For more information about the Y Combinator Challenge, check out this post first     

5. Enterprise software 2.0. Enterprise software companies sell bad software for huge amounts of money. They get away with it for a variety of reasons that link together to form a sort of protective wall. But the software world is changing. I suspect that if you study different parts of the enterprise software business (not just what the software does, but more importantly, how it’s sold) you’ll find parts that could be picked off by startups.

One way to start is to make things for smaller companies, because they can’t afford the overpriced stuff made for big ones. They’re also easier to sell to.

My Idea - Judy’s Book for Enterprise Software

I was at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Fran a few months back and if there’s one thing I learned from walking the conference floor, it’s that the enterprise software field is very, very crowded.  So instead of coming up with a new idea that will inevitably receive several “have you seen site XYZ? It already does this.” comments, I’m going to read between the lines of Paul’s idea and come up with an idea that improves upon the process of selling software to business (Pickaxes for sale!  Get your pickaxes here!)

Today’s idea is to take the community-review concept popularized by sites like Yelp, Judy’s Book, and others, and apply it to the enterprise software space.  Check out any of those sites for the overall basic idea, but here are a few features to make this concept pop in the B2B space.

• Self-Assessment Tool - This component would allow a user to fill out a questionnaire to get a sense of the type of software that may be the best fit to address the user’s business needs.  It would take into account factors such as company size, industry, budget, privacy tolerance, growth rate, etc..  Once the system determined the categories of software that the user may be interested in, they would get back a list of software options for the various categories, sorted based on ratings assigned by other users.  From here the user would have the option to purchase the software and (optionally) find service providers who can help with training, implementation, hosting, customization, etc..
• User Ratings and Comments - In this section, existing users of the systems can provide feedback on the system from a day-to-day user perspective.  This is very important for Enterprise software vs Consumer software, as it often takes a large up-front investment for customization and deployment before a customer can fully evaluate the usefulness of a system.
• Three Minute Demo Videos - This section would consist of a series of 3 minute (or less) demo videos created by the software makers to pitch the value propositions of their products.  Each video would be tagged and easily searchable, and would allow users to get a visual impression of the features and functionality offered from each product.

For revenue opportunities, there are a few options.  As much as I usually don’t advocate for ad-based revenue models, given the target audience and motivation to purchase, I think it might actually make sense here.  Another option would be to create a freemium model for software companies where they would be able to perform basic functions like submit product information for free, but might need to pay for additional services such as the ability to post demo videos.

What do you guys think?  Is something like this already out there?  Let me know in the comments below!

For more information about the Y Combinator Challenge, check out this post first   

4. Outsourced IT. In most companies the IT department is an expensive bottleneck. Getting them to make you a simple web form could take months. Enter Wufoo. Now if the marketing department wants to put a form on the web, they can do it themselves in 5 minutes. You can take practically anything users still depend on IT departments for and base a startup on it, and you will have the enormous force of their present dissatisfaction pushing you forward.

My Idea - InstantCMS

Nice - these next 3-4 challenges are right in my wheelhouse, solving problems with the current state of corporate IT.  I spent a couple years working on internal systems and tools at MS, so I’m pretty well versed on the problems that are facing the modern IT department.  If there’s one thing I’ve learned so far at MS, it’s the power of creating flexible systems.  Here’s one idea that I never got around to implementing, but definitely would have (actually, still would!) make my life a heck of a lot easier.

The basic concept of this idea is to bridge the gap between an application that was coded from scratch and a full CMS-style framework that only needs to be customized and deployed.  The CMS framework is ideal, but oftentimes you get stuck with a one-size-fits-all approach that causes serious usability and pretty-ability issues.  Custom coding definitely offers the opportunity to create the perfectly tailored app, but often requires time-intensive and costly rewrites and redeployments to make any updates down the road (and trust me, they will come). 

To get around this problem, I have an idea for a hybrid solution.  The idea is a magic piece of software that would allow power users to update sections of the custom-coded live site in real time, without the need to recompile and/or redeploy the site. 

Here’s how this could work. When the developers are creating the site, they can define regions of the site that can be updated.  To start this could be limited to blocks of text or static HTML functionality, but over time this could be integrated deeper down the stack.  Once the site was deployed, there would be a simple rendering engine running client-side within the browser that would take the output from the server-side code and re-render it in the live page.  Users with the proper permissions would see a special icon on the customizable sections, which would deploy a wiki-like editor to allow the user to make changes.  These changes would be stored back to the server in a special XML file.  Once the page was refreshed, the rendering engine would combine the original server-side code with the edits from the XML file to display the updated page to the user.  Of course, this solution would also need a way to resolve the changes on the server-side prior to the next deployment, but this could probably be done with a plug-in to the IDE. 

