10 random startup ideas

Here is a list of 10 random ideas, in no particular order or relevance.

- A tumblr for inspirational web design: a light-weight service that enables users to 'copy' any parts of a website you like and share it in a tumblr like service, that is easy and beautiful to set up. A place for 'river of news' style of web inspiration. A bit similar to PatternTap with a flow to it.











- Daily inspirations: A service where daily or hourly pictures of inspiration are posted. Have a big comment box where users can post, in 100 words or less, their reactions to the pictures. Comments are limited to the first 50 users before they are closed. Think this is stupid? Look at sites like PostSecrets and LoLcats.

- A Virtual Greats for Asia market + the ability for users to remix them = new markets for user generated 'branded' good and services

- Stardolls for boys: How about toy cars they can customise? Robots? Anime characters? I am surprised to see this wonderful model not copied everywhere.

- An enlightening post by Ethan on Umair Haque's 'How to Chrome your Industry' post. In more concrete terms, think about what is the complements for your industry that you can make free (or low cost) and open. The strategy is to increase the usage of these complements such that it will stimulate demand for your products/services.

- A ycombinator for bands: This is a great idea! With tools from TopspinMedia, and the distribution afforded by the Web, investing in bands or any kind of creative outfit will not be as risky as before. The music industry needs such innovation in their processes and organisation structures, with more transparency and ease of participation. Sellaband and SlicethePie are 2 examples. We need more. We need thefunded.com, the AVCs for the music world.

- Open source all legal documents: Ycombinator has made a great contribution. We can build a simple service to let others deposit, share and find other legal documents. There are of course hurdles to cross but none are impossible to solve.

- Revamp the concept of an article: Jeff Javier has a great post of how future journalism will have an entirely different structure. This means wide open space for anyone to try anything.

- Open markets for product placement in user generated video: NextMedium is an marketplace for product placement in Hollywood style content. Zadby is like an e-lancer for advertisers to engage video producers to produce videos for sites such as Youtube et al. I think there is room for something in between, an open marketplce where video producers upload their scripts, track records of viewership et al for advertisers to buy inventory.

- .......That is folks!

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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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Startup Idea #74: Small idea: Market for API access

As web services move toward open access, the use of web APIs inevitably will follow the same trend. As a service becomes popular, the burden of API calls will cause slowdowns and even crashing of the main service. While it is possible to remedy this problem by using additional servers, another approach is to design an economic solution: markets for API access.

I see this market evolving similarly to Amie Street. The initial batch of API access is free. As demand increases, the subsequent user has to pay a certain amount of fees. The fee will increase along with each additional user, until the point where the limit is hit. This is where it will get interesting.

Imagine now that there is a market where developers (or speculators) can start trading their access right like shares on the financial exchange. The opportunity here is to manage these exchanges, akin to how Intrade provides free prediction markets.

Business model? Give the software away for free. The revenue will come from aggregating the price information from these markets. Who will want these information. How about investors? The price information can be a good forecast for what are the potentially successful web services.

Alternatively, there is also an opportunity to build a derivative market on top of these exchanges. Sell these derivative instruments is going to bring in quite a large sum of $$.

Updated:
This article talks about how Twitter is relieving its access problem by restricting access. I think a better solution is the one I highlighted above.

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Startup Idea #59: Small idea-Coordination machine linking to-do list to globe

Coordination plays are a big part of what the web is all about. Enabling resources to be coordinated via simple mechanisms, rather than through firms is one way to gain strategic advantage.

A simple idea (inspiration here:article ) is to build an application that links a user's to-do list to the global marketplaces that have spring up so that he/she can outsource her/his personal tasks.
The value proposition is simple: rather than going to the different marketplaces, it is attention efficient for a user to list her tasks and wait for the appropriate response.

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Startup Idea #56: Small idea-Platform enabling feedback from micro blogging services

As micro blogging services such as Twitter becomes more mainstream and influential, there will be a need for businesses to engage their customers in this new area. As highlighted by Micro Persuasion, forward looking companies such as JetBlue are already using Twitter as the frontline for their customer service. The opportunity here is for a new type of customer service support company that makes it easy for the rest of the companies to do the same.

The bundled services this new company can provide include:

1. Design of template: preferably through a network of designers
2. Automated search for company evangelists from services such as GetSatisfaction. This person or group of people will become the customer service support for the company's micro blog. Companies can of course assigned their internal people to manage the blog.
   
3. Dashboard and data metrics for the company to monitor the activities on the blog, highlighting any potential concerns, similar to how SNMP works

With scalability built into the system through a network approach, this idea can potentially become the dominant design for customer support 2.o : )

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Startup Idea #54: Small idea-Platform for creating TwitterBots

Well, twitter as a group communication tool. About time.

Somebody should build a simple interface for non-technical users to easily set up their TwitterBots applications.

I would build more intelligence for this system so that it can add relevant information to the 140 words. For example, if the TwitterBot is about food reviews, the system will generate a dashboard type of page where there will be addresses of the restaurants, reviews from other services such as Yelp.com.Users can then have more information on these dashboards, beyond the 140 words.

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Startup idea #49: Small idea-Widget management system for blogs

Widgets are great but consume bandwidth resources and will typically slow down its hosts. A management system is needed to effectively allocate resource and make the user experience better.

Beyond this, the ideal system should also make the installation of widgets an effortless tasks. Facebook has achieved this but only within its own network. Independent sites and blogs still have to cut down numerous steps before getting the widgets to work.

We need a better system.

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Startup Idea #45: Small idea- email standardisation across different messaging systems

As methods of communications expands (see post by AVC), it implies a need for a service to assist companies in their outreach. This service needs to ensure that invites or advertisement be optimsied across different messaging formats. The service will also need to collect metrics such as view rates, respond rates, forwarding rates et al to allow companies to evaluate the usefulness of each messaging system.

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Startup Idea #42: Small idea-virtual gifts for social sites

Create a feature-as-company where its main product would be to create virtual gifts for social sites. Similar to how HotorNot uses virtual flowers, we can provide such applications for other social networks that do not have either the capabilities or the budget to develop it themselves.

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Startup Idea #37: Small idea-Market for digital art

Interesting developing market for digital arts(LINK)
As highlighted by Reblog here, throw in some print-on-demand technology, a microplatform, a plugin into Etsy and you have yourself a new business.

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