the button changes to 'play', 'purchase' et al.

This is my tentative product idea. I am sure more can be done. If you have any feedback, I will love to hear them.

See part one here:Startup Idea #96: Topspinmedia for the mobile

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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 a new gaming ecosystem as well? If so, what are the products and services that this new ecosystem will need?


Techmeme equivalent: if tens of thousands of games are being made, how do you know which game is the most interesting to play?

Zemanta equivalent: if we are to encourage a non technical person to develop a game, we need to make it easier to give him the right set of codes, images, models et al. This is where a recommendation service will be the most useful.

Last.fm equivalent: games are social in nature and there is a need for a social layer to be added onto the games people play. This means an opportunity to build a community service such as Last.fm where users can see who are similar to them in gaming tastes, what games are their friends playing, the top ten games of their social network according to the different genres et al.

TargetSpot equivalent: for the ecosystem to thrive, we need monetisation mechanisms. They can be in-game ads or virtual items or merchandising. Whatever the revenue models, we need someone to provide an easy way for a non-technical person to profit from the games he made through simple APIs.

Disqus equivalent: Rather than comments, users might need a score aggregation services to keep track of the scores from the different games he played. Based on the scores, a tournament service can then be developed where players of similar scores can compete.

Aggregating Verticals: serious games, advergames, educational games. All these can be aggregated and filtered to give players an easy way to navigate to what they want.

For the new gaming ecosystem to be developed, we will need lots of parts to be built by lots of gaming fans. If you have ideas or feedback, do leave a comment below.

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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. For example, one big thing I notice in Japan is girls buying all sorts of accessories and makeup. It make sense to have a mobile network that focuses on this target group. We can then design viral apps that are relevant for the group. For example, one that enable friends to share their new accessories, nail polish, make up et al via images that they can capture on their phone.

I will share more about mobile social networks on I get home to do more research. If you have any feedback or comments, do free feel to drop me a note.

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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. Photoshelter can never beat an open source version where new add-ons or new features are contributed by the community.
Ecommerce Platforms: Photographers must begin to better understand the context of where and how their images can be used. A contextually sensitive ecommerce platform can help photographers remix and rebundle their photos into different context (powerpoint backgrounds, wallpapers, scrapbook items, greeting cards), different topics (locations, celebrities, indutries), different colours et al.

The platform should allow photographer to decide how they want to sell their photos. They can sell it as a subscription, per download, or even free if the user sends in their emails. All these will allow photographers the flexibility to decided on the best way to engage their community.
Discover platforms: If photographers start to host their own sites, then there will opportunities for discovery services to help users discover new images and photographers. In the music business, we see discovery services such as Hype Machine. We need an equivlent in the photography business but using Flickr's 'interestingness' alogorithm to surface the most interesting and breath-taking image.

Related:
Startup Idea #94 (Part 1): Helping independents to earn a living

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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 business concept. I think there are a lot of opportunities for other startups to pursue.

Related:
Startup Idea #94 (Part 1): Helping independents to earn a living
Startup Idea #94 (Part 2): Helping independents to earn a living

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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 a community where parents submit and share their teaching experiences? I think it can be and should be done. This is the kind of bottom up innovation that formal institutions cannot provide and something that 2.0 is meant to accomplish.

This community platform should allow parents to submit their experiences or tips directly or through their blogs. It should structure the data such that they can be sorted by subjects, children's age and more importantly, the learning styles of children. This last point is very important as it allows the customisation of the materials to suit a child. For instance, a parent whose child learns better via touching will get a series of tips on how to use touch in educating him various subjects.

The platform should also parents to form meetups to better share their teaching experiences face-to-face or to even co-educate. The ability to form groups is critical as pointed out by the book 'Here comes everyone'. The platform should allow the users to do so by geography, interests, children's age et al.

Finally, the platform should generate its own feeds of whatever content a parent wants. He/she could, for example, generate a feed on learning tips for 5 year olds whose learning style is through images. These feeds can then be shared or diseeminated acrossed the web to hopefully benefit more people.

I am excited by this idea or at least in the direction it is pointing to. I think education is one of big issues we have to solve, along with environment, poverty, healthcare et al. If anyone is working in this area, why not share your experiences via the comments. I will definitely love to hear it.

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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 resource organisation that actually creates value for everyone. Whether this can be a form of social business is something I am not too concern with. If you create something of value, there are many ways the value can return to you.

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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 to put Shakira's music on the cellphone, who cares if it is of lousy sound quality, and extremely short duration. It is music.

Considering the above, doesn't it make sense to develop some easy tools that enable artists to connect with their fans via mobile? If that is logical, what do these tools look like? Well, here are some possibilities:

- using mobile as a testing platform (see fugees as an example)
- using mobile during live concerts (see diddy as an exmaple)
- allowing fans to create their ringtone mashups (see tonemine as an example)
- use the web as distribution but monetise them via ringbacks and ringtones (see Mice Love Rice as an example)

All these are opportunities for us to build simple tools to allow artisits to connect to their fans via mobile. However, the most exciting thing is to allow artists to launch their own branded phones, that comes with everything a fan desires i.e. artists wallpaper, artist ringtones and callbacks, artists mobile cover, fan chat et al. This concept was pioneered as early as 2002 by a pop group from HongKong called Twins:

This idea led to the Branded SIM Twins Mobile based on the ultra popular Hong Kong idols Twins, and turned an ordinary mobile phone into a portal with the power to bring Twins closer to their fans....With the subscription to TwinsMobile the member (subscriber) instantly belongs to a fan community. They get access to:

• TwinsMobile STK Menu for accessing information
• Latest news from Twins, concert info and direct advertising of upcoming live performances
• Twins Ringtones, logo, screensaver, e-card, website with a fan chat area
• Member can use loyalty points to enjoy more premium services

With the development of Android, I think it is now possible to develop a platform where customised Android phones can be created by artists to connect to their fans. This is an area which I find to be extremely exciting and I look forward to seeing how it will all play out in the coming month or years.

