There are companies I review every day that I don’t write about. Reasons vary – it’s been done already and the product isn’t even as good as what’s been done, its a mostly or totally one-way application, or it isn’t consumer focused (or have implications for consumer focused applications). Even with this filtering, I get flame comments on some of the stuff I do choose to write about as “not worthy”.
But there are a number of companies and/or products that I would like to write about but don’t exist. I’ve been keeping a list over the last few months and I am posting it now.
Some of these are big ideas, some small. Some could potentially receive venture backing, most wouldn’t. But I believe that a viable business could be built by an entrepreneur around any of these, and I will be happy to profile them if and when someone builds them. In a way, this is number 11 in my previously post “Top Ten Things You Can Do To Get Blogged“, but its also much more than that.
And let me know if and where these should fall in Nivi’s matrix.
1. Better and Cheaper Online File Storage
Photos, movies, music and important files take up a ton of hard drive space. I recently purchased a new desktop computer with a 250 GB hard drive, and the hard drive is full from recorded television shows that I haven’t watched yet. Yeah, I can buy a network drive for my house, but they are expensive and if the house burns down I’ve still lost everything.
It’s amazing to me that all of us aren’t backing up our important files online regularly. As far as I’m concerned, the only reason is because no product has emerged to fill this tremendous demand, with the right features and at the right price.
We need a good product. Something as easy to use as the Flickr uploader on the client side, and easy web access. These tools need to go a generation or two beyond what xdrive is offering.
Features I’d like to see: drag and drop file adding and removing, an rss feed for my files, tagging of every file for easy search later, easy sharing, and the ability to publish files to the web with permanent URLs. And off location backups in case your building burns down.
Pricing needs to be dramatically lower too. Find a way to make this cheap. Include ads or whatever, but this needs to be very low cost (remember that Google offers over 2 gb of mail storage for free). Xdrive is currently $10/month for 5 gigs. Even Godaddy, at $10/year for 1 gb, is way too costly.
I have no idea what the cost economics for a business like this are, but plan for scale and give some amount, at least a gig or two, permanently free. No 15 day free trials – we see right through that. Give me a lot for free and let me scale up to, say 500 GB for $20 per year.
2. Blog/website Email Lists
People can visit my site, and get the content via RSS, but I know of no quality service to allow people to subscribe to my site via email.
I hate to rip on Feedblitz, which is really the only choice right now, but it sucks. It’s orange. Really ORANGE. I want the look and feel to be TechCrunch, not theirs. I want people to have the option of getting an email every post, every day, or every week.
I also want to know that I and I alone control these email addresses so that they will not under any circumstances be misused. If I change services, I want to have an easy export feature to take these with me (OPML would be nice).
I also want access to real time stats. The number of emails, type of subscription, how often they are opened and what things are being clicked on.
And users need a very easy way to stop the emails.
I’m willing to pay for this. Probably as much as $20 per month. A free version should be offered too that’s add supported and maybe doesn’t have the analytics.
I’m frankly amazed that Feedburner chose to partner with Feedblitz to do this instead of building it themselves. It wouldn’t be that hard to build. And the Feedblitz interface disaster wouldn’t be detracting from the Feedburner brand.
3. Portable Reputations
eBay’s Feedback system is arguably their biggest asset. Even with its flaws, it is one the biggest drivers of trust between two people buying and selling who’ve never met and never will. But it’s a closed system, usable only within eBay and only for eBay transactions. We need an internet-wide identity and feedback system that any reputable application can tap into, both pulling and pushing data.
A couple of companies have taken tentative steps in this direction, but they have until now kept the data in their own silo, demanding people come to their site to provide feedback. I reviewed iKarma, one of these, in October and practically begged them to change their business model. So far they haven’t. Opinity is much the same, although they offer partners the opportunity to tap into the data. These centralized data plays have no chance on today’s internet. Why even bother.
Here’s what we need – a referee and a scorekeeper. Open (I didn’t say free, mind you) APIs in and out, not just links to feedback scores. Figure out the rules (keep it flexible) and let other applications feed the database. Somebody please build this. Or eBay, open up your Feedback API.
