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Ideas For Your Next Tech Startup
prostoalex writes "Business 2.0 magazine enumerates tech ideas that venture capitalists are currently interested in, listing the amounts they have ready to invest." From the article:"A column that appeared on Business2.com the next day described the company Armstrong envisioned and his wish list of criteria. Those who thought they had the right stuff could send Armstrong a business plan. A few weeks later, Armstrong had a new gripe: He'd received more than 20 solid plans and couldn't decide which of three finalists he wanted to fund -- not just for $1 million, but for as much as $5 million. He has since winnowed the list down to two.
That got us thinking. Why not ask dozens of VCs a tantalizing (but often unasked) question: What types of ideas would you fund tomorrow if the right pitch landed on your doorstep? After a few weeks of trolling Sand Hill Road and beyond, we got 11 leading venture firms to spill their most promising business ideas -- and to pony up $50 million in funding to the entrepreneurs who can pull them off. "
Or I should say the Midnight Ass Spelunker. YOu wake up in the middle of the night and strapped to your backside is an automated assfucker. You have to put in your credit card information to get it to stop.
I'm thinking mp3 player + SMS + ringtones + java
wait, it needs something...
XML!
Alright, I got it, an mp3 player that doubles as a text messaging device. Instead of beeps, it plays ringtones you pick from your mp3 player. Java makes cool games possible. XML makes it seem cool to those who don't realize it just means humans can read the tags I will hide with DRM thus playacting the RIAA thinking people can't pirate ringtones.
I think I'm on to something...
The last time we were talking about Tech Startups, people were complaining about Google picking up all the most potential ones. Then what do I see when I post? A Google ad. Of course there was a Google ad the last time we talked about this... but still..
"To be is to do." -Socrates
"To do is to be." -Jean-Paul Sartre
"Do-be-do-be-do." -Frank Sinatra
"One more bubble, and we retire with half-a-billion."
Tiresome. The ideas are as fruitless as before - many more of us will go broke working 75 hour weeks, while big investors walk off with a tax break, if not the rewards for effort.
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
to sit around playing video games and looking at pr0n all day. Maybe if I open source it somehow.
Someone hates these cans.
We want our cell phones to do everything and we want to market PCs and content to everybody on the planet. I think that's a decent summary of all the "ideas" there.
Is it just me or did everything sound incredibly boring?
I just wasted your mod points! HA!
I have a bridge for sale...
With the growing complexity and diversity of the internet and the communities that use it, how they interact, and nature of companies that provide the service, I sure am glad I never specialized in one particular field.
Seriously though, reading that actually made me feel a little better. Alot of the people I know can solve a given problem in a number of ways, feverishly spouting ideas and solutions like there is not tomorrow. From IPPBX to Corporate Intranets, this thing is HUGE. Those of us who have been using Open Source as hobbyists and professionals alike can attest to the sheer diversity of the community. I just read that sourceforge hit 100,000 projects...
Gluing them together is what I do for a living and it is only a matter of time before we come up with something very marketable. Maybe I'll give this guy a call and see if he will buy me a Porsche so I can fly around town from office to office consulting companies and interviewing the bottom half to see how my services can benefit their organization.
Who am I kidding though, I didn't even finish high school :)
I'll give you a hint though, it goes something like this:
Hello, this is Apache 2 calling, press 1 if you are hung over, press 2 if you forgot to set your alarm, press 3 if you are on your way to work allready...
Please leave a message after the tone to explain why you are late to work. Have a nice day!
Wonderful world we live in... everyone at work hates me hahaha...
You are about to give someone a piece of your mind, something which you can ill afford...
I got an idea that is sure to be a hit.
A news web site, but not just any news site. One that has a witty address and is directed towards technology. It will be a kind of news for nerds, you know... stuff that matters. It is sure to be a hit!
... begin, the next dotcom bubble has.
Disclaimer - I'm a physician. I can't really see a use for being able to know what a patient's vital signs are for someone "needing" to be in the hospital. In fact, according to recent insurance guidelines, if all you're doing is checking vital signs, you will not get paid for said hospitalization. Reminds me of a recent slashdot article about some bizzarre japanese medico-toilet which analyzed your various outputs and told your doctor about it.
I sure don't want to here about that.
Administering meds? IVs? Enemas? Who you gonna call?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Liar. It glowed.
Seriously, though...
