Most of them are web / software based, but oriented more towards B2B rather than consumer web. The resources and skillset necessary to implement vary significantly, so if you’re serious we’ll need to discuss. All of them will take hard work to build, but they’re scalable (I don’t bother writing down the small stuff).

I have limited time to get involved in implementation, but can take on an advisory role if wanted (I would want some equity if that’s the case, otherwise I’m just handing this stuff out). Will also connect you up to my network, such as it is.

Please feel free to share this post, in case somebody else finds this useful.

There are thirteen cellphone stores in the mall by my house. I counted. Each one uses slightly different combinations of primary colors in their logos. What I have to say here could apply to any of them, and I’m not going to name names. None of them are typically busy either, so I find this confounding.My phone company has been trying for several years to get me to upgrade my cellphone. Recently they’ve taken to mailing me pamphlets every two or three days, and calling or SMSing me weekly. Ignoring for a second the cynical thought that the phone company just wants to lock me in for another three year contract – I have actually tried to upgrade on numerous occasions over the past few years.

A quick explanatory aside: For those who don’t know me, my phone is (rather famously) a 6 or 7 year old, early-model smartphone (a “brick”), with slide out keyboard. It isn’t as large as the one in Wall Street, but it shows its age. If you drop it on your foot, you’ll be the one saying ouch.

The product line-up in the identical phone stores in this mall, typically consists of iPhones (which I don’t want for a lengthy list of reasons that I’m not going to discuss here), and a bunch of other identical-looking phones that are sold based on feature lists that don’t mean squat to me, and furthermore cannot be compared in an apples-to-apples way.

I’ve tried asking staff (on the rare occasions that I can get their attention) regarding which phones are “good”, and the responses typically have ranged from “I don’t know” to “they’re all the same” to an expressive shrug and a mumble that I couldn’t decypher. Looking at reviews online didn’t help either.

The situation is also compounded by daily stories on Slashdot that reveal the latest cellphone malware, or spyware deliberately installed by phone companies. Add in the financial instability of several phone makes, and this makes it difficult for me to know which types of cellphones are actually safe to buy.

Another aside: I’m not a difficult customer. Really. I’ve sold a lot of technology myself over the years. I’m decisive. I don’t ask much from the reps. Here’s the thing though: I don’t want to be treated like a (smelly) side of meat, and I also want to know what it is that I’m being asked to buy. I want to know that it doesn’t, for want of a better word, suck.

My take:

• Phone manufacturers (and carriers, and stores) need to stop the idiotic habit of “selling on features”. The computer industry realized this decades ago. I have absolutely no interest in comparing the clock-rates of two completely different phone chip architectures. Its completely irrelevant. Explain to me why this phone is good for me, why it has the best talking time in the industry, or the best warranty or whatever – or I’m walking.
• They also need to train their staff (and supervise them) better. I’m not going to buy from somebody who won’t give me the time of day or who can’t explain their product. Incidentally I’ve had that happen in car dealerships too – I was seriously considering a brand, and would have made a purchase on the spot, but the staff looked me up and down as if I was dressed in rags, and then ignored me – so I walked out and bought a different car elsewhere.
• Oh, and the stores themselves seriously need to differentiate themselves.

Until I can actually tell what it is that I’m buying, and have some confidence that it isn’t going to (literally) bite me, I’m going to stick to my old brick with its half-hour talk time.

Done grouching (for now).

1. TweetTV (http://tweettv.com)

They’ve collecting information from Tweets about TV programs, and doing some kind of analysis to provide people with recommendations.

The business model appears to be “be useful so that somebody acquires us”. That might actually work in this case.

Risks include the fact that they’re tied to Twitter. This means that if anything happens to the Twitter API, they’re out of business too. In addition, at some level of traffic, Twitter is going to start charging them, which might have cashflow implications. Never the less, this looks like a promising startup, and it might be one of the shorter term ones in terms of a potential buyout.

2. Valu Valu (http://valuvalu.com)

Not really a startup – they’ve been around since 2008, although it looks like they refocused their business model in 2010.

Valu Valu is essentially a web-traded hedge fund that specializes in ETFs. They have both fee-less and per-month-fee funds (obviously people need to put their own money in first), and use an algorithm that determines market sentiment from social media (there’s a number of companies doing that).

Not sure what their internal profitability looks like, nor do I have any idea whether they have a particular exit plan in mind. The nice graph says their funds are making money for their customers though.

