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Turn Your Walls into Dry Erase Boards with IdeaPaint
Jul 27th
Where better to put ideas than on the wall? If you want to make your home, school, or office space unique, do so by turning an entire wall (or a few) into a dry erase board! That is certainly possible with IdeaPaint, which is a simple coat of paint that’s much easier to set up
A device that proves if you’re really sick
May 3rd
Calling in sick and “having a doctor’s note” won’t get you a free day off work anymore, at least not in Malaysia. A USB device, called SickVerify, will eventually substitute the role of doctors as providers of medical certificates. By August 2012, doctors across Malaysia will lose the legal authority to issue medical certificates. From then on, all workers will have to submit to a test using SickVerify to substantiate their claims for sick leave.
Using a complex series of algorithms, SickVerify measures the concentration of antibodies and cortisol (shows up specifically from stomach cramps) in the saliva sample to determine whether the subject was ill during the time period claimed for sick leave. The device is reportedly 98.9% accurate.
The test itself is blindingly simple and quick. The subject wets a fingernail-sized piece of cotton with his/her saliva. The cotton is inserted into the compartment of SickVerify, which is then plugged into any laptop or desktop via a USB socket. A program provided with SickVerify can then be run to begin the test (which takes approximately 3 minutes) and display the results.
This might not be a bad idea in the United States, as employers loss $1.8 billion from March Madness alone. But would verifying everyone’s sick leave excuses really fly in this country?
Which floor are you on?
Apr 19th
I consciously notice the floors of the buildings that I visit and try to indentify the people who occupy these floors.
That’s where I see interesting patterns between management styles and the floors of buildings:
The Ground Floor
The people on the ground floor are ‘hands on’.
Mop in the hand, doing the dirty work. Sitting in an office that has no cabins. Talking to the people around them while trying to manage the crowds that come in. Quickly getting hot and tired. Blowing their fuse while trying to be civil. Just wanting to do everything themselves.
The challenge being on the ground floor is that it’s easy to lose perspective. You can’t elevate yourself and peep outside – to get a chance to view what’s new & happening in the big wide world outside or spot encroachments that appear dangerously near you. Your life begins and ends on the ground floor.
All the firms I work with and respect in my personal capacity – my PR & Travel agencies, Tax and Investment Consultants, etc. neatly fall in this category. The more the business leans towards ‘service’, the more it seems rooted on the ground floor. The owners of these ground floor shops are busy running their businesses while personally attending to demanding customers like myself. They rarely get a break to do ‘bigger’ things.
They are martyrs who are happy the way they are.
The 5th Floor
It’s that in-between, hanging, middle floor. Stuck between the ground floor and the top floors. If you operate from the 5th floor, you are involved in day-to-day ops and once in a while manage to get out and lean forward. You can leave your job or work unattended for say a week, before things go crazy.
It takes hard working people a while to reach the 5th floor. So it’s not even easy to abandon.
This also seems to be the ‘inflection’ floor for lots of entrepreneurs. You can get a view of the world outside and can really see where you stand in your current position and where you can reach.
In early 2008, I met an entrepreneur in San Francisco who ran a Photo Sharing website (piczo.com) for teen and tween girls. The business was fully funded by Sierra Venture Partners. Clearly, this Company and the entrepreneur were on the 5th Floor. The CEO could see the Facebook Tsunami hurtling towards him and yet could do very little to escape. He was so patient during our girls’ games discussion while silently acknowledging the death by drowning that awaited him.
My humble advise to those on the 5th floor is to stand on your window ledge and try to climb upwards. Do whatever you can to ascend that building even if it means using your bare hands & feet like Spiderman – with lots of hard work, prayers and hope thrown in. In the end, if you stumble and fall, it will be worth it because it’s better to launch again and aim for the to once again rather than getting stuck on the 5th floor.
The Club Floor (One below the top).
It’s the floor that belongs to those who have arrived. The kind of floor that’s always granted a special status. It’s the floor everyone wants to visit and check out. The occupants have the world at their feet, silently comfortable with the fact that they are living with one more floor above them.
Unfortunately, heights make some people nauseous. You have to have a strong demeanor to enjoy the height – while not falling sick.
I place Jerry Yang and Yahoo! at the Club Level. Both are cult brands and have attained a very lofty status. However the height of success made Yahoo dizzy. It fumbled. The mist surrounding that floor made Jerry Yang miss the big revolution of Search and Social and he along with his Company now remain humbled forever.
Say what you may, Yahoo will always remain an iconic media brand worth billions of dollars. They have their name etched in Gold on the ‘floor plan’ in the building lobby forever.
