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This week's new business ideas include property prices by SMS, planning boards for families, cell phone training sessions, vending machines for prescription drugs, emergency info tattoos for tots, and more. Our next edition is due on 14 November 2007. In the meantime, check out our daily postings on www.springwise.com, send us your tips, and please don't forget to tell your friends and colleagues about us. Much appreciated! |
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It's a rare product that can't benefit from at least a little bit of improvement, and many leave room for lots more than that. RedesignMe is a Dutch site that is putting crowdsourcing to work to refine and revise product designs of mass-produced consumer goods. Consumers frustrated by mobile phones, coffee machines, or products of virtually any type can submit a photo or video of the product along with a description of what they think needs redesigning. One user, for example, complains about excessively sensitive buttons on his cell phone that frequently get pressed by accident; another describes an alarm clock that won't go off. Other users on the site can then submit suggestions for redesigning the product in question, with the option of using an online design tool to annotate pictures with post-it notes, text balloons and arrows. Users can rate each other's submissions and add comments, and prizes are awarded each month. After a beta period beginning in late July, RedesignMe just officially launched a few weeks ago, with the goal of "promoting simplicity in product design" and giving "a signal to the industry." About 60 problem products have been submitted so far, and more than 30 have been redesigned. The site's developers are now looking for design schools, investors and entrepreneurs to partner with. RedesignMe's site could use some refinement itself—navigation can be tricky—and it's not yet entirely clear how ideas generated there will translate into actual products on the market. But if the site continues to gain traction, smart consumer products companies and inventors will start paying attention, and maybe even start sponsoring it. After all, who needs expensive market research when consumers are right there, showing you what they want? And the obvious opportunity for entrepreneurs in other parts of the world is to set up their own versions of RedesignMe, focusing on products (and services!) sold locally. Website: www.redesignme.org Spotted by: Sheila Wigman
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Since the dawn of the personal computer age, millions of us have attended training classes to learn how to build better spreadsheets and killer PowerPoint presentations. Now, as cell phones and other mobile gadgets become increasingly complex and loaded with features, entrepreneurs are finding similar opportunities in the mobile field. New Zealand’s Mobile Mentor provides hourlong one-on-one sessions as well as group training on how to use the rising number of features bundled with mobile devices. Plus, it conducts courses for phone-industry sales personnel on how to explain a mobile gadget’s advantages to customers. While some consumers are naturally adept at dealing with a device's interface, menus and options, others greatly benefit from a bit of outside help. One of Mobile Mentor's first customers explains: "All it would take is for someone to sit down with me for 1 hour. I've tried myself, got instructions from Vodafone, but it's too hard." Case studies on Mobile Mentor’s website illustrate how mastering a phone’s features can reap impressive productivity gains. In one example, a real estate agent learned how to use her phone to record appointments. In another, a doctor learned how to better use email and other mobile device features while protecting patient privacy. Mobile Mentor claims to have trained over 20,000 people, but the potential market is many times larger. Entire organizations are going wireless, communicating and accessing the internet via smartphones instead of laptops and landlines. To get the most from their investment, those organizations will insist their employees know how to use the full range of a device’s features. The need for training will continue to increase as phones inevitably incorporate more features. That’s because unlike computers, a mobile device’s keyboard and screen are limited to what will comfortably fit in its owner’s purse or pocket. And while many mobile devices are likely to mimic the Apple iPhone’s friendlier user interface, a mobile device—owing to its size—will never be as easy to operate as a laptop with a full-size screen and keyboard. Mobile Mentor isn’t the only outfit offering training, of course. US-based CompuTrain provides web-based and instructor-led courses for BlackBerry users. Also, the innumerable stores and mall kiosks that hawk mobile devices give buyers quick lessons. Given the fierce competition in mobile device retailing, customers may soon demand formal training as a prerequisite to buying. (Related, at trendwatching.com: Status skills—a value shift in status from from passive consumerism to mastering skills.) Website: www.mobile-mentor.com Spotted by: Paul Evans-McLeod
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Say you’re an entrepreneur bent on creating a classified ad site. How do you compete with the free ads you find on Craigslist? For US-based auto-classified provider HotSwap, the answer is to give users a more feature-filled platform for displaying their ads in a friendly, community-like atmosphere. And still charge nothing. Specifically, HotSwap gives users a way to post video ads of their cars online, YouTube-style. Anyone can shoot a video of their car with a cell phone cam or other digital camera and upload it to the site, along with still images and a description of the car. HotSwap also throws in some useful search tools for prospective buyers. Shoppers can search for cars by their mileage and colour, for example, or post questions about the vehicle for all to view and negotiate an offer online. Still, it’s the videos which give the site its sizzle. Underlying DivX encoding can improve low-res video uploads to high quality moving images. HotSwap’s founders, who met as graduate students at the University of California, are making the site pay by providing their video services to large-scale car dealers, including AutoNation. The site has already attracted some heavy-hitting investors, including Apple Computer co-founder Steve Wozniak and the co-founder of Clear Channel Communications, Red McCombs. Deep pockets and a slick video codec notwithstanding, what really separates HotSwap from the crowd of online-classified purveyors is the friendly feel of the site: more visually appealing than Craigslist, and not as commercial as cars.com. HotSwap’s organizers even advise sellers not to edit their videos into slick presentations, saying the home-produced uploads give viewers a more believable impression of a vehicle being sold. Believability isn’t a word often associated with used car sales, and it could end up being the biggest factor in HowSwap’s success. And something for anyone in online sales to learn from. (Related: Craigslist meets YouTube.) Website: www.hotswap.com Spotted by: Bill McMahon