I’m not alone in pleading for this. See what Rob Hof and others have to say as well.
4. Tailored Local Offers (via RSS)
Build a website. Let users give as much or as little demographic and personal information as they wish. Partner with a big sales force that already has access to local businesses (citisearch, yellow pages, whoever). Offer me (via email, website and RSS) special offers from local merchants. $5 off a pizza. Free first time dry cleaning. A cup of coffee. Whatever. I’ll eat it up (and so will everyone else).
5. Facebook, in other countries
Somebody’s gonna do it. Why not you?
6. Free Music
Music will someday be legally free. There is just no other way. Artists, label and promoters will need to make money in other ways.
Limited edition cds and dvds. Concerts. Tshirts. Whatever. Face reality and do it sooner rather than later.
7. Open Source Yellow Pages
YellowWikis is sort of on the right path, but drop the wiki aspect (as I’ve said before, wiki’s are hammers, but not everything is a nail), add tagging and make it open source. Or at least open APIs in and out. Make money from local ads and premium listings.
8. Podcast Transcriptions
Podcasters need transciptions. Many people don’t have the time or inclination to listen to every podcast they want to. Search engines can’t index the content. Transctiptions fix both problems.
Hire transcribers in a low cost country. Offer podcasters reasonably priced transcriptions (bonus: in multiple languages). I’m thinking $10 per half hour. Partner with the podcast directories, search engines and tool providers. Mint money.
9. Decentralized Review Aggregation
There are millions of passionate reviews of every product and thing you can think of sitting out there in the blogosphere. Don’t try to get people to re-write all this stuff. Leverage tagging, RSS and, eventually, microformats to aggregate it and make it searchable/findable. Wonderfully, chaotically decentralized. Ad supported.
10. Build Something Cool with SSE
Figure out how to leverage this before everyone else does and build something beautiful and amazing.
UPDATE: Richard MacManus adds a few ideas of his own.
UPDATE: Adam Marsh adds my startups into Nivi’s/Ethan’s matrix, using numsum. Wow, numsum is pretty cool.
#1: The current problem is that people’s home cable/DSL connections are very fast downstream, but very slow upstream, due to both technical and policy limitations. Uploading 250GB over my cable modem would take eons. strongspace.com is doing good work in this area, though.
#3: openid.net could be a good start for someone to build upon.
#8: Mechanical Turk?
Well, for item #1 you might poke around with openomy.com – they have 1gig free, use tagging, and even are offering open apis to access (read/write) to their filesystem
Have you seen Openonomy
http://www.openomy.com/
What about doing podcast transcriptions via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk?
On #8, there’s HyperTRANSCRIBE:
http://www.rese...r/pr051108.html
So Mike, no love for human search engines?
I don’t know if it quite fits the bill for #1, but it’s close. Try box.net. It at least has RSS & sharing. 1G/2.99 month.
Great post! I wrote a response in ZDNet, but here’s the gist of it:
To that list I’d add there is a real need for what I’ve termed Aggregator 2.0 (original, huh?). By that I mean an RSS Aggregator that is a lot smarter than the current generation. I want my Aggregator to get to know my preferences, automatically filter out content that won’t interest me (start with duplicates and go from there), do future searches for me, triangulate stories, and a whole lot more. Kind of like Rojo meets PubSub meets memeorandum meets Findory meets Chandler meets something nobody has invented yet. In a nutshell, it has to be more like an agent or a bot than a piece of software. So not much to ask then
More here…
About #8: Isn’t that the whole point on blogging (I mean traditional blogging, with sites and text and all)?
1. Better and Cheaper Online File Storage
You should check out http://www.mozy.com – they do free backups over the internet.
Check out Enablr: we’re taking a stab at #8 on your list (podcast transcription) and #2 (blog to email lists) could easily be an offshoot of the rss feed management we’ll be doing for both transcribr and for stenographr (which converts blogs to snail mail). We’ll add it to our to do list.
Oskar, yeah, but I know that I would really like transcriptions for the podcasts I’ve done.
checkout http://www.r-mail.org/ for #2
Pity about the poor design (almost as orange as feedblitz). In fact, i only mention it because you can subscribe to OPML.