Here’s a quick and ugly diagram to explain the inner workings a little better:

For revenue I see this as a great freemium offering.  The basic version can be deployed for free but only within a limited capacity (i.e. can only be used for static text blocks).  The premium version offers support for updating full html and potentially even simple data-driven controls (i.e. adding an item to a drop down list). 

What do you guys think?  Better yet, does this already exist?  The awesome guys at Wetpaint are doing something similar with their Wetpaint Injected offering in the consumer wiki market, but it’s not quite what I’m looking for in terms of an enterprise solution… 

For more information about the Y Combinator Challenge, check out this post first  

3. New news. As Marc Andreessen points out, newspapers are in trouble. The problem is not merely that they’ve been slow to adapt to the web. It’s more serious than that: their problems are due to deep structural flaws that are exposed now that they have competitors. When the only sources of news were the wire services and a few big papers, it was enough to keep writing stories about how the president met with someone and they each said conventional things written in advance by their staffs. Readers were never that interested, but they were willing to consider this news when there were no alternatives.

News will morph significantly in the more competitive environment of the web. So called “blogs” (because the old media call everything published online a “blog”) like PerezHilton and TechCrunch are one sign of the future. News sites like Reddit and Digg are another. But these are just the beginning.

My Idea - The Newsroom

I get lost easily.  The other day I was a good ten minutes late to a meeting and was roaming the halls of a strange building when I turned a corner and stumbled upon what appeared to be the msnbc central command room.  There were glass windows on the outside and you could see all the editors, writers, and talent running around like crazy trying to discover the latest scoop and push it out to the millions of readers/viewers out there.  The energy in the room was amazing, it definitely looked like a fun place to hang out.  So for today’s idea, instead of trying to go all crazy reinventing the entire news space, I instead came up with a fun way to bring together the power and excitement of the traditional newsroom into a distributed online community.

In a nutshell, this idea is the “AP wire for the web”.  Picture a scenario where users visit a site and choose the role they want to play: copy writer, copy editor, fact checker, reporters, and editor-in-chief.  As news stories break in real time, users on the site would collaborate with each other online to publish formatted, high-quality stories via a web service and/or rss feed.  Here’s how this could work, following the workflow of a story as it progresses from the initial discovery through the final publishing.

Reporters - Reporters would be responsible for discovering the most interesting news items of the hour.  Reporters can submit their own stories that they find from a variety of sources (either fresh stories from standard news aggregation services or breaking news from their own sources).  The posted stories are displayed on the page, and the other reporters on the site can discuss which stories should be published (via chat, voice, or streaming video).  The reporters then cast votes for the stories they want to see published, and the ones with the most votes get pushed to the copy writers.

Copy Writer - The Writers review the stories that are pushed out from the Reporters and choose one to write up.  Writers have several different options of stories to write, such as 50/250/1000 word summaries or opinion pieces.  Writers work quickly to complete their stories and post them back to the site where they are fed along to the copy editors.

Copy Editor - The copy editor role is pretty basic - they take the initial stories from the Writers and fix issues such as spelling/grammar mistakes, style problems, etc..  Once the stories are edited, they are sent along to the Fact Checkers.

Fact Checker - Again, pretty basic.  Fact Checkers go through the stories and do some basic due diligence to verify any specific facts stated in the articles.  They are also responsible for making sure that the sources are properly attributed and to ensure that the posts aren’t simply copy/paste jobs from existing news sources.

Editor-in-Chief - The editor-in-chief is the only role that cannot be self-selected.  These are the top contributors on the site and are elected from within the community. These guys have the final say on whether a story is fit to be published to the live stream.  Editor-in-Chiefs also can make last-minute updates to the copy or send a story back to a specific team for further review.

So, what makes this idea work?  For one, it would be really fun!  This site would bring together people who are passionate about the discovery and creation of news into a fun, fast-paced environment that functions almost like a social game for writers and news junkies.  Also, instead of hundreds of individuals posting similar blog posts on each story that comes out (and likely not getting much attention on their own), these users instead have the option to come together and contribute to a story that would potentially reach a massive audience.

From a business perspective, this approach harnesses the wisdom of the crowds to produce a 24/7 high-quality web service that any site on the Internet can take advantage of.  Unlike traditional news aggregators that push out links or copy from hundreds of different sites with different voices and different agendas, this service would push out news with a uniform voice and standardized format (i.e. 50/250/1000 word stories).  The site would start off with standard news verticals (such as sports, entertainment, politics, current events, etc..) but could expand into almost infinite niches (think local/hyperlocal editions) using the same platform.