This isn't a new idea. Twenty years ago, I was trying to raise funds to build a recording studio. A friend of mine, studying for his MBA at Harvard brought me a spiral-bound book that listed VC firms categorized by the fields that they were interested in (e.g., biotech, software, hardware, defense, etc.). All of them were way out of my league, but it made for interesting reading, in a "follow the money" sense.
Ten years after that, when I was involved in a dot.com startup, we ended up pitching to some of the VC firms listed in that spiral-bound book (on Wall Street, not Sand Hill Road).
From what I've gathered from the experiences of friends involved with vulture captial funding, it's a last resort, the only option if angel funding, friends and family, and lines of credit don't pan out.
k.
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
We all have ideas, we just don't have people to send them to.
(subject of article) (verb in present tense) YOU!
A rather plain old boring techie consultant that I want to become in five years. I need that much time to save the money I need to start my practice and get the networking contacts I need to fish for business.
:P
Yup. Plain. Simple. Boring. Nothing to see here, move along.
I think that while many of those business cases have a good idea, the real question is how to best sell your idea. After all the greatest idea in the world will get laughed at when if comes from a guy that looks like Urkel... So what did those 10 buisness cases have that made them great? How were they presented? I bet those cases aren't any better than a million others that failed just because they were not presented adequately.
Peter.
First we get a story about Graying Mainframe maintainers, now a Venture Capital story?
What's next, Slashdot announcing a VA Linux IPO?
None of those ideas come to anything.
The real moneymakers come out of nowhere. If it sounds like something you've heard of, but with maybe a tiny twist...look elsewhere.
The really amusing thing is that the biggest success in recent times, Google, was simply "we want to do search engines just like everyone else. But we'll do it better".
What makes real money isn't a hot new idea. It's doing something well. Quality. If I were a VC, that's what I'd be looking for. Competence and pragmatism.
The cake is a pie
why not use a SecurdID Tag/Code with your cell phone and get Kerberos version installed on the cell phones. this way it wouldnt be 100% fraudproof(but then again is anything in life guaranteed?).
It mentioned SecureID but i wonder if they have heard of Kerberos We have this at work.. you type in your username and password. after the password you use a 4-digit pin number, which gives you a 6 digit key(sometimes referred to as a ticket) to type in at the prompt. If you are really serious about security you could set a time limit on the ticket, lets say 5 or 10 mins, then even if a hacker was trying to hi-jack your ticket it would take more than 5 or 10 mins..but after that the ticket would have expired.
maybe i should email him and ask him about that, but i am sure they all know about this.
For competitive reasons, I don't want to post this with my real name, but this is a real post from a real guy in the SlashDot community. I've been here for a while (id in the 4x,xxx range).
Anyways, I started a company by raising US $500,000 through friends and family. I used to be the CTO of an Internet company and decided to start my own company on the Internet but in a different field. I am a techie and an entrepreneur and definitely a geek. Let's put it this way, even today, I write the majority of the software (though I have other developers too).
The best advice I can give is to watch your cash flow. I was personally horrified by the stories of $200,000 per month burn rates. I actually had a lot of personal wealth (from my last venture) but still ran out of my basement until I needed more space. The US $500,000 lasted us for 2.5 years (not 2.5 months like some companies) after which we raised another $250,000. But we actually had a viable business already with the $500,000 spend. We raised another $250 K to speed up the marketing that we had already proven to know that if we spent X we would get X times 2 back in less than a year. This was based on hard numbers.
Anyways, I only gave away about 25% of the company to do it, and the company is probably worth about $20 million today and our earnings are growing faster each month.
We are in the very competitive website builder arena but are one of the top sites in the field. Our focus has been on ease of use first and then secondly on feature set.
Anyways, I'm mentioning this because I wanted to give those of you who want to start a business hope.
The absolute worst thing you can do is get into the high-tech business without a model for making money. Pure research or cool ideas are fun but don't bring home the bacon. Remember your market is business people so focus your business plan on how the tech brings in profit. Now how cool the tech is and hence there ought to be profit.
Good luck.
I'm thinking mp3 player + SMS + ringtones + java
wait, it needs something...
XML!
I believe what you are asking for was covered under "convergence".
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I have personally overseen the patenting of at least 75% of these ideas. Considering that's just within my own firm, and without a reviews of the prior art, any firms attempting to implement these concepts will probably be faced with serious legal obstacles.