The Penthouse (with high speed elevators)
Google occupies the Penthouse. So does Facebook. Twitter and Linkedin will join them soon. These Penthouses come with special elevators, which are only meant for the owners of that floor.
The promoters of all these Companies have one amazing similarity – they ride their Penthouse’s high-speed elevators with a vengeance! One moment they are on the ground floor starting up new features and businesses from scratch – the next they are on the 5th floor reviewing what’s happened within the business and then, kaboom – they are back in their Penthouse doing mega deals.
Just look at the way Google monopolized search, bought Youtube, Admob and routinely buys businesses almost every week.
Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Marc Zuckerberg actually own not just the Penthouse but also THE Building. Each and every floor belongs to them and they are comfortable being on whichever floor the situation demands.
The Terrace (with the Helipad)
Rupert Murdoch and Steve Ballmer come to my mind when I think of Terraces with Helipads.
They have the Capital to ‘land’ anywhere, arrive on top of any building as they please and then buy it if they want. ‘Hey – the MySpace building looks interesting; let’s just buy the damn thing. I like this tower called ‘Search’. Let’s just call it Bing.com and party like never before.’
The guys on terraces with helipads fly out when they feel like. One building more or less doesn’t mean anything for them. Observe how MySpace is crumbling and Bing.com is going nowhere. Now look carefully and see that the party is getting wound up as the helicopter’s pilot is whipping up his blades to fly the owners to the terrace of another building.
The Murdochs and Ballmers of the world can never repeat the glory of starting at the Ground Floor and climbing to the Penthouse. They are too spoilt and old.
The Terrace (without a Helipad)
ADAG and the Sahara Group are on terraces, which, unfortunately, don’t have a Helipad.
Their buildings are on fire (ADAG earned the distinction of being the ultimate wealth destroyer last year).
All the floors (see the businesses of these groups) have major problems on them. There are leaks, foul smells and a general rot in their buildings. Sure, from the outside they still look attractive, but those are pretty looking scaffoldings that will soon unravel.
ADAG ‘inherited’ the building with all the floors which is surrounded by crooks and sycophants whose interest is only in looting the furniture and valuables of the building and then take off (Career plan for the unambitious – join ADAG for few years, make a salary of a lifetime and then quit happily ever after).
Such buildings are not only self-destructive but also dangerous – they will ruin the buildings around them when they fall.
Finally, given that we have traveled from the Ground Floor to the Terrace, the point to ponder is not to get stuck on the floor that you are on but to make sure you carefully move UP from whichever floor you are on.
[via Rodinhood]
Startup Talk: Keepstream tries to reduce social media noise
Mar 30th
Some great startups come out of Startup Weekends and better so if you and your buddies cooked up a startup at Case Western Reserve. What started off as CorkShare – a tool to organize your social media streams across twitter and facebook has now evolved into Keepstream. Keepstream helps you organize it. Keepstream is a social media curation tool that helps you collect tweets, Facebook posts, and website bookmarks, and organize them into shareable, embed-able collection pages. This is useful for bloggers, marketers, or just about anyone who wants to curate the chatter from a conference or event, a news headline, or a hashtag chat. But even simpler than that, you can use it to organize your Twitter favorites and retweets, making it easier to share them with your friends or look them up later.
We have setup the Ideabing keepstream page ourselves and it looks as good as gold. Publicly launched in March 2010, Keepstream is a graduate of the Capital Factory early stage startup incubator program.
Startup Talk: ebook lending picks up steam, ebookfling launched.
Mar 28th
We know how popular ebook readers have become off late, growing at a higher rate than ever. Sure there are tablets spoiling their niche party but ebook vendors have found their way around by introducing ebook stores on all mobile OS and PC platforms. The industry saw an eye popping $1b spent on ebooks by consumers in 2010 which will triple by 2015 according to a report by Forrester Research. Although the market is growing via first time users the industry had to find a way to make money out of ebooks already sold to consumers.
Amazon and B&N did what was natural to physical books – allow users to rent books from friends (only). This limited scope of book sharing has spurred the emergence of new startups in the book lending space like Lendle, Booklending and Ebookfling that are aiming to transform an already evolving industry. Lendle and Booklending allows lending and borrowing ebooks on the Kindle platform (on any mobile OS or PC) while Ebookfling allows you to rent and borrow ebooks on both the Kindle and Nook platforms. But how does Ebookfling stand out from the rest? Well, they let you borrow and lend books using what they call a credit system within the Ebookfling ecosystem where you get 1 credit point for every book you lend which can be used to borrow another ebook through the system.