Thanks to everyone for the great comments on the ideas I’ve posted so far and welcome to all the new visitors to the site.  So far this series has been getting some fantastic attention - in fact, ASAD was at the top of the WordPress fastest growing blogs for 8/23!  As always, let me know what you think about this one in the comments below.

For more information about the Y Combinator Challenge, check out this post first 

2. Simplified browsing. There are a lot of cases where you’d trade some of the power of a web browser for greater simplicity. Grandparents and small children don’t want the full web; they want to communicate and share pictures and look things up. What viable ideas lie undiscovered in the space between a digital photo frame and a computer running Firefox? If you built one now, who else would use it besides grandparents and small children?

My Idea: The Jesus Browser

Remember when computers were big gray boxes with a bunch of cords hanging out the back of them?  And when cell phones were little black boxes with antennas sticking out?  And TVs were big or small, black or gray boxes with both cords and antennas attached?  Oh, how quaint and simple things were back then, before people realized the power of amazing design.  Good thing we all caught on to these trends and managed to learn from our past mistakes..especially with the most recent iterations of the popular web browsers!  Like IE’s black box with a text box and icons/menus at the top, and Firefox’s blue box with the text box and icons/menus at the top, and Safari’s…OK, OK, OK - you get the picture.

This idea is pretty hard to describe without images, but the basic idea is to create “the iPhone of browsers” aka a browser with a revolutionary new design that breaks the mold of the traditional box-with-text-input-on-top form factor.  I see this as having a modular design, and the user would have the ability to add or remove modules depending on the features and functionality they are looking for.  Here are a few of the specific features that would be a part of this new Jesus Browser:

• The browser could be pre-configured by a more computer-savvy member of the family and sent via Email to a parent, grandparent, etc..  This user would open the message, click a button in the message to launch the one-click installer, and within minutes could have the full application installed, pre-configured, and ready to go.
• The browser could be connected directly to a user’s Email account and would intelligently parse the user’s inbox for things like photos, messages from trusted contacts, etc..  These would be pulled out of the emails and displayed in separate modules directly within the browser’s main “canvas”.  Of course, the browser would notify the user when new content is available via simple icons and notification sounds.
• Instead of having the main interface be a text box, the browser would display a Facebook-like activity stream.  This stream could be pre-configured to display news stories and links to articles that the user might be interested in.  In addition, other trusted users could push items to this stream.  For example, if I found an article I thought my grandma might like, I could tag it and it would automatically show up in her stream next time she logged on.
• For text input, I’d actually not even bother putting a text box anywhere on the screen.  Instead, the user could simply start typing and a text box would pop up in the center of the interface.  At the bottom of this text box, there would be several different options, such as “Search” or “Send a Message”.  That way, a user wouldn’t have to go to the mouse, point to the correct spot on the interface, click the left mouse button, and start typing.  These are things that are intuitive for us, but can be very frustrating for new computer users.
• Some other optional components: A family tree (connected on the back end to geni or something similar), a safe shopping widget (all products displayed would be from trusted e-commerce sites), instant messaging (could interface with the major IM clients, trillium style), and a social game widget (with customization for children based on age)

Got any additional modules or features you’d like to see on this one?  Post ‘em if you’ve got ‘em.

For more information about the Y Combinator Challenge, check out this post first

1. A cure for the disease of which the RIAA is a symptom. Something is broken when Sony and Universal are suing children. Actually, at least two things are broken: the software that file sharers use, and the record labels’ business model. The current situation can’t be the final answer. And what happened with music is now happening with movies. When the dust settles in 20 years, what will this world look like? What components of it could you start building now?

The answer may be far afield. The answer for the music industry, for example, is probably to give up insisting on payment for recorded music and focus on licensing and live shows. But what happens to movies? Do they morph into games?

My Idea: If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em

OK - you won’t hear me sticking up for the RIAA very often, but for this idea I’m going to take a bit of a different approach to this very old problem.  Most startups in this space look at how to go against the RIAA, to come up with the one disruptive technology that will once and for all kill the old media empire and usher in a new era of free music utopia.  As fantastic as that would be, the truth is that the music industry is a multi-billion dollar establishment that will not simply throw up their hands in defeat when faced with the threat of a few punk kids with a killer idea.