Swipe the card!! lol! er...ouch.
The people taking risks are your overworked IT employees. Look at your boss the wrong way and you are out on the street. Have you business get bought out and while the owners are flying their golden parachutes, you are wondering where your next paycheck will come from.
People don't become wealthy by taking risks. They become wealthy by figuring out ways to make lesser folks assume those risks instead.
now you know what not to develop.
hordes of monkeys will be driven to please the suits, so thousands will be competing with each other to get funded.
a few others will pursue their own ideas no matter what, and create the next disruptive forces that open up entirely new markets.
granted, that doesn't make a good business model, but no doubt it creates real value.
I always thought it was up to a smart innovator to pitch an idea to the investor. It would just seem to me thse investors are just beggining to be scammed. I mean anyone can say,"Give me the $3 million dollars, I can do what you are asking for."
God spoke to me.
Er, could anybuddy spare a few coins for Open Source Artificial Intelligence?
You don't even need to fund an unknown AI startup. Just hire some hotshot programmers and Steal.This.Idea!
It's all described in the scientific literature of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).
Be the first on your block to launch the Hard Takeoff of a Technological Singularity.
If there's more of a supply of bizplans than money to fund them, that means there's too much equity to go around. There's then really no excuse for VC not to be investing their money anymore - $TRILLIONS of it is just sitting there, rotting. The only reason they've got is that they still haven't learned how to tell Internet shit from shine-ola. In other words, still not enough brains to go around on the funder side of the table.
--
make install -not war
You'll play hell getting hospitals to adopt this. Imagine going to the Director and telling him:
"We want to help your patients save money, by letting them buy less of your services."
Sure, some hospitals are having a capacity problem, but it's way better to be overbooked than over-capacitied. This is especially bad when you consider the incredible fixed costs they have (think malpractice insurance for 75-150 doctors and a trauma center.)
Oops, meant as reply to above poster...
Holy cr#p, and I thought these guys lived in a techo society!
The pitch has the smell of a whole bunch of disorganized Missouri rednecks trying to pitch their fifty buck savings into the evening bingo.
Get the f&*k real, throw the oil monkey out of DC, get a tax break for pooled VC and go for something techno serious, colonize Venus or organize Mars...
Back office for Banks... f*&^k... Can't believe I am even reding this sh&^t.
Zorg.
$5M Mobile ID for Credit Card Purchases
WHAT HE WANTS: Fraudproof credit card authorization via cell phones and PDAs.
Google could make a cool five million from this since they already use similar technology now when signing up for a Gmail account. (more info on their account creation page)
These proposals sound really dry. It feels like while the rest of the world moved on to robots, spaceflight, and defense, Silicon Valley is still in these really tiny internet experiments from the 90's. Not only are the monetary amounts miniscule, the proposals seem to condense into more networking, more ecommerce, and more tiny parts of something that hang off of something big in Taiwan.
Indian startups normally get $50 million but they seem to be doing more ambitious projects.
The number one tech problem that comes up again and again and again for anyone that uses a machine connected to the net is that it eventually gets taken down by worms, spam, or both. If I had five million bucks to trade for ownership of a technical product, it'd be a product that elegantly solves that problem. I'd make a hell of a lot more than five million back on it.
Do you really think these guys would give their really choice ideas for free?
We have solved step3) ???
The cost of these projection TVs and plasma displays are a joke.
It's a trap!
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
It seems to me that they are really millionaire entrepeneurs looking for business proposals for THEIR idea.
Is not maybe what the company owners want.
Remember kids, if you're not working on something that you love, it won't work! Not sucessful or rich, just plain old work.
Good techs, and revolutions, come from passion.
Checking my online banking messages while reading the FTA, I was amused to note one of the ideas already being rolled out by my bank. The message follows:
Date: 17/08/05 17:06
Subject: SMS payment security registration invitation
Account: No Account
Reference: SB10143677
Register now for SMS payment security - a new service that provides
an extra security layer when you make Internet Banking Bill
payments and Funds transfers to other people. Once registered, you
will be sent a one-time only code via SMS to your mobile phone that
you will need to enter in the payment confirmation screen to
complete the payment.
As part of our ongoing commitment to Internet Banking security,
this service is free.