3. Cull.TV (http://cull.tv)

An online music video channel. Looks pretty. I suspect somebody has put a fair bit of money into building this one. Not sure how they’re planning on making money (ads perhaps?) or what their timeline is for their exit strategy. Judging by sites like justin.tv, the model has “legs” though. Music videos aren’t my thing, but I’ll keep tuned here.

4. RAVN (http://ravn.com/beta/splash)

This one is coming later this week. RAVN is a local activity site that is in Beta (invite required). The “outside” interface is attractive – and cheeky – they allow users to play an arcade game for a chance to win an invite code. I don’t have enough info from the about content to work out exactly how the site functions, or what their business model is. Kudos to their design team though, and I’ll keep an eye out once I can get in.

Wahooly is launching on Tuesday. More on them below. Then the Facebook IPO will apparently be happening on Wednesday, which could potentially start off another big round of startup frothiness.

The overall level of excitement in tech is as boisterous as I’ve seen it in a number of years. Whether it has “legs” remains to be seen, but there appears to be a definite shortage of qualified people to go around. Over the past few months, the number of resumes sent my way has slowly dropped, and instead I’ve been receiving calls from head hunters and startups (although typically they haven’t bothered actually checking what I actually DO). It will be interesting to see whether things actually pick up economically (or even just in the tech world) over the course of the year.

Wahooly is an interesting riff on startup incubators, crowd-funding and viral marketing. The amount of attention that they’ve achieved in the past couple of months is larger than anything I’ve personally encountered. The basic idea is that startups give them a small amount of equity, which they then “share” among their users, in exchange for which the users promote the startup. The amount of “equity” given to each user depends on how effective the users are in helping to market the company in question, according to some internal formula. To avoid market regulations, it looks like they’re giving some kind of virtual equity to the users, rather than actual shares, and the users will only profit directly if there is some kind of liquidity event. Remains to be seen whether it will work (and whether they can keep it on the right side of legality), but there’s already a large number of users who have registered, and approximately 50 to 60 startups to begin with. My approach is to view it as a combination of an interesting source to find out about new startups (i.e. pure entertainment value), a possible deal flow source, and maybe, just maybe a couple of bucks on the side, somewhere down the road. In the meantime, I’ve been chatting with other users on two groups (here and here) that have been started on Facebook, and its been fun.

I’ll be posting regular updates with regards to Wahooly (and particularly the startups that are launching via their system) over the next few months. Also, two startups I’ve been working with are gradually getting closer to Beta launch, and I will have more to say about them as that time approaches.

Its time to finally do something about it (no use thinking about wasted time).

I will be including interesting posts that I’ve found elsewhere, plus some unique content that will only be available via the newsletter.

If you’re worried about subscription management, I will only be sending this out once per month, and the list will be managed via MailChimp, so you can always unsubscribe if it sucks!

Please feel free to subscribe via the form on the right hand side of the page (only if you’re interested).

Several people have asked me my opinion, so here goes.

1. I’ve made a habit of always logging out of Google services before searching. Not that I really care if they have a connection between an actual profile and my searched (after all, they have my IP address anyhow). I just think its none of their business, and as such I’m not going to make it easier for them. Based on what I’ve seen so far of the G+ modifications, I’m going to continue doing just that. The quality of the search results with G+ content included is poor. Google is either going to need to tweak this feature substantially in order to make it usable – or more likely they’ll quietly make it disappear in a few months.

2. A number of people have written about the dangers of excessive filtering – if everything that we see online have been selected for us based on our preferences, how do we ever hear about opposing points of view? Or anything new at all for that matter? I personally feel that the G+ mod is an example of this. One of my friends sent me a search that he did for “jeremy”, and fully half of the front page of results had to do with either my G+ profile, my website, or postings that I’ve made on G+. The issue is that if search results only pertain to your circle, then you’re being isolated from other information.

3. Of course, once he sent me a snapshot of his search results, I immediately did the same search – and was given a completely different set of results. If you and I both search for the same thing, and we see completely different things, how can we compare or share results? Its bad enough that Google already does this sort of thing based on locale (don’t get me started on this one – locale is useful if you’re looking for a restaurant, and stupid if you’re looking for anything else).

4. People don’t usually search for things that they already know. If they do, they’re looking for new info on the topic, not things that they’ve almost certainly already seen.