Today’s idea is a startup that instead focuses on bridging the gap between music listeners and the RIAA.  How to do that?  First, look at what both sides want from the other.  The RIAA/labels are looking to identify the next hot artist or single that will let the execs hit their Q4 numbers.  Music lovers want to get insider access to the latest releases.  The solution?  A stock-exchange style site where the labels will post early cuts from their upcoming albums and newest artists, and users can “buy” shares in the releases they think have the most potential.  Users who “invest” early in the songs that hit the top of the fake stock charts can cash in their shares in exchange for exclusives from the label, such as autographed copies of the final released album.  Of course, for the RIAA, they get a way to run market testing and get back valuable demographic and trending information to determine which songs should be the first singles, which new artists to promote in which markets, etc..

Another idea I have in this area is a service to pull out just the 30 second hook from any song - more details here: http://astartupaday.wordpress.com/2008/04/09/startup-118-30-second-music-clip-service/

I’m an unabashed fan of the Y Combinator startup incubation program and very much enjoy reading Paul Graham’s excellent startup blog.  This past weekend Paul had a long post outlining 30 broad startup ideas that they would like to fund.  After reading through the list several times, I got an idea of my own.  Why not get back into my “A Startup A Day” blog in a big way - by spending the next 30 days working through the list one by one and coming up with an idea to address each and every scenario that Paul outlined in his post. 

Here are a few of the ground rules:

1. If by chance I’ve previously came up with an idea that addresses one of the scenarios, I’m allowed to repost that idea.
2. I get to take weekends off - unless I get really inspired (aka bored) and feel like doing a bonus post
3. I may need some help along the way - anyone interested in signing up to do a guest post for one of the ideas, just let me know!

This should be fun.  Let the challenge begin!

With all the chatter on the blogosphere today around the .me fiasco, I thought it might be good to take a break from my summer break to post up a few ideas around some killer .me domain ideas.  Note that I haven’t yet checked to see if these are registered (not that it would do any good anyway) but I’m avoiding all the obvious ones like aweso.me, hug.me, and, well, this is a family blog so I’ll leave the last one to your imagination. 

1. ChromeDo.me - Site selling hair restoration products
2. DoeRay.me - Users post videos of themselves singing popular songs, American Idol style
3. SoSue.me - Judy’s-book-style directory with peer reviews for lawyers
4. YouVs.me - Site to challenge your friends to various dares
5. DoYouLove.me - Secret crush site

What are your favorite .me domains?

We’re back with our next episode of “A Startup A Week”, the online reality show where we challenge a team of developers to build a startup in just one week.  For episode two, we’re trying something a little different by bringing together “A Startup A Week” with an event called “Incubation Week”.  Instead of working with just one team, Incubation Week brings together multiple teams of entrepreneurs for a caffeine-fueled week of coding, all leading up to a final presentation in front of a panel of experienced angel investors. 

For this video, I flew out to Boston to check out the initial Incubation Week event.  We definitely had a great time, check out the video to see if the teams were able to complete their apps in time for their presentations to the investors.

I’ve started up a new blog!  You can check it out at www.tchblg.com.  The name is a tribute to one of my favorite bloggers, Peter Rojas, and his new-school record label named www.rcrdlbl.com.  If Peter is leading a strike against vowels, then I’m going to stand up there with him.  

I’ll still be posting some ideas here, but TchBlg is going to be more of a regular outlet for my general thoughts about technology and some of the stuff that’s going on our there on the blogosphere.  If you’re reading this, chances are that you’d probably be a good addition to the conversation over on www.tchblg.com.  Hope to see you guys over there soon. 

I always did love this idea…

From my third-ever startup idea from this blog (and one of my all-time favorites, truth be told…)

There are lots of local restaurant sites out there. How to stand out? Simplify! Imagine a desktop widget that loops a series of tasty-looking pictures from nearby restaurants’ menus. The widget would show three things - the food, the price, and a “Food Me” button. If you see something that looks good, just click the button and the food will be delivered right to your office, home, dorm room, etc..

The set-up would be similar to Amazon’s one-click feature, where you enter your address and billing information, provide information about the type of food you generally like, etc.. Local restaurants would pay for the ability to market their food directly to “Food Me” users and work with a “Food Me” account manager to set everything up (menus, pictures, workflow for the restaurant to deliver food).

And here’s an interesting article from cnn.com that describes Pizza Hut’s new approach to online pizza deliver:

Pizza Hut, the nation’s biggest pizza chain, also allows customers to order via text messaging and mobile Web. The unit of Yum Brands Inc. soon will unveil a new method for ordering pizzas, dubbed “Pizza Hut Shortcut,” that it says will be the fastest in the industry. Customers will be able to download a “widget” onto their computers that will let them place their favorite pizza orders with just one click.