To complete the registration you need:
1. To read the terms and conditions below
2. Reply to this message asking to register and
3. Call us now on 1300 651 656 to register your mobile phone
number. This is the mobile phone number that the one time only sms
code will be sent to.
When you complete steps 2 and 3, this will confirm your acceptance
of the terms and conditions below.
Please do not hesitate to contact us via this secure Messaging
Service, or call on 1300 651 656 in Australia or Internationally on
+61 3 8641 - 9886 between 8:00am - 9:00pm (EST) Monday to Friday
and 9:00am - 6:00pm (EST) Saturday & Sunday.
National Internet Banking Support Team
Terms and conditions
1. You agree to notify the National promptly of any change to the
registered mobile number or your exclusive use of that number;
2. You authorise the National to provide the registered mobile
number and your payment amount to the telecommunication service
provider used by the National to enable you to receive an SMS
message with the payment amount and the authentication code
generated by the National, for use by you within Internet Banking;
and
3. You agree the Terms and Conditions for Internet Banking
(effective 7 February 2005) will change as follows:
A new definition is added. "user authentication" means the
authentication service made available by the National to a user
when using the service to make certain payments.
A new clause 18A is added. "18A [User authentication]. In the event
the National receives an instruction from a user to make a BPAY
Payment or payment to a third party account and that user has user
authentication, the National will require the user provide the
identifier generated by the National in accordance with user
authentication. This requirement is in addition to any password or
other information a user must give to the National when providing
an instruction using the service.
The user should contact National Internet Banking Support in the
event the National does not accept any instruction using the user
authentication identifier. Provision of this identifier does not
alter your responsibility for the transaction.
Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will! - Antonio Gramsci.
I was not sure what Sand Hill Road was. If anyone else is wondering, here is the Wikipedia entry on it.
This sounds EXACTLY like my experience in the music business.
... why would you ever want to be involved with them?!?
Here is what the record companies (VC's) want:
1. "Start up" a band with your own resources.
2. "Start up" a fan base by playing out. (They will not be interested in you unless your fan base includes opening for the Rolling Stones or having CitiBank as a client.)
3. Create your own hype so that the record company (VC) can no longer ignore you.
4. "Sign" with the record company (VC) and watch them take all the credit for "incubating" your talent.
BULLSHIT!
By the time you have achieved the success that the VC's or record companies want you to achieve to be involved with you
Pablo Piccaso was never called an asshole. Not like you.
Lots of people have ideas. Imagine you're a VC and someone proposes an idea and you think it's pretty good. Obviously the first thing you are going to do is see who else is doing similar stuff to gauge the competition.
If it really is a good idea then there are always going to be a couple other startups doing exactly the same thing. So now the question is should you fund the first guy or not. Or maybe you should fund the competition?
What really counts is the team. Do they have what it takes to make the idea into a product and beat the competition? A great team can take any idea and adapt it into a profitable company.
Strange thing is, that we are working practically exactly on one of these ideas (PCs for senior citizens). Although we are working on a special Linux distro combined with a portal for our folks. But our first customers are not the seniors themselves, but the home they are living in. First PC is already running and we have preAlpha CDs for download.
Unfortunately we only have a German version available, since we are located here. If somebody might be interested in a collab to bring this thing to the US, you might drop me a note to
mail@andreas-rueckert.de
Ciao,
Andreas
You then code the application such that, when you want to switch, it dumps a checkpoint of its current state and the new device pulls that in to continue where the old one left off. You then make sure the router redirects the virtual endpoint to the new physical endpoint. High Availability systems do all this all the time, though usually for servers rather than clients.
Credit card validation, through a secondary mechanism? Just implement S/Key as an application on your cell phone, as that is a fairly solid challenge system that is widely understood. Either that, or have both a public and a private key on your phone. You get the encrypted transaction, keyed to your phone, which you then re-key to the bank.
Ok, so that's 9 million dollars I'm owed so far. I expect the startups to cough up if they use these ideas and make a fortune. (Yeah, right. Like I'd ever see a cent for any of my ideas, even if they were used and were even credited as such. Especially when you start getting into the millions.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The Open Source IT centre did seem useful
There are four sorts of people in the world: fools, lunatics, idiots and morons. - Umberto Eco, Foucaut's pendulum.
who even has his own FAQ written by the real AI community to stop the nonsense he spouts from giving AI research a bad name
keep flipping burgers Murray, you will get further in life
Having a bed/place in a hospital can be mighty expensive these days. In sweden most hospitals are governed and funded by the taxpayers/state (there are a few privatised hospitals though) and there is not enough hospital beds to go around.
