I left a corporate job a couple of years ago to pursue technology development in areas that I think will be making a huge impact across all industries in the near future, notably computer vision and artificial intelligence.
One of my biggest problems is that though I have many ideas about how to implement advanced technologies I haven't had much luck finding intersections between the following requirements :
1) Problems of a scale that don't require a large team to achieve meaningful results (ie. no competing with IBM at natural language query or building humanoid robots).
2) Problems for which people with money are willing to pay for solutions.
Generally speaking I have few social connections and most of the ones I do have haven't proved very helpful in meeting my goals.
I too believed (and to an extent still do) that there can be good opportunities in meeting the needs of smaller businesses. However to date my only attempt at this sort of thing yielded no results. You can read about my idea here :
http://cogniception.com/products/rmds.html. I sent out a dozen or so emails to restaurants in my vicinity but didn't receive a single response.
I think that one of the problems is that there is a tremendous gulf in knowledge between someone like me who has worked with these types of technologies and understands what they can accomplish and small business people who's concept of what computers can do doesn't extend much beyond Word and Excel.
If you're interested maybe we could work together. At the very least you seem to have a greater interest than I in the social aspects of business. I'm definitely open to business ventures with anyone who would be able and willing to help with business development, both at the stage of identifying good matches between business needs and my technology (ie, pre-product development) and with actual sales once products have been developed.