Turns out in the past hour I’ve met strategists from eBay, Yahoo, Amazon. They are here to see the small ideas. Some of them are pretty cool.
Here’s my favorites of what I saw at the Entrepreneur 27 event that just concluded at Stanford University.
Flagr. Take a cell phone. With a camera preferably. Walk into a sushi restaurant. Take a picture of the front, of the menu. Of the food. Write a little review. Send it to Flagr. It puts it on top of a Google map. Very cool. Limited window to make money, though. This is too big an idea to be ignored by Google/Yahoo/Microsoft for long. In the meantime Flagr is it. Here’s a photo of the Flagr team with TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington.
Skobee. No, this isn’t named after me. Heh. But, let’s say you want to find something to do tonight. So you email your five friends asking what’s up. That all causes a flurry of email. But, while that flurry of email is going on Skobee is listening in and is keeping track of what you’re talking about and builds a site for you automatically (and, if you’re clueless, it helps you find something fun to do).
Billmonk. When Buzz and Doc and I shared a room Buzz picked up the hotel room and he said “you owe me some money when you get your expenses back.” Turns out Doc owes him money too. How do you keep track of situations like that? Billmonk. And you can do it from your cell phone. Text 60×3 to Billmonk and it’ll automatically create an entry that says your friends owe you $20 each.
LicketyShip. When Robert Pazornik, co-founder of LicketyShip was hanging out with his buddies in Yale they wondered why they couldn’t apply small-idea thinking to the shipping business. FedEx and UPS had done the big idea (moving boxes around by shipping through a hub). But they were at their local computer store one day wondering why they couldn’t move a box of toner down the street in a few hours. LicketyShip is their answer. They found that in certain areas they can use existing courier networks and a smart database of their locations to ship packages across town in less than two hours. The eBay and Amazon strategians were first to visit their table, they have an impressive small idea.
Box.net. Ever want to email a 200MB video file to someone? I have. Yeah, I’m an edge case but there are other reasons you’ll need online storage. Backup. Moving servers. And such. Box.net is the answer. They have a cool gadget for the Google online page (I’m trying to get them to build one for Live.com) too so you can play with your server-based files while you check the weather.
I met Michael Arrington of TechCrunch there too. He says he’ll have a review up shortly of the event (update, it’s up). I said “I’ll stay here and beat you.” 🙂
I love the valley!
Scobleizer 
Those are some neat things, Robert. The bill thing in particular… could make meals at restaurants with large groups of cash-strapped friends a bit more convenient (“No, *I’ll* pay by credit card” “Can I add my card, too?” “How about me?”) 😛
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Those are some neat things, Robert. The bill thing in particular… could make meals at restaurants with large groups of cash-strapped friends a bit more convenient (“No, *I’ll* pay by credit card” “Can I add my card, too?” “How about me?”) 😛
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Robert, It’s total BS that you (1) stayed there to write up your notes, and (2) leave out logos (they take forever). Oh yeah, you write well too. Unfair. 🙂
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Robert, It’s total BS that you (1) stayed there to write up your notes, and (2) leave out logos (they take forever). Oh yeah, you write well too. Unfair. 🙂
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Michael: it’s worse than that. I’m lazy! 🙂
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Michael: it’s worse than that. I’m lazy! 🙂
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Robert, you should cap off your night in the valley and stop by superhappydevhouse (http://superhappydevhouse.org/) for some hard core hax0ring. 😉
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Robert, you should cap off your night in the valley and stop by superhappydevhouse (http://superhappydevhouse.org/) for some hard core hax0ring. 😉
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Noam: I might drop by with some food for the geeks. 🙂
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Noam: I might drop by with some food for the geeks. 🙂
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nobody invited me to SHDH. Robert gets to go to all the fashionable parties.
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nobody invited me to SHDH. Robert gets to go to all the fashionable parties.
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And now, the snarky, but dead-reality report…
Flagr – Egads, Web 2.0 mash-up city. Pointless. Camera phone, Google Map, this that, thunk here and there. I am sick of mash-ups, this all the Web 2.0 nutheads have to offer? Rope in a ride sharing Craigslist rental locational something too why doncha. Geeeus. Goto a sushi place, take a came pic, zap to Google Maps, zap to Craigslist to find all avail rentals near the sushi place and then zap in the location of all ice cream shops within a 5 mile radius, kick it to a free Wi-Fi database to see all the Hotspots near the sushi and ice cream. I wanta strangle these digtial lifestyle nutheads. Be human for once, absorb the culture.