Many elderly that are fragile - but not sick enough to be in a hospital - could stay home with one of these devices. Considering that there are many elderly that want to stay at their own home as long as possible, everybody wins.
There are already some solutions that work; My grandmother in law hates hospitals and want to live at her own place and to be independent. She's 85. She has got an emergency button linked to the hospital in case she would fall and wouldn't be able to get up. (sometimes neighbours and family is on vacation and can not be there for an emergency) She's used it twice now.
The vital signs monitoring equipment could be a complement.
One of the things that I miss from the USA (there being quite many). I wrote them several times, but it seems that they don't want to provide subscriptions to Europeans.
Weird, since their FAQ contains a point on how to access web content if you're European.
Everyone here knows that the ideas put forward are stupid.
There is no question that most, if not all, of the ideas are not worth the ASCII they are typed in.
The VC's however got free advertising that they have money to fund good startups.
The issue today is not getting money, there is way too much of it around, the issue today is that the VC's can't find good people to spend the money on.
I've been through several startups, all promising. The VC's were assholes, frankly.
VC's need to get smart, it's like an inverted bubble where there is too much money sitting around doing nothing.
Over the next couple few years (it started 5 years ago) VC's will get smarter, much smarter. Today they are not smart enough, they have tons of money lying around and there are tons of techy ideas that won't take VC money because it's too expensive.
The two will meet soon, and I'll be waiting.
Housing is about to take a major hit, and it will affect all sorts of ways that money is used in the economy. That and derivatives. Double whammy bad mojo. Greenspan just re-warned about the housing bubble, and it barely made the news. When 1/3 of the homeowners in the US realise that they are sitting on a massive debt that is a lot more than what their equity will ever be, there will be severe ramifications for "new shiny" stuff in the market place, as necessities will take precedence. People are going to want to reduce expenses in order to keep trying to payoff what they already owe.
No idea* how that would translate into "investment' ideas (besides buying up mortgages after the crash at discount), but it might be hard for consumers to provide the retail cash ultimately needed to purchase all this new stuff, when what has already been purchased on credit needs to be paid.
There's a reason they changed the bankruptcy laws. The law, IIRC, goes into effect in October.
*cheaper alternative energy,local produced food, and affordable transportation come to mind though. I think all the shiny electronic and internet toy stuff will take a hit. Just a guess though.
VC's don't come up with ideas, but rather decide to invest upon your ideas or not.
Which explains why I and some others here are not impressed with the ideas list.
Apparently the search for a "what do you want to invest in" response lead to some VC's realizing the opportunity to mention themselves.
Simple logic:
I'm a VC and I have this idea.... Hmmm, why don't I just invest in myself and hire those who can impliment my ideas???
Duh!
The word is spelled "mom's".
When people are quoting "Vignette" as one of their success stories, I have to chortle. What a piece of crap that software is, and clearly the market agrees.
I can't wait for the day when the patent system switches to "first to file" and we're practically forced ot chase VC before we invent anything. "Gosh that idea you have sounds great, but I'm really looking to invest in a souped up Craigslist."
These business ideas need more cowbell.
These investors aren't going to walk away with a tax break and rewards.
I took a look at these ideas, and I classify them into one of several groups.
(Class) Convergence in a diverse market.
(Why it won't work) Convergence will happen, based upon unifying forces within the technology. The problem here, though, is that those unifying forces will come from ISO efforts of the current sales leaders. In other words, there is no room for a new startup taking the lead.
Now, you can *take part* in unifying things, by sponsoring symposiums to just that purpose. However, there are already a number of companies that regularly do that as their main business effort, and can be expected to be working on that at any given moment.
(Class) Rehashing a badly working business model.
(Why it won't work) Typically, these investors think that the problem is a first order problem: people don't like to use it. On the contrary, usually the problems are second- or third-order. People don't have money, or the business environment is dangerous, or customer service can be expected to not come through.
Therefore, these businesses can be expected to come through with a flashy, new, hyped product -- and still get only a tiny fraction of what current sales leaders get.
(Class) The already-existing, and working business copy.