5. The vast majority of postings on any social site (G+ included) are one-off comments that are specific to a conversational context, or a particular time or place. I’m being generous and ignoring the fact that most posts aren’t even relevant there. Seriously – if I do a search and all I see is out of context posts from people in my circles (few of whom I actually know in real life anyway), how will I be able to find what I’m actually looking for? The signal to noise ratio just reached the babble point.

6. This is really, really bad for the SEO and web marketing crowd. Search just became completely unpredictable. Or maybe Google isn’t stupid – if you want to be found, perhaps paid search just became completely indispensable.

Anyhow, my take on this is that: a) this degrades search quality, b) people are going to avoid using it if possible, and c) its likely to go away soon.

The new theme, in case anybody is interested, is a heavily modified version of WordPress’ Twenty Eleven theme. It takes surprisingly little time to modify it to look completely different than it does out of the box.

I also used a number of typography cues from a web marketing site called Social Triggers. You can see the specific post here. The goal was to make the site easier to read, which I hope this accomplishes.

Image: Carlos Porto / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

I’ve had a number of conversations with people online in the past few weeks regarding the topic of why some people are so good at holding others attention online.

You already know the sort of people I’m talking about – they have tens or hundreds of thousands of follows on major social media sites, and people hang on their every word.

What we were discussing was the ability of people to grab our interest, not general influence (although in many cases these are one and the same people).

As I told somebody on Twitter, I think I have pieces of the answer. Not the whole answer, unfortunately. That would be worth its weight in various precious minerals.

Let’s exclude some of the obvious reasons first of all:

• Real world celebrities (it really helps to have a media company spend mega-bucks on behalf of your personal brand)
• Billionaires
• People with a major real world platform (i.e. CEOs of major corporations)

All of the above have a huge amount of leverage in terms of attracting attention. They could be the most boring people in the world, and still have a huge following.

A few other categories come to mind as well:

• Anybody who is giving away money. Venture capitalists fall into this category, even though they’re not really “giving” away money. From a psychological perspective though, its like they’re handing out lottery tickets though. People are generally going to be highly intrigued by anybody with even the slightest likelihood of handing them a bucket of cash.
• People who post a lot. You probably know examples of who I’m referring to – the people who post on Twitter every 30 seconds, and haven’t stopped in years. Pure random chance is likely to result in at least one post eventually connecting with virtually any other user of said site. On the flip side, they tend to have a lot of follower churn as well. And they also likely go through a lot of turnover in staff. Just saying. Relentlessly posting random material on somebody else’s behalf is a soul-sucking job.
• Experts. This includes world-renowned experts in particular niches (think famous scientist), awesome photographers, or people who have the secret to why some people are more interesting than others (and other marketing tricks). Some people who spend their time talking about SEO and blogging seem to inspire huge followings in particular.
• Talent. An awe inspiring talent can really hold everybody’s attention.
• Genuinely funny individuals. Let’s face it, when you spot something that really cracks you up, you’re much more likely to share it with your friends. I don’t know if anybody really understands why some people are more funny than others, so this is just an additional riddle that needs answering.
• People who have had something newsworthy happen to them. This can lead to 15 minutes of fame (sometimes more if the person in question is quick off the mark), but it is too random to really be of much use. Unless the newsworthy event in question was actually planned…

Or maybe its just all about how you say what you’re saying (and your visual presentation), as social marketing expert Derek Halperin writes (his website is an interesting read).

Or perhaps its all about what you do.

In other words, being interesting is some combination of who you are (platform), what you do, and how you (or others) present what you do. If somebody has a formula for that, I’d really like to know!

Newton's Apple - Flickr Creative Commons - Ann Kempster

If I’m right about the following thought experiment, this could have a huge impact on humanities technological advancement.

As usual, I have no way of knowing if the following is original. I’ve placed links to whatever I can find that’s relevant.

A metamaterial is a man-made material that has attributes that aren’t normally found in naturally occuring minerals. Some of these materials have made the headlines in recent years (think “real” invisibility cloaks). Harry Potter aside, they’re pretty useful in a wide variety of areas, including telecommunications.

Now for the thought experiment:

Picture a metamaterial that creates (at some focal point) the simulated effect of a different metamaterial. In other words, we’re simulating a metamaterial using a different one. I’m not sure what to call this. Maybe a meta-metamaterial. Or a meta^2 material.

Building something like this is probably going to be difficult, but I don’t think it is impossible (See edit #1 below).