First time user? No problem – you can purchase credits at $1.99 a credit point. So how does it change the ebook ecosystem? This model potentially limits the amount of money flowing into the Amazon and B&N’s coffers by cutting off a substantial number of first time ebook buyers. For example, if Ebookfling has 1000 books available for renting and the system takes off, no new ebook adopter has a reason to purchase books directly from Amazon of B&N. Instead of spending an average of $10 per book, a lent book only costs 20% of the price although it stays with you only for 14 days before it goes back to the original user. Plus the used ebook is always in mint condition no matter how many people you lend it to.
So will it permanently damage the revenue source for Amazon and B&N? That aspect is yet to be explored. The recent API block episode where Amazon blocked its lending API to Lendle should serve as a notice to future entrepreneurs treading this path. Although Amazon reinstated the API’s access to Lendle, it was not before heavy media exposure to the issue. just like Apple’s App store policies frustrated developers (even today it does!) the ebook lending policies will require a lot of fine tuning and tweaking before it becomes a sustainable, profitable model and eventually create an ecosystem like the Apple App store. Ebookfling CEO George Burke notes that “the initial reaction may be a negative. Publishers and authors will claim the lending feature is being abused and causing cannibalization of sales. Authors are already bending over backwards by giving away many of their backlist (older) books free in the Kindle never needing to purchase.”
From an analyst’s perspective the market is ripe for more than 5 lending services to co-exist and be profitable in the long term. Let’s just hope Amazon and B&N do the right things over the next year.
Startup Talk: Happy Grasshopper wants to convert everyone you meet into a referral
Mar 24th
We have written about Publishedin and about how the referral landscape is changing. Today, we have another submission from a rather interesting startup that wants to make sure everyone you meet, not just email becomes a referral source. The startup – Happy Grasshopper is again changing the way you keep your contacts productive.
Happy Grasshopper is a referral marketing service that helps you turn anyone you meet into a referral source. All that you have to do is upload the email addresses of past clients and people you have just met. Happy Grasshopper’s writers will draft and send a friendly, relationship building message for you about every 3 weeks. Unlike traditional e-newsletters, the messages sent by Happy Grasshopper are designed as conversation starters and help you build relationships. You simply edit and/or approve the messages before they are sent. They are delivered from your email address and all replies go directly into your inbox.
This is an interesting model since it brings a personal touch to email marketing. This could be a game changer since email marketing has more or less been tagged as “spam” for the most part. After all. who does not want to maintain relationships in the world of global business that compels you to keep the conversation going.
Startup Talk: Time3 tries to solve the cloud security problem in its entirety
Mar 21st
Now that the “cloud” has taken over our lives it’s natural that startups will sprout like weeds in an ill maintained garden. But every now and then flowers blossom from among the weeds. Time3 is one such startup based out of Nevada, USA.
The most pressing issue about the cloud is about data security and privacy. What makes security implementation so difficult on the cloud is it’s complex architecture and multiple points of access, especially in public clouds. Time3 has engineered a brilliant solution that counters this problem by wrapping the entire cloud in a shield of sorts. By doing this, Time3 is trying to solve privacy and security problems as a whole instead of working on an incremental approach to cloud protection. Since the internet was designed to let you access prettily rendered HTML, the current scenario of web applications creates a scenario that was never imagined when the www was engineered in the first place. Time3 solves these issues while restructuring the way people access information from the cloud. We wouldn’t be surprised if Time3 is acquired by large cloud and security corporations such as EMC or Symantec in the near term. PR follows.
*********Start Press Release***********
US start-up company TIME3 Inc. has reached agreement to commercialize the Total Information Management Environment (cubed) “TIME3″ – a revolutionary framework that radically alters the paradigms underlying the World Wide Web. Online security, privacy, control, and efficiency are all at your fingertips with the TIME3 internet software solution.
TIME3 addresses the fundamental design flaws of the Web, including identity theft, e-Commerce fraud, privacy concerns, piracy issues, misuse of social networking, spam emailing and malicious viruses; that currently consumers have no option but to tolerate.
TIME3 achieves this by wrapping a protective layer (“Wrapper”) around the Cloud (content, information,applications and services) and providing a simple, secure, fast, relevant and integrated user interface that only talks to this Wrapper. TIME3 does not replace the Cloud, but provides this Wrapper to ensure the consumer is totally protected by providing them with a single, controlled entry point to the web. In effect TIME3 transforms the way people access and use the web by creating this controlled connection for each validated individual, through which they set their parameters for privacy and access to the Cloud.
The World Wide Web was never designed for the commercial applications and uses now being attempted. Companies like Microsoft, Google and Facebook are attempting to apply fixes and enhancements to address issues such as privacy, but they are just “band-aids” on a essentially flawed system.
TIME3 is a fundamental shift in the way you engage with the Cloud and as such is a dramatically different approach. TIME3 has been designed from scratch, with a commercial development approach that changes the underlying paradigms. Its unique 3-party Relationship Security model permeates the core technologies and begins with s SSL connection between the user interface and the Wrapper.