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Startup Idea #94 (Part 2): Helping independents to earn a living

Continuing my posts about creating tools to help independents earn a living, I will be talking about software ideas to help the independent t-shirt designer. Before going further, I want to share this statement from Six Part. I didn't notice this before but what they are saying fits very well into how we can create tools to help independents become more successful:









T-shirt designers are proliferating and yet no tools exit to help them become more effective at what they do. One immediate thing that comes to mind is a tool that helps independents upload their designs to multiple aggreator sites and then tracks their comments.A cross between tubemogul and disqus.

Why is this important? It helps designers to 'listen' to their users and in the process, learns what will appeal to them.This turns the value chain inside out as designers can now know what to produce before producing them.

Another idea is to have an open source threadless. While threadless is great, it does not allow anybody to create their own version of the community. I believe that if we make the threadless software open and modular, it will greatly benefit the community. Independents can now choose any features they liked about threadless and implement it on their own blog or site. I think this open model can potentially have a greater impact than what threadless currently brings.

More to come in the next posts...

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Startup Idea #95: 4 ideas to turn beautiful interfaces into meaningful applications

I saw some great interfaces recently and was wondering if they can be adapted to solve some real economic issues and create value for its users. This is by no means an implication that these current sites offer no value. Rather, if we can alter the content or context, they can deployed to realise raically different values.

1. Determining the independence of a company's board
This site has a great interface to allow users to flow from one topic to another. The power comes from the relevant topics that pops up when you click on a post. Rather than topics, why not make them people? Related people can pop up whenever I click on a particular, and when I click these other names, I should be able to flow to their profiles











2. Visualisation consumer's feelings towards your brand
Twistori has been around for a while. But I am amazed is the kind of direct conversation opportunities it offers. Look at the screenshot below. It is literally a goldmine, waiting for some clever startup to make their day better. If we add in some intelligence such as showing how many times a company's name has been mentioned et al, this could be a powerful way for companies to listen to their users.









3. A tumblr for community to highlight key issues of financial reportsFinancial reports are one of the hardest to read document and yet is an important form of communication between shareholders and company. I think there is room to have a tumblr equvialent where users highlight/annoate/emphasis the key issues/dangers/warning signs of a company from its reports. Imagine the below interface. Instead of random images, they are filled with markings, highlights, scibbles of a company's financial report. This is a form of crowd filtering to let investors zoom in on areas that need their attention.













4. Converting your playlists into a curated storefrontTake the idea of playlist sharing and have a easy to use storefront builder where it can automatically extract the songs, their album covers from your playlist and displays them like a store (see image below). This concept is essentially another approach to share and discover music with the exception that everyone can now earn some $$ : )

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Startup Idea #94 (Part 1): Helping independents to earn a living

As the markets continue to take a pounding this week, I was reminded of a great post by Bernard Lunn called the Emerging Main Street Web. It talks how Web 2.0 can survive in the recession by enabling people to make money off the Web. It is a fantastic and well written article that any startups should read and reread it.

"The way for Main Street Web ventures to make money is to help other people to make money."

Enabling people to earn a living is also why I am a big fan of Topspinmedia, the company that helps musicians connect with their fans through social widgets. In fact, I believe there should be such a company in all industries to help independents leverage the web and earn money. Let me take this post to brainstrom how it can be applied in some the industries where there are many independents (I have briefly written about how the Topspinmedia concept can be applied to fashion and games.)

Photography: The millions of photographs being sold at iSTOCKphoto and/or posted at Flickr is a testimony to this large photography market. However, there are no tools or mechanisms to enable these independent photographs to earn more from their work. I think we can do better.

We need to create more flexible pricing tools to allow photographers to sell their work anywhere and in any price they want: flat subscription fees, price per photo, batch sales, discounts, demand based pricing (see amie street) or even free photos in exchange for user email. We need to give control back to the photographers to let them value their own work.

We also need to create alternate revenue streams for photographers who want to give away their work for free. Why would they do that? Getting attention is one good reason. In this age of abundance where anyone can be a photographer, giving high quality photos away is one way to gather exposure and attention. The important thing is to use the free photos to create your fan base and then create value for these fans so that they are willing to pay you.

So, what can photographers earn if their photos are given away for free. How about photography books sale: A photographer becomes a curator of his work and presents them in a theme book for sale to his fans. We need to make it dead simple for photographers to create such a book and enable its sales to its fans and through the different book sales channels such as Amazon.

Any revenue possibility is photography classes. Given photographers a widget to manage their lesson schedules, invitation, event planning and pricing. Sell on the experiences, rather than the photographic content.

In summary, I believe more can be done to enable independents. Next few posts will focus on other independents like Theme Designers, Game Developers, and Toy Makers.

See part one here: Startup Idea #94 (Part 2): Helping independents to earn a living

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