Great Ideas For Startups Today
Start-up Ideas
Just come across this great article by Paul Graham called Start up Ideas We’d Like to Fund - well worth a read I suggest, especially for those of us interested in using New Technology for Older Ideas.
Startup Ideas We’d Like to Fund presents 30 ideas that they think is cool - I have to say one or two surprised me, but then when I read Paul’s reasoning, it did make perfect sense.
For example:
Auctions.
Online auctions have more potential than most people currently realize. Auctions seem boring now because EBay is doing a bad job, but is still powerful enough that they have a de facto monopoly. Result: stagnation. But I suspect EBay could now be attacked on its home territory, and that this territory would, in the hands of a successful invader, turn out to be more valuable than it currently appears. As with dating, however, a startup that wants to do this has to expend more effort on their strategy for cracking the monopoly than on how their auction site will work.
AND
Dating.
Current dating sites are not the last word. Better ones will appear. But anyone who wants to start a dating start up has to answer two questions: in addition to the usual question about how you’re going to approach dating differently, you have to answer the even more important question of how to overcome the huge chicken and egg problem every dating site faces. A site like Reddit is interesting when there are only 20 users. But no one wants to use a dating site with only 20 users—which of course becomes a self-perpetuating problem. So if you want to do a dating startup, don’t focus on the novel take on dating that you’re going to offer. That’s the easy half. Focus on novel ways to get around the chicken and egg problem.
They also include an old favourite of mine - Better video chat.
Skype and Tokbox are just the beginning. There’s going to be a lot of evolution in this area, especially on mobile devices.
Talking of mobile devices I did find a link to http://www.heysan.com on their website. Apparently, Heysan! is a mobile web based service that lets you use your MSN, AIM, ICQ, Yahoo and GTalk accounts in your mobile phone - for free! It doesn’t matter where in the world you are, what network or phone model you use, their patent pending technology works no matter what.
The theory is good, I like it, but a challenge for me was that I could not see any obvious way to sign-up / join (but hey, maybe I did not look hard enough) - I can see how I am supposed to sign-in to MSN etc, but really I did not fancy just offering up my username and password just like that, especially when it was not even on a secure page.
Also the link to their Blog says, coming soon and it still says © Copyright 2007 heysan! inc. (surely it would have been updated to 2008 by now?
So I am guessing this is one of the Start-ups that Y Combinator are still in process of funding? Getting launched?
According to their home page - Y Combinator is a new kind of venture firm specializing in funding early stage startups. We help startups through what is for many the hardest step, from idea to company.
We invest mostly in software and web services. And because we are ourselves technology people, we prefer groups with a lot of technical depth. We care more about how smart you are than how old you are, and more about the quality of your ideas than whether you have a formal business plan.
Written by Michael on July 20th, 2008 with no comments.
Read more articles on Uncategorized.