Key features of TIME3 come from each individual, business or other organization being uniquely validated ensuring they are identified throughout the framework. This validation of an entity enables core functions within TIME3 such as: secure access to the Cloud, eliminating the need for multiple login’s and passwords to each service; trusted communications eliminating spam, viruses and unrequested advertising; integrated functionality like Location Based Services providing a simple way for services to be enriched; data modifications needing to be approved by all relevant parties reducing the capability of fraud; and the removal of piracy through inherent Digital Rights Management. These are just some of the features of the TIME3 framework making the difference between this approach and the band-aids of the current technologies glaringly apparent.
TIME3 is not just a secure framework for the current Cloud technologies. It is also able to integrate legacy applications and non-web enabled applications, making this system just as relevant for businesses wanting to migrate in-house software into a Cloud.
TIME 3 Inc. is currently in discussion with a number of parties to secure country licensees to bring this product to the global market. For more information please visit http://www.Time3.org.
Contact: RJ Joksch, 602-324-9530, email info(at)intl-group(dot)com
Contact: Russ O’Kane, 918-407-2892, email russ(at)pacbri(dot)com
*********End Press Release***********
The Ideabing Ideabook Vol 2 now available for download. FREE!
Mar 17th
Here it comes, the second edition of the Ideabing Ideabook. This time round we have filled it with a lot more original content than ever before thanks to a lot of factors. A lot of startups have been featured in this issue of the Ideabook (about 300 of them!!). This edition contains all blog posts from July 2010 to Feb 2011. There are guest posts by entrepreneurs and VC’s in this issue so let yourself loose on this one. The pdf file is fully linked which means you can click and go to articles. As usual, the book is available for download free of cost. The file is about 16 megs big so hold your horses while the book gets downloaded fully. Please feel free to print it and distribute it as you like, we won’t bother you with copyright bullcrap. Enjoy! Download the book here.
Startup Talk: Appsplit wants to create a massive app marketplace
Mar 17th
We are seeing this as a trend now. When there are too many things to be sold what’s more better than a marketplace? But where there are 500,000 apps available for purchasing, it takes a whole new twist. A few good apps bubble up to the top and the rest get left out sinking to the bottom. All that siad, the app business is so lucrative that more developers want to dive headlong into the app scene without a second thought.
In tha pst we had featured Appbistro – a startup trying to create a marketplace for facebook apps. Today we are featuring Appslit – a startup that wants to create a marketplace for iOS, Android, Blackberry, WebOS and Facbook apps. Technically speaking, the concept is quite simple but Appslit has a whole new angle to it. While the startup allows developers to sell apps at wholesale rates to potential buyers it also allows app developers to work with Appsplit on making a product successful, for a cut of course. This is a brand new way to attract developers to submit and let Appsplit (called the Split program) manage apps that may or may not sell too well while looking out for potential whole sale buyers. This way appslit is doubling up as an app marketing consultant and borderline investor – taking anywhere between 40% to 60% of app profits based on the contract period.
Stratups such as these bring to my mind questions about sustainability of single owner apps. Yes, there is an opportunity to grow thanks to the ever growing consumer and manufacturing base for mobile phones and the ever growing user base of facebook. However, there is also a need for liability sharing in the app developer’s invetments since there are too many apps put there. This is what Appbistro is doing. Taking a share of the liability in an app’s journey to success is a great way to encourage development of new innovative apps.
All this said, we believe that there is space for a bunch of app marketplaces in the ecosystem as single the Android market and Apple Appstore get crowded. All this given, an intermediary who can manage risk certainly helps.
Startup Talk: Now sell off those group deals you bought and did not use through sellmydeal.com
Mar 16th
This day had to come. It’s an almost predictable cycle for products. Once you have something and cannot use it, sell it. Marketplaces prop up everywhere when there is second hand stuff that can be sold. Craigslist should get you up to speed with the size of the second hand market.
Now sellmydeal.com wants to help you sell off your unused discount coupons you got from group buying sites like Groupon. Why this sudden flash of genius? Well, numbers talk. Apparently 20% of all group bought coupons never get used. So why not just sell it to someone at a reduced price compared to the reduced price you paid for it already? In the end the second hand consumer benefits from this sale. Sellmydeal also sends out a daily newsletter to make your second hand coupon hunting even more of a breeze. Depreciation rocks or what! Whatever be the case we can almost predict that there will be hundreds of sellmydeal clones very soon if Groupon and Livingsocial don’t already have plans to start off a second hand delas marketplace. These guys support deal hunting in almost all major cities in the US and Canada. Watch this startup!