(Why it won't work) Actually, this will -- but will have only limited returns. As such, it probably will be an okay investment for the investor (though he'd do better to buy stock in an existing company) -- but a terrible investment for the person who wants to spend the labor, with one exception. If you're a college kid and can pull it off, specify that the contract includes funding for later degree completion, based upon number of years worked. If you are out after a year, you get a year's tuition/board. If you are out after two years, you get two years' tuition/board. That way, you can work triple time initially, and then hand the company over to a more regular C/O just about the time the "investors" start to bleed the company and put their own friends in.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
it is supposed to be: (Direct object)(verb)You
VCs should do VC work and let engineers and inventors do their job.
Wow, a physician who's not interested in a patient's vital signs. I'm shocked.
In fact, both the IRS and the Fed are in heavy competition for your business:)
is to give students in MBA school an assignment to work on prior to graduation. Their grade would be based on how well their business plan is written.
I'm sorry, I must have the wrong friends. That and I should have chosen my parents better.
Housing is about to take a major hit, and it will affect all sorts of ways that money is used in the economy. That and derivatives. Double whammy bad mojo.
The problem isn't just the housing and derivitaves which will cause the entire economy to collapse. The problem is that they will take out every financial institution in the USA with them, who will hyperinflate the dollar out of existence in their last dying gasp!
The US will have no choice but to move to a gold economy or die. If I were VC's I would be getting into the gold and precious metals transaction business like it's doomsday, because it is! And for their sake, I hope they have a lot of that venture money of theirs stored in precious metals, commodities, and their resprctive unhedged mining companies.
God help us with derivatives and housing, all hell is going to break loose before the end of the year. By christmas, people will be saying WTF?, by feburary, people will be in outright panic!
Employees of failed ventures face these real life risks. VCs dont.
Investors lose paper assets. Employees lose their livelihood. Understand the difference?
how about a domain name registrar that takes all profits and sends them to charities like UNICEF and the EFF, instead of funding superbowl advertisements?
http://paycan.net/
You have to pay someone for your domain name registration. It might as well be someone who donates all proceeds instead of superbowl ads sporting big-breasted women appearing before a mock congress.
For now I'm all by myself, and just a reseller, but the goal is to have a board, complete transparency, and full ICANN accreditation. I'm working on the $10K funding for the last part, I need some board members and some help. So for now, domain registration is $8.99, giving net margin of $2.00 from the upstream reseller for charity. With ICANN accreditation, plan is for $5.25 domain names, leaving $5.00 margin for charity.
MORTAR COMBAT!
My wife and I have a business plan for two public service web portals (yeah, with advertisements...): a knowledge intensive recipe/health site (which we already have an early beta for, but I leave out our URL to avoid slashdoting :-)) and a public bulletin board searched by zip code/location.
I subscribe to Business 2.0 (usually has interesting material). I was dissapointed to see our idea in slightly different form in the article - now I will have 10,000 competitors. I did grab a great domain name (http://ourevents.us/ but it will be a couple of months before we have a beta system in place.
I think that with a few exceptions the days of making a lot of money off of web portals is gone. However, by combining personal interests (e.g., both my wife and I love to cook) with low cost deployments of web portals, I think that it is a good business for motivated individuals. The important thing is finding a need and filling it.
I think that the idea behind http://del.icio.us/ is brilliant. I have heard that one guy did this: came up with the idea, implemented it, and I notice fairly frequent enhancements. Very cool.
Witty name.....
"known authors"....
Stuff that matters
Nerdy readers who need a date
Lots of duplicate posts just days apart
and......,
copies of do it yourself case mods and hacks posted elsewhere.....
yes Ive got it...
PLease forward the check...
I don't see any creative idea in the list...
So... if the VCs have trillions of dollars, why in the name of Pete would you beat yourself up trying to come up with "the idea" that will grudgingly seperate them from a paltry few million? Go to where the money is! Put together a consulting firm that specializes in helping VCs get a better return on their investment - doing technical reviews, working with founders to assist in recuiting and development, etc. Siphon off a few million of that VC funding directly, instead of having to beg for it.
"Great men are not always wise: neither do the aged understand judgement." Job 32:9
With ideas as stupid as their's, I wonder how these venture capitalists ever got rich in the first place?
9/11 Eyewitnesses to Explosive WTC Demolition 1 of 2
anonet.fshell.org (The internet the way it was meant to be.)
