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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. "
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 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!
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
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
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 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.
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.)
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.
Do you really think these guys would give their really choice ideas for free?
We have solved step3) ???
Good idea, but what business can be build up with projects like opencyc?
http://opehncyc.sf.net/
Who needs AI? Why do AI solutions not scale? Whenever AI people sell "usable stuff" it is exaggerated. Whenever AI people provide nice stuff you do not know what to do with it.
where is the japanese 5th generation computer gone?
Who uses AI expert systems?
Why isn't there prolog installed on my machine?
Where are the neuronal network processor chips?
Why do search engines need no AI semantic net or AI language analysis.
why is there no fulltext translation tool?
Why are AI problems usually solved by non-AI methods?
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.
The word is spelled "mom's".