Wow, I’ve read through the whole post now.
A few of these ideas are really quite brilliant. I hope people will take you up on them.
Thanks Sidd!
Of course, I’m not giving away the best stuff.
Hi Mike. My stealth-mode startup is about to commercialise what I believe is what you are asking for with #1. A lot of the comments here have pointed to other providers but every one of these is a ‘me too’ of xdrive – which is a technology and business model that is over 5 years old. Our offering (currently in early alpha) covers what you have mentioned and the client software goes beyond what flickr uploader does by being tightly integrated with the host operating system. We will also be supporting windows, mobile, mac and web from day 1 with public beta due around christmas.
Only problem with your comments is the pricing – no provider can afford 500GB for $20 and build a business out of it, 2GB for free is much more reasonable but it would be bandwidth limited (as the flickr free account is). I will get in touch with you and give you more details if you are interested in hearing more, otherwise there is some basic information and a beta signup form at http://www.omnidrive.com.au
Great Post. On #1 esnips gives you 1GB of storage for free (although you are limited to how much you can upload in one go)
Re: #3 – this is what we were trying to do with Repuserve.com.
That site at present is where we stopped after a few hours of hacking =)
Basically, you could aggregate through Repuserve eBay feedback ratings + your own ratings.
It would be URI based like del.icio.us and gravatar.com –
I.e. pass an email address, URL, ebay user id, slashdot id, etc. and give a feedback score, or obtain someone’s feedback score.
Could also leverage in the data we’re aggregating on WhoLinksToMe.com.
#1: http://www.gmx.net, the biggest german Mail&Messaging provider (~120 million visits/month) gives every user a 1Gig Filestore for free, accessible via secure WebDav. Without tagging, rss etc. I think “pure” File storage my well become a commodity. The business model seems to base on Photo prints, MMS, etc., directly from the drive.
Regarding #5 – firechat.co.uk is coming for UK students. Got a little way to go before Beta but people can sign up for news updates. Also, our developers are very excited about SSE and have already thought of some great uses for firechat students. Thanks!
#4. Pigsback.com, since 2000 in Ireland, 2005 in UK. email based but I’d imagine only a matter of time before rss available.
Nice ideas – I’ve done some work on a few of them myself. Follow-up post here:
http://mashable...for-techcrunch/
I’m also interested in Portable Reputations, but how would it work?
Reputations an eBay are easy. They’re based on transactions that are related to eBay, and you either shipped a good item or you didn’t.
Reuptations in real life are harder. What is the criteria? When does someone add feedback about you, and how do you know what its related to really exists? How is it monitored? On eBay you leave feedback when a transaction is complete, not just whenever you feel like it.
What do you do when a hundred pranksters gang up on you and leave you false negative feedback?
I suppose feedback would be weighted and work a little bit like PageRank. A new user with no feedback wouldn’t be able to put much of a dent in your reputation, but someone with a higher feedback score could.
#2.
Some facts:
You CAN change the color scheme in FeedBlitz – it’s called “Pro” and is only $4e.95 per feed per month (but if you want to pay more, go ahead
).
You DO get real-time stats on subscribers. That’s the dashboard. It’s FREE to all. And if you have FeedBurner, you get all the click through metrics from them, regardless of whether you used the integration. Their basic services are also FREE to all.
We DON’T abuse mailing addresses. Never going to happen, and those who use dedicated email addresses to track us know that this is true. You’re very close to asserting otherwise which is uncalled for, unjustified and flat out untrue. You can simply copy / paste them out if you like – it is that simple and they’re YOUR subscribers, not ours – a text file export will be along in a few weeks for users with larger lists.
So what you’re saying is that
a) FeedBlitz sucks because it’s orange and you don’t like orange.
b) um…
c) that’s pretty much it.
FeedBlitz works. It’s trustworthy. It’s customizable. There are thousands of happy users and tens of thousands of readers.
Don’t like organe? Get rid of it! Sign up for the custom look and feel. Free 2 week trial, 4.95 per feed.
Those are the facts – I’m sorry you couldn’t find them before you wrote about us.