What does this have to do with this article. Well if we had a few servers on a highspeed backbone it would be nice -- but is not required.
Stop by if you feel so inclined -- you would be amazed what happens when you combine OpenVPN + IANA reserved address space + BGP. You get a nice anonymous network that is encrypted...
...if they believe there's no competitive advantage to doing it themselves and they can save a boatload of $$$. It's already been done in the check image archive space with a company called Viewpointe. BoA and Chase started it and a bunch of others with the same problems got on board.
S tory.pdf
For those with too much time on their hands, history of Viewpointe below...
http://www.viewpointearchive.com/files/Viewpointe
--bank
Those who are late do not get fruit cup!
People from Paul Graham to Bill Gates and everyone in between were all lucky. If they don't at least tip their hat to lady luck, they have an ego problem.
It is also known as being "in the right place at the right time."
1. Totally secure cellphone cc transactions. Requires the phone companies to play a willing part in this, and prone to phishing attacks. Debit cards already have a PIN.
2. Good luck convincing a bank to just hand over control of their systems to you, a fly by night "entrepeneurial" firm with less than ten employees. Then there's the banking regulations that can quickly destroy a bank should they be in non-compliance.
3. I could probably put together a group of people to engineer this, and even find an "etailor" or two to work with. The problem isn't that suggestions aren't good enough, it's that nobody cares. I'm sure the retailers care about an extra 2 percent increase in suggested sales, but online consumers generally don't window shop. They know what they want, that's why they're there and willing to wait for shipping.
4. They already have something similar, it's called financing a Dell and Yahoo! Not to mention that Zagula is on crack if he expects the AARP membership to have huge amounts of discresionary income.
5. Related to number once, but with twice the theft potential.
6. Sorry, you can't buy that for 3 million. If I was say, the evolution group, I'd be asking for more than 3 million.
7. The internet is California writ large. Craig's list succeeded because a) good times were rolling b) craig was well ahead of the status quo c) there's a fuckload of online people in the area. Oh and d) it was free to most people. This worked great when recruiters were earning hefty fees for filling positions, but no so much anymore. You notice that even now, the only listings that bring in money for craigslist are the high population centers.
8. VOIP just restricts the client base drastically. CallerID should suffice for customer service identification and partial automation.
9. Again, this requires a lot of participation on behalf of the wireless providers. Cat herding is an understatement.
10. Somewhat promising, but there's the tangle of healthcare regulations, and while it might save 2.7 billion in hospital stays, those that need to return in day 9 or 10 might be enough to counter the savings by extra travel costs or at-home care. The real reason this VC hasn't found a taker is that you can't prototype this system for 500k.
11. I can't recall wanting to switch from a PDA to a fridge during a VOIP conversation. And I'm sure the other end would love for me to be able to pause the conversation for a minute or two. If you're at home, instead of switching between devices on whims, won't you be simply using the devices best suited for the task at hand? Watch TV on your big screen, or your PSP? Big screen, por favor.
Reguarding all of these, I'd be a little wary of VCs telling you what to do. They get submissions all the time and the current VC culture doesn't sign NDAs. You could wind up sitting on a decent technology because a VC who sat on his capital for too long gave you someone elses plan in a deperation attempt to "find something that worked, damnit." Remember, you're investing most everything in a single basket of eggs. The VC plays the odds across a wide number of investments.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
None of those ideas is particularly noteworthy, especially as they are all devoted to basically just methods of distribution and not much else. Nothing to see here, and nothing to see. I'll pass on all of those ideas for something truly revolutionary.
..lose their jobs in a crashed or semi crashed economy sell their homes at a loss, or it's just taken from them. Happend to millions in the great depression. Happened to I don't know how many across the rust belt the past 20 years as blue collar manufacturting jobs got offshored. In a large area it's not quite as bad, but smaller areas with a few key employers can be devasted when the factory closes. Then all the same sort of homes get dumped on the market while people desparately look for alternative work. I know several folks that happened to back during the mini crash following the huge oil price surges of the early OPEC days. when every other home on the block has a for sale sign, people really do lose equity. Stuff happens I guess. No one can really predict, all you can do is guess based on current realities and past history. Bubble economies (based on counting your future chickens before they are hatched mindsets) lead to crashes, they always have. Most people are maxed out now,we are at the lowest savings rate and highest debt rate ever,so they (still generalizing) couldn't stand much in the way of a long term layoff/unemployment and still keep their homes, much as they still would need a place to live..