Why this is useful is that potentially we could use this approach to simulate metamaterials that cannot currently be built.

At the moment, the state of the art appears to be metamaterials that resonate at optical or near-infrared frequencies. That’s on the order of magnitude of  Terahertz (or THz), or 10^11 Hz, or looking at it from the perspective of wavelength, 0.1 millimeters.

Using a meta^2 material, we might be able to simulate something that resonates instead at a wavelength that approaches the Planck length.

What I think – and I have no way of proving that I’m correct right now – is that such materials will give us the ability to directly manipulate the fundamental forces of the universe. I’m not the first person to think along these lines. See this article which quotes a paper on ARXIV.

Some examples of what could be possible if we can do this:

• Use the Strong Nuclear Force to build SF-style force-fields. Or industrial drill-bits that make diamonds look as soft as talc.
• Create resonance with gravitational forces. This could allow us to make artificial gravity, or gravity cancellation devices.
• Create extended areas of negative energy density. If Alcubierre is right, that could mean FTL.
• Obviates the need to develop nanotechnology. Why bother building something at nanometer scale, when you can simulate the effect with much less effort, and make it any size necessary?

Edit #1: To clarify (based on some readers comments): what we’re talking about is using either optical or EM interference from a metamaterial to form a waveguide that produces the effect of the second-order metamaterial. In other words, creating a waveguide that doesn’t have solid walls, and then working backwards to create a metamaterial that generates such a condition.

Edit #2: Another relevant link.

Edit #3: I found one paper (horrible translation from Russian) that appears to cover the math behind virtual waveguides. There’s also a lot of work that has been done on plasma-based waveguides (a step in the right direction – not using solids!) over the past decade.

International Pile of Money - Flickr Creative Commons - epSos.de

One standard piece of advice given to startups is to pick an industry that will permit scale, so that it is at least feasible that somebody in that industry at some point in time could build a large company doing it.

I saw a video on Yahoo Finance a while back where somebody claimed that Apple will be the first trillion dollar company (barring a brief stint by Cisco during DotCom).

Obviously it is hard to tell right now whether that’s true or not, but an industry that can support a trillion dollar company sounds like a good place to start, doesn’t it?

We know that this is possible in consumer electronics then, but what other industries would make this feasible? The goal here is to list industries that are big enough to support large companies (possibly even trillion dollar ones), and yet are still at least somewhat feasible for startups (potentially requiring substantial – but not unfeasible – capital).

I’m going to start with some of the obvious ones, just to get them out of the way. Then I’ll move on to extensions of existing industries that look like they could be large markets, and lastly I’ll throw in some speculative possibilities.

Please feel free to comment if I’ve missed any.

