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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. "
"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
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!
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.)
Yeah right there is a LOT to gain from that.
Consider a first few programming class you took. Consider a average guy there. That's what you get when you try to build 25 person team plus all your time will go managing those twenty guys. However consider few nerd friends you got, and thats what you can get if you go for 5 person team. Next thing to consider is the communications thats more or less n style thing. There is only so many independent peaces you can split the application, and still those need to communicate with each other. In the end for us the 25 person team is a LOT worse solution than going for 5 person team.
I think I'd go for 5 person team at beginning rather than VC:s just to have better productivity and higher code quality.
Emacs is good operating system, but it has one flaw: Its text editor could be better.
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.
It seems to me that they are really millionaire entrepeneurs looking for business proposals for THEIR idea.