A wishlist for WWGD

I have been looking forward to Jeff Jarvis book, What Would Google Do (WWGD), since the day I knew of its existence. Beyond a doubt, I think it is going to an enlightening read, to say the least. What I hoping is that Jeff will also cover industries beyond yesterday's tired definitions. Industries like those mentioned by Tim O'Reily.

As an incentive for Jeff, I will start posting about the WWGD principle to these industries in future posts. Think of these posts as a fan's wishlist. As a preview, let's look at detecting infectious disease. Applying the WWGD principle will lead the following idea:

The most time consuming in modeling is data collection and the actual crunching. Why not have a platform that provides the raw data and the computing resources? Let the rest of the community work on the modeling itself to produce better prediction models for infectious diseases using online data such as clickstreams, new mention et al. These models should be open to allow for modification by other users. Through these distributed research, it may be possible to have better prediction models in lessor time.

More in future posts.

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Idea generation #38: Tim O'Reily on 'be good' and other 'be good' ideas

Great week as there are a couple of interesting reading materials that surface to my attention:

Tim O'Reily on 'Be Good': It is good to see high profile bloggers like O'Reily getting behind Umair Haque's vision of bringing 2.0 to solve real issues. Below is a nice list of issues that warrant a 2.0 makeover. I have blogged about a couple of ideas on some of these topics:

• earth monitoring,
  
• carbon markets, (opportunities on personal carbon trading, first post on personal carbon trading)
  
• energy efficiency of electronic devices,
  
• home energy management
• collaborative scientific research,
  
• early detection of infectious disease outbreaks, (post on early detection system)
  
• personalized medicine,
  
• resource discovery,
  
• new materials
  

Financial literacy: Great article by the economist on the need for financial literacy. I fully agreed, and looking at the mess of the current markets, have to concurre this is a real issue waiting for a 2.0 solution. What are the best 2.0 startups out there in the education market? Can we apply their models here?

Small businesses not giving healthcare coverage to employees: I blog about this a couple of months ago and suggested that a network model is the right one to use. This article just confirms the need for it. See also my related post about group purchases

Questionable practices at rating agencies: One market that is clearly in need of a disruption. This should not be hard. If people can build an encyclopedia through collective intelligence, I don't see why we cannot do it for rating agencies.

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Startup Idea #72: Data driven: Creating new markets

Continuing the push for data driven startup ideas, I am thinking of how to leverage on online data to form create new forms of industries that lies outside yesterday's definition.

Intelligence on emerging infectious diseases: using online content to trace and predict the movement of infectious disease is going to be a killer. The next thing is to make it easy to plug that information into a country or a city's alert/medical/disease prevention system. Make it into a network where these critical information flows. As BubbleGen has mentioned, whoever make it easy to amplify the flow of data is going to be the winner.

Similar efforts can be found here (Global Public Health Intelligence) and here (Google's Predict and Prevent Initiative).

Forecasting terrorism: A network of analysts sharing information to enable forecasting of terrorism. Great idea! Networking these information into insurance calculations, monitoring systems et al will yield rich startup opportunities.

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Startup Idea #71: WWGD: Fashion edition

Image via WikipediaJeff Jarvis has been blogging about his book, What would Google do (WWGD), and how such thinking can reshape different industries. I have been having fun reading these 2 particular posts, one on remaking restaurants and one on remaking banks.

This got my mind itchy and, with a few minutes to spare, decided to apply WWGD thinking to fashion, an industry
plague with surplus inventory and all sorts of problems.

i) Treat each piece of fashion as a platform and give it for free. Let users create fashion mashup by adding pins, clip-ons et al through an easy to use interface. You make $$ on selling the accessories;

ii) Make your production facilities as the platform. Allow users to submit designs. The best voted design will get manufactured and sold;

iii)Collect data from virtual world fashion to surface the preferences of consumers for product designers. The same idea was articled in this Forbes piece on how Zara can use Stardolls as a form of market research tool.

iv)Give away tools such as OptiTex for free to allow open innovation. Use such technologies as the base to build the Blogger equivalent for users who want to create fashion pieces.

What are your thoughts?

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Startup Idea #70: Data driven tools for enterprises

(Read the first post here)

In my previous post on how the abundance of new data will transform job functions, I focus mainly on what new sources of data are available and the opportunities in creating predictive analytic business to harvest these new data. As I explore further in data driven businesses, the opportunities become so much bigger. In this post, I am going to rave about the kind of enterprise businesses that can be built.

Risk management: The availability of data is going to reveal the hidden risks that are embedded with each function. Take IT for example. There is now geninue risks in employees leaking confidential information. How about surfacing the transfer of these information to alert IT managers that too much information is resting in too few people? What about HR and turnover rate? Can we surface the information on whether is any department suffering from too little or too much turnover, relative to industry averages? All these risks can now be surfaced and managed with the current technologies and the availability of data. This is the opportunity: building a Riskmetrics equivalent for each job functions

Forecast: Companies such as Farecast and Delaycast have shown us the value of using the abundance of data to build powerful forecasting tools. I believe forecasting tools will become important for job functions within any organisation. Logistics managers will love to have a Delaycast equivalent to tell them the probability of delays for their shipments. Recruitment managers might need to have a Farecast to tell them the best period to recruit. Sales personnel will be delighted to have a tool telling them the best time to make a sale call. The possibilities are plenty. We just need to line up the options to weigh the best startup opportunity.

Visualisation/Analytics: We definitely visualisation and analytics to help users make sense of all these data. Sisence is good example of how to take advantage of a new source of data by building its entire analytics business around it. Hpwever, the model is not perfect. I believe future successful analytics businesses will look nothing like Sisence or Google analytics as they will develop new forms of interfaces to take advantage of new types of data (myBloglog is a new form of interface for human traffic).

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Startup Idea #69: OpenID for avatar

I always supported the idea of portability. There is little sense in forcing users to key in their information in every single web service they signed on. However, customising your avatar is even more painful. Hence, an idea I am toying with is the concept of OpenAvatar (See OpenID).

While the current favour is on avatar portability, my personal view is that this approach is too hard to be achieved. My thinking is to have an open standard where the characteristics, not the actual avatar, will be portable. These characteristics can be seen as 'meta-tags' that describes the avatar and can include examples such as gender, skin colour, clothing colour, et al. With these portable meta-tags, each game can provide their users with similar looking avatar, despite different game engines.

With these meta tags, we can actually create a lot of cool services. How about a De.cli.ous version where users can search through different avatars through tags (assuming the OpenAvatar engine have the ability to take pictures of different avatars)? We can also allow users to add tags that instantly alters their avatars across different games. Finally, these meta tags can be mergered with OpenID which will then provide even more convenience to the users.

Regardless of whether my idea works or not, portability is going to be very important. There should be more experiments trying different approaches to achieve this. Let's hope it happens.

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Idea generation #37: Exchange for internet capacity, billion doller idea for twitter, disintemediation of analysts

Market for internet capacity: The age of markets. The interesting thing is to apply markets to areas where it is not obvious. Things like HR recruitment? (more on that in a future post)

How Twitter could be worth a billion dollars: Interesting angle. And we are long overdue on Paypal 2.0. Could Twitter be it?

Who needs analysts?: The disintemediation continues. Open source research to the research market will be what blogging is to the publishing industry. Will there be a need for a blogger, technorati, techmeme et al for research or will current tools suffice?

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