How about this for a business idea that captures users’ intent and therefore enables highly targeted advertising? A web application that allows a user to broadcast a brief RFI (Request For Information) to all or selected companies in one or more categories, as well as to their customers. Besides advertising, additional revenue would come from premium [...]

In this post I outline a few features that I hoped Open Social was about but quickly learnt it wasn’t. When I first read the name of Google’s recent social networking play ‘Open Social’, I immediately made a connection with Open ID, expecting to read that it was finally a way to have one base [...]

There are plenty of write-ups on how to assess the viability of your business idea but here is my fairly simple take on it. Can you write a simple vision statement for your idea in the following format: “Our vision is to be the most useful X for individuals/companies who Y”, where X is your product/service category and [...]

It is no secret that Facebook needs to find a way to monetise and that Yahoo needs to close the gap on Google. My proposal for a Yahoo and Facebook partnership that might address both problems is as follows: Yahoo to provide an in-Facebook web search facility with an agreed ad-revenue split between the two. [...]

Every now and then I come across something that makes me think nothing is impossible in life. Below are five of such things that I have come across lately: 3-D printers that ‘print’ (more like create) real life objects and the fact that they will soon be cheap enough to have in our homes. Business [...]

I find it an increasingly worrying trend to find more and more startups openly admitting that they don’t know how they will make money yet but expect to figure it out later. Perhaps even more worrying is that these startups are getting funded. Notable examples recently include: Geni – as admitted by CEO David Sacks on the GigaOM Show. Clipmarks (which [...]

We all know that the P2P loans startup Lending Club grew remarkably quickly because it launched on the Facebook platform but given that it now runs on its own site, I am wondering what Facebook gained from hosting and more or less incubating Lending Club. I ask because unlike many of the applications on Facebook, [...]

There are a number of fairly new web applications out there that have caught my attention. Each of them appears to be very useful in its own right but in my opinion if they were all combined into one super product, the whole could indeed be much greater than the sum of the parts. The [...]

Clues: people I meet, mobile phones, twitter, crossed paths, social network, offline or online, exchange

A recent problem with my headphones got me wondering why online videos like those on YouTube do not have subtitles like many programmes on TV. One answer is that the commercial case is clear on TV – subtitling firms provide the service to TV stations for a fee. On the net the videos are mostly user [...]