Startup Idea #64: Media 2.0 for remote medical care

This is another idea on how to reduce healthcare costs using 2.0. One current issue in healthcare is

providing quality medical care for all citizens, even those living in small towns and rural areas. Currently, access to sophisticated healthcare is often restricted to those in major conurbations and people in sparsely populated areas are usually required to seek healthcare some distance from their homes. "These trips can require hours of travel time for a relatively short examination, and thus are neither convenient nor an efficient use of the patient's time," says the team. Conversely, having healthcare workers with specialist knowledge travel to remote areas is equally wasteful of resources at various levels.

Through the use of video conferencing as well as the uploading of vital signs data, doctors can provide medical advice without having to travel to remote areas. To democratise this process further, we also need reputation or verification systems to properly connect patients with healthcare workers. Youtube + verification for healthcare, anyone?

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Startup Idea #63: Web based immunization schedules For missed childhood Vaccinations

What a cool and important idea waiting for a 2.0 makeover.

• A new downloadable software tool will help pediatricians, parents and other health care professionals determine how to adjust complex childhood immunization schedules when one or more vaccine doses aren't received at the proper time.

What we can further add on is maybe a network to connect the children who need the vaccines to local clinics or hospitals. Another angel is to make it predictive by forecasting users who are likely to miss their vaccination through Amazon-alike type of system i.e. people who are this type tend to miss vaccinations et al.

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Startup Idea #62: Networks for group purchase

I have been picking up this idea from various blogs that the next step for social networks (and a possible revenue model) is to organise group economic behaviour such as purchases. See:

• Carsharing:

With gasoline prices eating holes in the wallets of the world’s most vulnerable consumers – young people and single women – EnergyTechStocks.com anticipates that each of these social networking sites will be utilized in what will coalesce over time into a gigantic national (or even international) Internet-based carpooling network.

• Group buying from 500hats:

imagine what could happen if the targeting gets a helluva lot better & we start using the same social sharing / viral distribution techniques to discover cool stuff on the open web... ... and then buy it together at substantial group discounts, like a pack of electronic wolves bringing down a very big & tasty e-caribou

• Group buying from readwriteweb:

What would be much more in keeping with the peer ethos would be to enable friends to get together to buy cooperatively. General Motors really, really wants to spend more ad $$$ online because the young car buyer is getting so hard to reach in other media. Say 1,000 Facebook users, all of whom wanted a new car, agreed on a specific model so they could bulk order and get a discount?

So, if the above observations are true, then what are the startup opportunities? How about:

• easy-to-use apps to coordinate behavior. the apps would use implicit data to establish whether a person will be keen to group purchase a particular item;
  
• marketplace to coordinate the buyers and seller

The most interesting however is that such group behavior enables different strategies to be built.

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Startup Idea #61: Markets for climate risk

I have mentioned in this post that creating new forms of market exchanges are huge opportunities.

Given the recent disasters that we see happening in China and Mynmar, why is there no strong interest from startups to solve this type of problems? Problems that are affecting lives and causing series grief to real people.

Climate risk is going to get bigger and bigger. There should be a market where such risks can be mitigated and managed. WeatherBill is one such company but how do you take it down to a personal level?

Creating such markets can yield many benefits. One of which is prediction. If we take it that the market can better predict forth coming disasters, we can then use the information and feed into a simple disaster management system, such as an alert application on a phone. Such things are worth doing and although it will be tough, i will welcome any suggestions, feedback, resources you might have encountered on making markets in climate risk.

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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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Idea generation #29: Free consumer electronics

A thought provoking article on using consumer electronics as marketing tools:

you can outsource everything about hardware. You can make sexy consumer electronics. And you can do it very, very cheaply.

The fact that hardware can now be a sales tool implies that it has a very, very low price of entry. Low enough that banks could design their own consumer electronics to support the customer experience, if they wanted. You can imagine the situation: you choose your bank because its gadgets are the most desirable.

With prices of electronic components getting cheaper all the time, I am sure there will be unexpected uses. As Kevin Kelly said, free fosters greater innovation as the cost of experimenting drops tremendously. If consumer electronics become cheap enough, what other uses can we expect, beyond the marketing tool mentioned?

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Idea generation #28 (Part II): Mobile opportunities

Continuing from the previous post on mobile opportunities.

The Churchill Club's annual Top 10 Trend dinner also highlight a number of mobile opportunities. In particular, I thought the following are all relevant trends:

1. From Vinod Knosla: The mobile phone will be a mainstream personal computer. With built in projector. Authentication. Credit. Khosla says he keeps pictures of his passport electronically on his phone. He says people will be less likely to carry their laptops. Come near a computer, and physical hard drive will be yours, including half-sent email message you left at home. Lose the phone, and all the information is on the network. Imagine what you want to do, and it should be available anytime. Projectors in cell phones in next two years. More than one camera per cell phone; high priority for Texas Instruments. Critical ingredient is high speed networks, which we will have in next 2-3 years. cards on SIM cards. ID cards, passports, drivers licenses. Any information you need.
2. From Roger McNamee: Betting on smart phones: The mobile device migration to smart phones from features phones will produce even greater disruption than PC industry moving from character mode to graphical interface. Used to be just Palm and Research in Motion. (Note that McNamee’s firm is a large investor in Palm.) What you are really doing, is put in real software environments, with applications layer that separates network from physical device. Phones far more pervasive than PCs. Will take out Motorola. One of LG, Samsung or Sony Ericsson as well. Will be intensely disruptive. And it will hurt Microsoft. You can not make a great consumer product with unbundled operating system. It will be incredibly disrupted. In five years, half of what we think of as phones will do something far more profound than what we think of a phone as doing. Design centers will fragment. An Amazon Kindle is a smartphone, with 3G network behind it. A life changer for people who use it. Will turn billion unit a year industry on its head. Assume Nokia, Apple, RIMM will do really well. (And Palm will do great, he says.)
3. McNamee: Within 5 years, everything that matters to you will be available to you on a device that fits on your belt or in your purse. Massive shift in Internet traffic from PCs to smaller devices. You should all get a Kindle, and study this thing, Roger says. Apple has it in the long run, wrong. Won’t be about watching created content, it will be about creating content. Within 10 years, more Internet traffic from your person than all other locations put together. Maybe actually more transaction, as opposed to bits, he corrects, given HD video traffic over the Internet at home. Khosla thinks the trend is already here. He does agree that the device will be transformative. McNamee says he is astonished how surprised people were by the iPhone and the Kindle. “Imagine all the other stuff you aren’t thinking about,” he says.
4. Schoendorf: 80% of the world population will carry mobile Internet devices within 5-10 years. Dial-tone is going to be gone. By next year, people will put micro cells in your house. China Mobile has 500 million billable lines. Within 5-10 years will hit 5 billion global wireless phones. Jurvetson thinks 80% is simply too high; he noes that a quarter of the world’s population has no electricity. They will concentrate in the richest nations, Jurvetson says.
   

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