Phil
FeedBlitz – http://www.feedblitz.com
#1. How about an ‘upload to your online drive’ FF add-on and let the online-drive server take care of the rest.
Instead of downloading it to your computer and uploading it to the online drive. Should save bandwidth.
The server should also skip uploading if the file already exists on some other users online drive. Now that’s a social web2.0 app.
As for #2 – “Blog/website Email Lists”, I absolutely agree that there’s a big gap over there. Meanwhile, there is a workaround to this. You can create a Google or Yahoo group and feed your RSS to it. And then provide a link of the group on your blog for people to subscribe. This can work with RSS as well as OPML.
Idea #11. How about a universal login system? It’s about time we get past add-ons or applications that fill out your login info. If any member of GYM (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft) came up with an open authentication API it could give them an edge over the other two. Or, maybe a better solution would be an industry standard.
The branding of your newsletter is possible with FeebBlitz. Its $4.95 a month for one feed or $24.95 a month for all of your feeds. It lets you customize the look and feel of your email and the landing page. Its not great, but it works.
I’ve been using the AllMyData service for day to day backups. It’s a P2P setup.
http://www.allm...a.com/index.php
You pay either with hard drive space (give 10GB to get 1GB) or cash (to get closer to 1:1. I like their setup better than most other offerings because it scales according to your usage. You pay more (or will when it’s out of beta) the more you use.
Keep in mind that GMail keeps a *per-email* limit that effectively keeps you to a lower limit. If you had to spend a billion dollars one at a time, there’d be no buying of cars and houses and you’d actually have difficulty spending it.
Video and audio storage are a whole other level of storage compared to other files. Given how few decent solutions exist for even documents and pictures (more in the last year or so, but still), the likelyhood of 300GB storage for $20/yr, you’d actually have to be customer for 5 years before the service would even break even on the hard drive itself, much less the bandwidth, redundancy (you didn’t want to lose your data did you?), customer service, payment overhead, deadbeat customers, etc.
If you really need that much storage, do what I did for video and audio. I bought a $125 machine from Retrobox.com (1.2Ghz), put Linux on it and threw 2 300GB drives in it and made them into shared drives.
With regards to 1, someone should go to talk to Penn State (http://citeseer...en01pstore.html) and see about commercializing that concept. If it were encrypted, wouldn’t you trust 10 friends with your data?
My mom wouldn’t use any of these. How long will it take before the Web 2.0 meme starts making tools for people aside from high-end tech users?
Have you seen http://www.botablog.com/ for the email of blog updates (#2)? I’m using it on my blog at http://www.healthcareguy.com and it seems to work well.
#1: http://www.stro...space.com/plans – about $2/GB/month.
Howabout an intermediate RSS feed creator for plain old-fashioned web sites? There are plenty of regularly updated “web 1.0″ sites there that people need to keep track of. Keep it free and push all the ads you want! One paid service I know of is http://trackengine.com and they are email based.
#6 Free Music
It’s just one band, but Harvey Danger (http://harveydanger.com) decided to see how offering their entire album for free would work for them. I set up the infrastructure for them to do it for as cheap as possible. Their goals were modest, but the experiment is doing better than expected. They are somewhat unique in having some latent name recognition, but anecdotally, there seem to be plenty of people digging the new record who’d never heard of them before.
I think there is a real opportunity for providing low cost services to bands that want go this route that also help them maximize revenue from merchandise, touring, etc.
How about something to take notes, but in a more interactive way.
I’ve been searching for this a long time: there are sites who offer something to take notes, but it’s always limited to plain text or HTML. I would like something to take notes with diagrams in them. You should be able to draw the note, but write it to.
Of course, currently this is only possible if you use a Java applet, and nobody wants to use that anymore.
Re #9: check out http://urbnforage.com/pulse
I’m aggregating all the chatter around various fashion sectors (footwear, denim, etc) from the multitute of product blogs that continually cross-post information.
regarding #1, is there really enough demand for a business. Am I the only one who backs up all his files via web mail. Just fire it into gmail or yahoo and forget. If I need it I search for it later. No bells and whistles, but unbeatable free pricetag.