Hate to break it to you, but Craigslist has been there first. Heck, localized Usenet groups were around before Craig even got email.
A few years back, I was involved with a great idea: Monitoring diabetes patients. The idea was to have patients use their monitors, the same one you can find at your local W@l*M@rt, on a regular basis, then occasionally hook their monitors up to their computers (or another specialized device with a modem interface) so that their data can be uploaded. Their doctors will view their patient's data via their secure session on the Internet. By the time that my involvement ended, there was support for many diabetes monitors and even other devices (like blood pressure and weight scales).
The idea was strong and the geek factor was way cool, reverse engineering the monitors and stuff. But there were external problems, mostly meeting FDA requirements. Ultimately, by the time I left the project, they had other internal problems not really related to the technology, but with the direction of it's application. It's still in existence, but not widespead as it should be.
Coderz 4 Life
I should have used "JVJ Enterprises" or something similar instead of "C.U. Seamy". It probably would have made the P.O. box thing more obvious to some people.
For people that respond to spam, come-ons from VCs and investors.
AS400 ... hackers despise it. [1]
... 1Hr 48m, 37.3Mb, recorded 2004MAR17:
... 37Min 45s, 8.6Mb, recorded 2003SEP18:
After reading this about VC`s fishing for talent to build their ideas. I couldn`t put the thought out of my mind that `these guys are doomed`. Someone may bite at the money. Would you?
I don't see any interesting problems. Just lots of little nasty ones.
Thoughtful listening:
One of the biggest shifts I`ve seen this year is audio. Audio scales. [2] It brings the ideas forward with more immediacy than the written word. I don`t have to be at the conference to hear these speakers. IT conversations [3] has a whole heap of talks suitable for those interested in start-ups. For example....
* Paul Graham on Great hackers [4]
* Clayton Christensen about Capturing the Upside [5]
* Tim O`Reilly on The paradigm shift [6]
* Ben, Mena Trot on Six Apart [7]
But don't think Pod cast. This is more radio than Pod and the ideas are lasting ones.
Nasty little problems make you stupid.
Good hackers avoid it like models avoid
cheese burgers. [8]
Great Hackers:
The Paul Graham talk, Great Hackers, is humerous and insightful and all about the types of problems hackers find interesting. Graham poses lots of good questions on hacker motivation, what kind of projects hackers find worthy of solving, their tools and optimal environments.
Innovators Solution:
The Clayton Christensen talk has to be listened to carefully. His talk is about the answers, to the questions posed in his book Innovators Dilemma.[9] The core idea is that creating a start-up is less hit and miss than first appears. Christensen has devised a model that can be used as a guide to turning an idea to an enterprise.
The Paradigm shift:
Tim O`Reilly has written about, The paradigm shift in his article on the same name. His idea is that software like hardware is being comoditised. Therefore, the opportunities are not in hardware or software but the three c`s... accommodation's, collaboration & customisation. Listen to the talk or read the article [10] to find out.
SixApart:
What is it like to run a start-up? Ben and Mena Trot have ridden the Blog Wave with their company Six Apart. The Trots talk about what may appear as trivial, day to day things about their business. None of the pie in the sky ideas, just how they solve problems like, What are the consequences of changing business focus from a software development company to a software service company.
Reference
[0] `Paul Graham`, Great Hackers, talk, runtime... 30m 50s, 10Mb, recorded on 2004JUL27:
http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail188.htm l
[Accessed August 28, 2005]
[1] `Ideas For Your Next Tech Startup`, Slashdot.org comments on VC ideas they want to fund:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/27/022320 5&threshold=3&tid=187&tid=1
[Accessed August 28, 2005]
[2] Audio recordings scale (just like Linus does not). You can get the ideas from the source speakers with more immediacy that reading the words.
[3] `ITConversations`, A bottom up, audio based geek community:
http://www.itconversations.com/
[Accessed August 28, 2005]
[4] `Paul Graham`, Ibid.
[5] `Clayton Christensen`, Capturing the Upside, talk, runtime
http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail135.htm l
[Accessed August 28, 2005]
[6] `Tim O`Reilly`, The Software Paradigm Shift, runtime
peterrenshaw ~ Another Scrappy Startup