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Business Ideas for Startups

financialreflections.com

21 pointscoglethorpe22 comments

I'm out of my league here, but as far as 'on-demand supercomputing' goes, I think Plura Processing is pretty close: http://www.pluraprocessing.com/

Title should be, "10 Business Ideas for the 90's"

Mobile ads are a 90's idea? You should tell that to companies working on it now.

Here are some 90's ideas:

1. Online Pet Store

2. Grocery store that lets you order online and delivers to your house.

3. Online auctions.

4. Search engine.

Oh wait, I also did the stalker ads idea, or sort of. I believe that someone will come up with a successful solution for location-based mobile coupons. What we have seen with our project is that this idea clicks with customers, but it is hard to develop a scalable model to acquire local advertisers. Local business owners seems extremely reluctant to embrace the internet medium for some reason (even with some free limited service, free pilot programs, etc.).

I end again with a shameless plug: http://www.moqpon.com

"To get full FREE access to all our most exclusive coupons, you just need to get 2 friends to sign up."

#fail

I hate to play devil's advocate, but that kind of crap is the reason Facebook apps exploded. You don't get viral growth without supporting friend-spam.

That's a pretty good point, but requiring it for signup seemed a bit much. It was more than "now invite your friends."

It's actually not required for signup. You would still receive coupons for free up to a face value of $5 (which is the vast majority in volume). That was an incentive to foster virality, but your comments are very much appreciated.

It's interesting that customers like it. I started working on something like that, but the thought of being on the receiving end of constant advertising through my phone as I walked around really bugged me so I dropped the idea.

An explicitly opt-in version I could go along with, but the legwork to acquire advertisers was more than I wanted to do.

In a weekend I coded the virtual business card idea a few months ago, but it didn't catch up at all. Basically the click-through rate of the tiny link in email signatures is below 0.1% so its virality is basically none. http://www.tinyvcard.com i thought it was a brilliant name :-)

That is a cool name, but it seemed really hard to actually see someone's business card. The codes didn't support vanity URLs and it looked like there was a $10 signup fee. Physical business cards are designed to be read easily and shared easily. They are even pretty cheap.

"Fwitter: A site that’s something in-between twitter and a forum. Get real time updates"

A chat room?

Heh. Got a side project that does exactly that (twitter-forum, NOT a chat room), and everyone that saw it first thought it was a (lousy) chat room.

I believe there is use in micro-forums (or group-twitters) different than chats; it's a group timeline, it's meant to be persistent, not real-time conversation (though faster than doing blog/forum posts) of group of people publishing related tidbits of information (or replying to / referencing it).

(Shameless plug, my project is http://speeka.net/ , one-tech-guy side project that's practically dormant atm because of lack of spare time and biz/marketing efforts).

As someone who recently moved to an apartment sight unseen (it worked out) and will be moving again soon under the same conditions, a decent rental site would be most welcome. CL doesn't cut it.

We've been working on this for quite some time and have hundreds of thousands of rental listings on our site (don't want to spam, if interested look at my profile). We're doing well, but it's still amazing how well craigslist dominates all the verticals it covers.

Thanks. I will check it out.

Pretty much being done already or a good way to go broke. Free rental listings? That's how CL pays the bills. On demand super computer weather forecasting. Ah, these mothers are expensive.

They don't look that great.... I did like the CL idea tho... Needs to happen. Someone needs to compete with Craigslist.

Why not just build a front end for craigslist? (organize the real-estate data rather than text-based search)...

I'm pretty sure the CL TOS doesn't allow stuff like that.

Pyramid builder? Really?

What? You don't want to share a cell with Madoff?

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