Skobee – a solution in search of a problem, normal people won’t hash out things like that, creating a virtual space to problem-solve in real-time. Be real. Geeks creating geeky things to solve problems that aren’t problems.
Billmonk – another geeky back-up brain playing phone tricks. Rolls eyes. Reminds me of the seemingly near thousands of Palm OS tip and bill calculators. Beyond pointless.
LicketyShip – Ever hear of BIKE MESSENGERS? In a few hours? Cue up Kevin Bacon and have it under an hour. Moving around town tons of services already functional. Looks pointlessly middle-manish, guys with a database contracting out for a higher price and a cut of the pie. Someone wanta explain what exactly is new here?
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And now, the snarky, but dead-reality report…
Flagr – Egads, Web 2.0 mash-up city. Pointless. Camera phone, Google Map, this that, thunk here and there. I am sick of mash-ups, this all the Web 2.0 nutheads have to offer? Rope in a ride sharing Craigslist rental locational something too why doncha. Geeeus. Goto a sushi place, take a came pic, zap to Google Maps, zap to Craigslist to find all avail rentals near the sushi place and then zap in the location of all ice cream shops within a 5 mile radius, kick it to a free Wi-Fi database to see all the Hotspots near the sushi and ice cream. I wanta strangle these digtial lifestyle nutheads. Be human for once, absorb the culture.
Skobee – a solution in search of a problem, normal people won’t hash out things like that, creating a virtual space to problem-solve in real-time. Be real. Geeks creating geeky things to solve problems that aren’t problems.
Billmonk – another geeky back-up brain playing phone tricks. Rolls eyes. Reminds me of the seemingly near thousands of Palm OS tip and bill calculators. Beyond pointless.
LicketyShip – Ever hear of BIKE MESSENGERS? In a few hours? Cue up Kevin Bacon and have it under an hour. Moving around town tons of services already functional. Looks pointlessly middle-manish, guys with a database contracting out for a higher price and a cut of the pie. Someone wanta explain what exactly is new here?
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Arrgh, this godforsaken comment-system ate my Box ending. Btu here it is.
Box.Net – Geeeeus, Yetanotherstorageserviceoutfit. (And technically it’s old news, I thot I saw this awhile back?) Anways…like 50+ of these store-your-files-on-the-net services DIED with the dotcom crash. What is so special or new here? Egads. And even so, tons of active ones already out there, Radpidshare, Megaupload, Uploadnet and etc. And the only traffic on thse storage servers seems to be porn, warez, mp3 packs and movie rips, the biz model is always on shaky ethical grounds. Just not enough edge cases to make it work, but tons of porn addicts and Russian and Chinese warez groups, creating actvity and accounts (go figure). Frankly to make them work they need to be like Swiss Bank Accounts, know nothing, see nothing, third-party proxy payment system. Develop that, and with a strong legal team, and might be able to make the illict service work. But I doubt it even so. if they case away the WaReZ KiDDieZ and porn addicts, then the biz model tanks pretty darned quick. Irony.
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Arrgh, this godforsaken comment-system ate my Box ending. Btu here it is.
Box.Net – Geeeeus, Yetanotherstorageserviceoutfit. (And technically it’s old news, I thot I saw this awhile back?) Anways…like 50+ of these store-your-files-on-the-net services DIED with the dotcom crash. What is so special or new here? Egads. And even so, tons of active ones already out there, Radpidshare, Megaupload, Uploadnet and etc. And the only traffic on thse storage servers seems to be porn, warez, mp3 packs and movie rips, the biz model is always on shaky ethical grounds. Just not enough edge cases to make it work, but tons of porn addicts and Russian and Chinese warez groups, creating actvity and accounts (go figure). Frankly to make them work they need to be like Swiss Bank Accounts, know nothing, see nothing, third-party proxy payment system. Develop that, and with a strong legal team, and might be able to make the illict service work. But I doubt it even so. if they case away the WaReZ KiDDieZ and porn addicts, then the biz model tanks pretty darned quick. Irony.
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Yeah. I agree. Box.net seems so 1999.
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Yeah. I agree. Box.net seems so 1999.
