Free* ideas

[Rod Clarke]

Here are a bunch of free* ideas that I am not working on. I’ll keep adding to these as they come up, feel free to use them as I have a year devoted to one thing.

 

1)      Silicon Valley Lauchpads.  Engage with property investors to buy units in Silicon Valley and Rent them out to Aussies in 4 – 6 week blocks, have fully furnished, wifi enabled pads set up with guidance on how to open a us bank account, how to pitch etc etc (benefits – much better yield that Aussie RE investment, SV real estate market likely to boom and the Australian Dollar is favourable atm)

2)      Smartphone / Email / Social network integrated App. Imagine being a salesman. The client calls you and immediately your phone brings up your latest email exchanges, any Social Media updates that are relevant. (Benefits -  immediately when you answer  you are on topic and able to have a relevant information right at hand, you can also have rapport building conversations “how was your holiday” etc) – also have bluetooth   / wifi sharing to your laptop.

3)      Deathbook – a service that has all your social media and email passwords etc for safe keeping and cleans up you e-history on notification of your unfortunate and untimely demise.

4)      Foreign Student connections – I teach at the ICAA and have also taught at a few of the community colleges around town. Australia is sitting on a goldmine in terms of deep cultural links into Asia and India with these young students in terms of understanding cross cultural markets and business opportunities with the emerging middle class in these countries, but we are not developiong that goldmine.

5)      Question Generating App – You are about to go into a meeting with someone you’ve never met. And based on aged / gender and industry filters the app generates a few pithy rapport building questions.

 

* Free - but if you become a zillionaire out of any of these please flick some money to the charity of your choice .

[Ben Sand]

1) Being done by a few folk, but the best ones will always be a bit selective, and to be honest, include people from all areas, as well as Aussies. Also, see Startuphouse which is similar

2) Awesome

3) I'd like to expand the Deathbook, to just a general way to be able to store highly sensitive/secure stuff, and make it available to people based on certain conditions (eg. them requesting access and you not responding within a week).

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[Varun Prakash]

Great ideas Rod,

I am particularly interested in your idea #4,  what exactly would you try to aim at?

Thanks
Varun.

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Varun

[Ben Sand]

Yeah #4 is big need, just can't see the business model at first glance.

Also I have an X for Y for #3:

ifttt for dead people

[drllau]

1) Virtual Office with real-estate component (complete with roll-away cot)
I suspect the indians and other capital lite nationals already have under-radar ops ... see Alibaba in how they bootstrapped from several Hanzhou apartments.

2) SocialCRM ... I'm aware several startups already tackling this space

3) Deathbook == variation of medical vault ... if you can solve the PKI problem you will mint money

4) more an issue of social engineering than technology ... given the boat-people fiasco, I think the gov needs to refactor their attitude

5) if anyone is going into a business meeting without preparation, they deserve what they get.

#3 is the interesting problem.

Lawrence
http://www.linkedin.com/in/drllau

[Varun Prakash]

#4 What is being referred to is international students. These are the plane people (some may arrive on boat, not sure though).

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[Rod Clarke]

Thanks very much for all of your responses. Everyone says execution is more important than the idea and I agree with that. However I have so many ideas in the pipe that I'll just have to throw them over to the community to play with.

 

Re

"4) Foreign Student connections" its a massive missed opportunity  that we have all these young people who know Australias Society and Markets AND know their Home countries society and markets. A smart Funds Manager who wanted to invest in middle class consumption goods in emerging markets (like wine, beer, cigarettes, resturants, SMGC and durables) could use these kids. For example I would be very happy to invest $10grand on beer brewers in india (to go with all that indian food)

 

I also have a blog at http://cash4.it/ it contains broader societal and economic (my background) commentary

 

Cheers. Rod

 

More Ideas to follow.

[Rod Clarke]

Idea 6) SkinnyPicture.com (the url is available) Its an app that makes you look skinny, it takes any jpeg you upload and make you look skinnier using simple gimp techniques (i.e. making the foreground darker and the background lighter etc) this taps into a few trends, social media, photos, self obsession and (sadly) obesity.

 

7) abitcooler.com  (the url is available) everyone wants to be (somewhere, something, listening to songs)   a bit cooler than they are used to, but no one wants a dud, Its an app that takes your foursquare and faceboook place logins and song favourites etc and based on these it recommends places, resturants, songs a half a positive standard deviation away from the places you already visit. (based on song listens, resturant duration etc.

[Brendan Quinn]

One specific idea re #4 is what a mate of mine in London is doing...
he gets financially-savvy international MBA students (mainly studying
at London Business School where we studied) to perform due diligence
on companies in their home territories, or at least countries where
they have a strong knowledge. He then uses that analysis to run an
emerging markets hedge fund!

He does have some ex-Goldman fund managers as his co-founders so he
can do that sort of thing...

Brendan.