 Existing Industries

1. Resources. There’s few companies in the world that are as large as big mining or petroleum companies. The barriers to entry are significant for startups, but Glencore did it. I also want to thank @EzraSedek for pointing out that wood products (particularly as used in construction) are a huge percentage of GDP in many countries.
2. Pharmaceuticals. Developing a new consumer drug is an expensive proposition. There are lots of other entry points into the pharma industry though, and the technology needed gets cheaper and more accessible every year. A related industry that is still just forming is genetics, which has the potential to be huge.
3. Consumer hardware. The success of several companies in the Maker community seems to indicate that it is feasible to enter this industry as a startup. And its certainly a large (if fickle) market. The primary barrier to entry is probably marketing – selling a few hundred million gizmos is harder than making them.
4. Consumer products. Somewhere in the world, somebody is baking the cookie that will eventually lead to the next P&G.
5. Agriculture. There are any number of reasons why traditional agriculture is frequently a marginal business. There are a number of large-scale companies making money making food though. Everybody has to eat, right? A friend of mine tried a startup in this area a few years back. He had the right idea, but it didn’t succeed. There’s plenty of room for small but scalable ventures here though. Small greenhouses that are close to niche markets are one plausible entry point.
6. Construction. As many management consultants have pointed out, boring, stable industries are the best ones to disrupt. There are a number of companies working on ways to automate the building process, or to invent new and improved construction materials. Process improvements are another potential entry point for startups – there’s a lot of different steps involved in building, starting from design, to the permit process etc. Finding new ways to integrate or separate these steps may be profitable.
7. Financials. They’re not doing so well right now, but will eventually recover. Its easy to overlook how much innovation occurs in the financial sector – a few decades ago, there was no mutual fund industry, for example. Regulation is a major barrier to entry, but can be overcome. Several interesting areas include the “final mile” problem (i.e. how transactions between customers and merchants occur), digital wallets, and digital currency.
8. Robotics. The consumer robotics industry is still fairly small (vacuum cleaners aside), and its hard to say how large it will be. On an industrial level though, robots are already a huge industry (think: Japanese auto industry). Several million new industrial robots per year = scale. Competition and technical skill are the primary barriers to entry.
9. Chemicals. As part of the industrial sector, this is a highly cyclical, generally low margin, high startup cost industry. Could be ripe for innovation? One area that is starting to take off in parts of the world is to locate chemical plants in clusters, such that the waste products of one become the inputs of another. Chemical production through biotech is another.
10. Water filtration and environmental reclamation. Delivery of clean drinking water is already a huge industry (although nationalized in many places). Many countries in drier climes are investing huge sums of money to build saltwater reclamation plants or closed cycle systems for their cities. Startups would probably best focus on better and cheaper ways to filter water. Environmental reclamation, particularly brownfield reclamation is a large and growing sector. Again, finding ways to reduce cost is a good place to start.
11. Marketing/sales/advertising. Its a question whether this should be on the list – this is a large industry, but its total size worldwide is probably less than a trillion dollars, and it is highly fragmented. On the other hand, there isn’t a large barrier to entry.
12. Education. I’m not certain about market size, but world-wide there are still many places with literacy rates under 50%, so this is going to be a growth industry for a long time. In developed nations, there is a competitive battle to become more educated, in order to secure better jobs. Delivery of education is a hot area for startups right now (I’m working with one company in this area).
13. Software / IT. I’ve got this down at the bottom of the list because there is so much overlap between software and virtually any other business model. As a certain well-known individual has claimed, software is eating the world. Or large chunks of it, anyhow.
14. Other: Feel free to let me know!

Extensions of Existing Industries

Most of the following exist to some extent already. In most cases, the size of the market is still relatively small, but they have huge potential.

1. Micro-scale manufacturing. There are a number of cheap 3D printers on the market already (RepRap, MakerBot and many others), but this is still a very new industry. The potential is here to completely revolutionize the manufacturing of virtually all consumer products though.
2. Next-gen telecom. Ad-hoc wireless mesh networks are rapidly becoming feasible. When they appear, the traditional telecom companies will need to adapt or die.
3. Social everything. We think of social media as being fairly established, but it is really still in its infancy. Right now it has a firm foothold in how people talk to each other, and how they share and comment on content. Two areas that have barely been touched yet:
• Business processes. Yes, SalesForce has a nice P/E ratio. What I’m thinking of is a situation where your accounting software and ERP are integrated into Facebook; where you and your supplier’s supply chains are completely integrated through social media, such that your staff and theirs, and your customers can all collaborate transparently to build your product. Right now the only efforts I’m aware of in this area are job hunting and rudimentary business networking (done by people who only understand job hunting).
• Creativity. I’m working on several projects in this area right now, so I have to be careful what I discuss online! Current social media is great for sharing content, but lousy for working together to make it.

New Industries / Blue-sky

1. Nanotechnology. The last few years have seen the first “real” nanotech products, primarily focused on new materials (fabrics, paints etc). Right now the startup costs are unfeasibly high, but eventually the relevant equipment will become cheap off-the-shelf commodities, and then the real boom will begin.
2. Space mining. Currently it is economically unfeasible to mine asteroids for resources. The key to bear in mind though is that an average sized asteroid contains several trillion dollars worth of minerals. The first company to succeed will essentially have complete control over the price of virtually all metals, to the extent that they can then create a “moat” around their business by undercutting the profit margins of any potential competitors. Once space hardware becomes off-the-shelf, expect this industry to become hot.
3. Replacement for existing marketing methods. There are two current methods for letting potential customers know about your business: broadcast (i.e. a newspaper ad, a TV spot, or a banner ad) and targeted (i.e. Google AdWords, YellowPages etc). Eventually somebody will come out with a better model for matching up businesses with customers. What that will look like is anybody’s guess.
4. The next “X”. Be it Google or Facebook or any other big web company, eventually something will come along that is more interesting or works better. The Next Facebook could be Facebook itself in a future iteration, or it could be something else entirely.

Have I missed any industries? Am I completely off-base about some of the ones I’ve listed? Please let me know!