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Glad to hear LicketyShip is making waves — got an interesting backchannel from a friend at sequoia on these guys. Apparently they’ve got a lot of sauce connecting retail inventories to efficient delivery units — not trivial stuff — the model flips Kozmo 6 ways from sunday…
What’s getting them real attention though is the claim to do 2 hour deliveries for the same price as overnight … we’ll see if they can actually execute on that tiny a contribution (hopeful but skeptical). Lots of genuinely intelligent folks buzzing on this one…
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Glad to hear LicketyShip is making waves — got an interesting backchannel from a friend at sequoia on these guys. Apparently they’ve got a lot of sauce connecting retail inventories to efficient delivery units — not trivial stuff — the model flips Kozmo 6 ways from sunday…
What’s getting them real attention though is the claim to do 2 hour deliveries for the same price as overnight … we’ll see if they can actually execute on that tiny a contribution (hopeful but skeptical). Lots of genuinely intelligent folks buzzing on this one…
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Anybody who needs some clarification on how we’re not like 1999 (or a warez host) should email me 🙂 aaron [at] box.net
Would love to hear from you.
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Anybody who needs some clarification on how we’re not like 1999 (or a warez host) should email me 🙂 aaron [at] box.net
Would love to hear from you.
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is it a sign of drop in age if you are just over 40 but currently designing some of the same small ideas as the the E27 talents?
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is it a sign of drop in age if you are just over 40 but currently designing some of the same small ideas as the the E27 talents?
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Skobee: a site which is good under FireFox, and bad under IE6… (and it is advertised (ok, advised) at an MS evangelist blog… Is Scoble really turning things around ;))
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Skobee: a site which is good under FireFox, and bad under IE6… (and it is advertised (ok, advised) at an MS evangelist blog… Is Scoble really turning things around ;))
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got a lot of sauce connecting retail inventories to efficient delivery units
A lot of sauce? You wanta speak in English and not VCish? 🙂 Sauce, you mean a database? Or a supply-chain management system? Major bluster if 2 hour for same price as overnight, and you are right it’s not trvival, reason why existing companies haven’t found that magic, but the hype should come from customers not Sequoia backchannels. The hype reminds me of Webvan. And they seem to be talking intra-city, not nationwide. Or they gonna claim nationwide 2 hour deliveries? One problem, that’s impossible.
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got a lot of sauce connecting retail inventories to efficient delivery units
A lot of sauce? You wanta speak in English and not VCish? 🙂 Sauce, you mean a database? Or a supply-chain management system? Major bluster if 2 hour for same price as overnight, and you are right it’s not trvival, reason why existing companies haven’t found that magic, but the hype should come from customers not Sequoia backchannels. The hype reminds me of Webvan. And they seem to be talking intra-city, not nationwide. Or they gonna claim nationwide 2 hour deliveries? One problem, that’s impossible.
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Robert: Thanks for a quick and good coverage of E27. A well written description of the companies. Its awesome to see so many young entreprenuers trying out things early on – there is just so one much learns from the first stratup, whethere it becomes successful or not. E27 is really good event – brings out the reason why United States (more like Silicon Valley) remains the innovation capital of the world.
One thing I noticed though was the business models still seem weak for several of these companies. Box.net has no barrier to entry and little marketing differentiation from the likes of StrongSpace. Same with BillMonk – sometimes you really don’t want yet another web application to do yet another task that’s may not be worth as much management time. Placesite and 411 Metro will need advertising sales team to target niches/local markets, which is not an easy task and its tough to get the scale of Adsense without the muscle of Google.
Nevertheless, theoretically, one can rip apart any idea. That means nothing – the founders can still make it work 🙂 All the best to all of them!
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Robert: Thanks for a quick and good coverage of E27. A well written description of the companies. Its awesome to see so many young entreprenuers trying out things early on – there is just so one much learns from the first stratup, whethere it becomes successful or not. E27 is really good event – brings out the reason why United States (more like Silicon Valley) remains the innovation capital of the world.
One thing I noticed though was the business models still seem weak for several of these companies. Box.net has no barrier to entry and little marketing differentiation from the likes of StrongSpace. Same with BillMonk – sometimes you really don’t want yet another web application to do yet another task that’s may not be worth as much management time. Placesite and 411 Metro will need advertising sales team to target niches/local markets, which is not an easy task and its tough to get the scale of Adsense without the muscle of Google.
Nevertheless, theoretically, one can rip apart any idea. That means nothing – the founders can still make it work 🙂 All the best to all of them!