I like Umair Haque’s take on this:
http://www.bubb...entences-on.cfm
Here’s my take on what he means:
http://opposabl...2/rss-remixing/
- David
Looks like you hit a nerve with #2!
Don’t like FeedBlitz orange? Want to add your own logo? Change colors, fonts? Add your own promotional materials, ads or other graphics?
Now you can, with FeedBlitz Pro.
http://feedblit...-customize.html
(Disclaimer: I work for the company, so I’m a bit biased).
Better and Cheaper Online File Storage
Streamload.com has a new product coming out in the coming weeks that has features similar to what you’ve described. Streamload MediaMax will offer 250 GB of storage for as low as $9.95 per month. Your Streamload MediaMax account uses file tagging so that you can easily organize and locate your files when searching, easy file hosting/sharing (using simple, permanent URLs), drag-and-drop uploading, an API for developers to create their own Streamload-enabled applications, and lots more. Free accounts offer 10 GB of storage space and are not limited to a trial period. Streamload MediaMax is currently in beta, but we’re hoping to have it released to the public very soon. Streamload has an existing service at http://www.streamload.com that has similar capabilities, but Streamload MediaMax will have an improved interface and greater storage and bandwidth offerings than currently available.
Unfortunately, an RSS feed for files isn’t going to be available in the initial release, but is something that’s on the agenda for future updates.
Anyway, it sounds along the lines of what you described, so definitely check it out.
As for subscribing via email – http://www.rssfwd.com. Here is the page for publishers – http://www.rssf...sfwd/publishers
-
Mike
Re #2 – check out MessageCast (we were acquired by MSFT this past May) – it does email, SMS and IM. Handles feeds, is customizable, etc etc
http://signup.alerts.msn.com
Have you profiles all the blogging networks in Feedster’s top 500?
3. Portable Reputations
^ Already been working on it for the past 2 or 3 months. Implementation details came about as the result of an interesting email exchange between myself and Scott Laird on how to make OpenID work for more than just authentication. Essentially a free reputation reporting agency, much like the credit reporting agencies.
Hi Michael,
I’d like to point out that Item 6 in your list, Free Music, is alive and growing.
In last weeks, Time magazine (Nov 21, 2005), you’ll see an article covering the “Top 20 Online Music Sites.” One of them, http://www.ArtistServer.com – is a site I run on that I think you might be interested in.
In the last year, I’ve added: RSS feeds, Tags, a Friend networking system, support for ringtones (even sending them to your phone), blogs, creative commons licensing, and more.
The site is going a bit slow right now – I’m in the middle of a migration to deal with the traffic.
In the coming months, I’ll be launching a station and playlist system on the site, which includes RSS Audio Feeds (podcasts), in addition to a photo sharing environment with group support (ala flickr). I actually just finished all the code for the station/playlists and podcasting, but the server can’t handle the traffic as it is, so I plan to turn it on after the migration is complete.
If you have a mobile with Web access, you can hit the mobile version of ArtistServer.com – just type in the same URL. The mobile site is in beta, but you can still download the ringtones (free). I’m not 100% sure, but ArtistServer may be the first Independent music site w/ a mobile site.
There’s a lot more planned, If you like to chat sometime
, I’d love to talk about the site and what I plan to launch next year.
Thanks for the great blog, and company profiles.
Gideon Marken
You might be interested in Strongspace.
RSS 2 email? Feedblitz is only the latest there are about a half dozen, including my own R-mail.org.
There is another nice service that deals with issue #2 (well, the RSS to e-mail part, not the control part): http://www.rssfwd.com/
Although that ones also a little orange, you don’t have to send your readers there. You just put a subscription form on your blog: A textarea where the readers write their e-mail, and a submit button (but they are sent to a confirmation page at rssfwd.com for a little while before they’re sent back to your page.
And it’s free.
What about a lightweight, streamlined CRM or contact manager? I know 37Signals has one on the way…are they the only ones who also see a need for this?
Seems it’s the bloated Act! software and heavyweight salesforce.com at this point.
Sxip is doing some interesting Identity 2.0 stuff.