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I’m pretty sure from their presentation that the point of Licketyship is that they deliver from local stores, not their own warehouses (not easy), which is what makes them a much better model than webvan/kozmo, et.al. The point being that the stuff you order online and wait days for can be delivered from a local store faster and cheaper. So it would actually work nationwide–
I’m interested to see if they can pull it off or if this is another 2.0 pipedream. I hope it works — hell, for that price I’d use it everyday and twice on sunday.
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I’m pretty sure from their presentation that the point of Licketyship is that they deliver from local stores, not their own warehouses (not easy), which is what makes them a much better model than webvan/kozmo, et.al. The point being that the stuff you order online and wait days for can be delivered from a local store faster and cheaper. So it would actually work nationwide–
I’m interested to see if they can pull it off or if this is another 2.0 pipedream. I hope it works — hell, for that price I’d use it everyday and twice on sunday.
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another 2.0 pipedream
Totally. As even if the “local store ship” is the model over FedEx, the logistics and the partnerships, and contracts you have to set up are near impossible. And if you can GET it locally, why don’t you just waltz down and get it? And all companies let you pay extra for better and faster shipping.
And local companies want local contacts for repeat biz, not having to middle-man, with some stupid dot.com or shipping company only using them as a crutch. And why do companies want to cut out their own customers? Amazon wants a relationship with you, not some local shipping company. And I would argue the COSTS will be more. Order some books online, wait two days, Amazon ships, cheap but time heavy. Order some books, store contacts via this service to local shipping company, local company picks up and delivers. Logistical nightmareish and do you know the price of gas nowadays?
And besides, Fred Smith and his team, tried this model and wasn’t able to make a go of it. Not saying it’s impossible, but it won’t come from some secret-sauce overhyped start-up.
There is not enough consumer pain to make this happen. Solution in search of a problem.
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another 2.0 pipedream
Totally. As even if the “local store ship” is the model over FedEx, the logistics and the partnerships, and contracts you have to set up are near impossible. And if you can GET it locally, why don’t you just waltz down and get it? And all companies let you pay extra for better and faster shipping.
And local companies want local contacts for repeat biz, not having to middle-man, with some stupid dot.com or shipping company only using them as a crutch. And why do companies want to cut out their own customers? Amazon wants a relationship with you, not some local shipping company. And I would argue the COSTS will be more. Order some books online, wait two days, Amazon ships, cheap but time heavy. Order some books, store contacts via this service to local shipping company, local company picks up and delivers. Logistical nightmareish and do you know the price of gas nowadays?
And besides, Fred Smith and his team, tried this model and wasn’t able to make a go of it. Not saying it’s impossible, but it won’t come from some secret-sauce overhyped start-up.
There is not enough consumer pain to make this happen. Solution in search of a problem.
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Here’s another for the list – http://www.billhighway.com, however, this may be more of an “upstart” vs. “startup” since it has actually been around a while. Seems they’ve been staying under the radar for some time now, possibly building the next Pay Pal? Not sure about BillMonk, but there *real* services out there, such as billhighway doing things like this and more, that actually save time and/or money. My roommates and I use billhighway.com to manage, split and pay bills. It’s pretty slick. My alumni also uses a service from their site for managing and tracking group events, complete with payment processing, reporting and notifications. After using the service for some time, I’ve seen how quickly they’re rolling out new features/functionality and they even have a real support hotline! An insider told me they have well over 100,000 users – seems like something big is going on over there!?
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Here’s another for the list – http://www.billhighway.com, however, this may be more of an “upstart” vs. “startup” since it has actually been around a while. Seems they’ve been staying under the radar for some time now, possibly building the next Pay Pal? Not sure about BillMonk, but there *real* services out there, such as billhighway doing things like this and more, that actually save time and/or money. My roommates and I use billhighway.com to manage, split and pay bills. It’s pretty slick. My alumni also uses a service from their site for managing and tracking group events, complete with payment processing, reporting and notifications. After using the service for some time, I’ve seen how quickly they’re rolling out new features/functionality and they even have a real support hotline! An insider told me they have well over 100,000 users – seems like something big is going on over there!?
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…and other cool products are on their way: http://smarttechideas.blogspot.com
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…and other cool products are on their way: http://smarttechideas.blogspot.com
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interesting article m8
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interesting article m8
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