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Keeping track of your own schedule can be challenge enough, but in families with children, there may be six or more to coordinate. Bizzyboard tackles that problem head-on with a wall-mountable board that maps out an entire family's weekly schedule at a glance. There are other family calendars out there, such as one from MomAgenda, but most are paper-based. Bizzyboard, on the other hand, is essentially a magnetic and erasable white board, with durable, easy-to-clean construction. The 60cm-by-80cm board provides a row for each day of the week and a column for each of up to 6 family members, plus room for miscellaneous scheduling notes. Six large magnets are available for photos of each family member, while 220 smaller ones—some with colourful icons for birthday parties or sports practices, for example, and others blank for customized use—allow even young children to participate in the scheduling process. Weekday names are not printed on the board, allowing customers in different countries to use their own language and choose which day of the week to start with. The board is available in brown or grey, and pricing is EUR 119 plus EUR 15 for shipping. Netherlands-based Bizzyboard currently ships only within Europe. (Update: Bizzyboard now ships worldwide.) Bizzyboard just launched a few weeks ago with the mission of giving "everyone in your family, including the youngest toddlers, an overview, peace and clarity within their daily activities." Its price seems unsustainably high, but anything that can lend a bit of order to the chaos of family life is sure to win a following, particularly with a cute, kid-friendly format. Perhaps more than anything else, Bizzyboard underscores families' unmet need for kid-friendly organization help. What else could help parents keep home life under control? Website: www.bizzyboard.com Spotted by: Willem Bonneux
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Between credit cards, cash cards, ID cards, membership cards, pass cards, travel cards and frequent customer cards—to name just a few—wallet cards are almost like passwords these days in terms of their explosive proliferation. But consumers in London now have the opportunity for a small respite thanks to Barclays Bank, which has scored a victory in the name of simplicity by combining three of those cards in one. The new Barclaycard OnePulse combines credit card, cash card and Oyster card—used by Londoners for mass transportation—to remove a few cards and a few steps from consumers' daily lives. The card functions exactly as a regular credit and cash card does, allowing consumers to shop securely and pay for smaller purchases (under GBP 10) with one-touch payment, requiring no PIN. Even better, though, is that the card includes a built-in Oyster travel card, giving consumers access to area bus, Tube, tram and train services. Just as with a stand-alone Oyster card, consumers either buy a season ticket or prepay as they go, replenishing the card periodically as they use it. Barclaycard's Auto Top-off service will even replenish the pay-as-you-go Oyster function automatically with GBP 20 or 40 when the balance falls below GBP 5, saving consumers the need to queue up to do so. The focus is highly localized on this one, but the same basic idea can be applied virtually anywhere. And in an industry as fiercely competitive as credit cards and personal banking, it's hard to imagine a better way to create a competitive advantage: make things easier for consumers, and they'll reward you with more business and greater loyalty. New York, Sao Paulo, Shanghai, anyone...? Website: www.barclaycard.co.uk Spotted by: Junaid Kazi
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As the holiday season begins its descent upon us, friends and family of foodies everywhere will be glad to learn of Zingerman's—if they don't know it already. Since 1982 the Michigan-based gourmet food purveyor has been home to many a rare but tasty item not easily found elsewhere, including a broad assortment of vinegars, oils, cheeses, breads, sweets and more. Zingerman's offers a variety of clubs for regular shipments of upscale bread, coffee and other products, but its specialty Z Club could prove the ultimate gift for the food lover who has everything. Four times a year Z Club members receive a package of 8 to 10 food surprises picked specially for adventurous palates. The items included are chosen specifically for Z Club members by the Zingerman's staff, and may include such treasures as raw-milk Stilton cheese that had been "extinct" for decades, small-batch marmalade made from "calamondins"—tiny Southeast Asian oranges—or olio nuovo, a hard-to-find olive oil fresh off the press and bottled just days before. Packages always include a collection of writing on the foods’ history and culture and recipes for their use. Pricing begins at USD 175 per shipment. Offering up rare treasures—or, at the very least, versions of ordinary things that can't be found at Wal-Mart or Marks & Spencer—is right out of our lecture notes on the trend we like to call massclusivity. Rare food items have become snobmoddities (commodities that are special enough to have snob appeal), and massclusivity-minded consumers will pay a premium to get them. Retailers smart enough to offer them, meanwhile, could end up awash in rare treasures themselves. Website: www.zingermans.com Spotted by: Emma Crameri
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After visiting the doctor for the flu or other common complaint, the last thing consumers want to do is to make a second trip to a pharmacist and wait while their prescription gets filled. InstyMeds, a US startup, has devised a novel way to make getting medications easy. The company’s vending machines are designed to be placed in doctors’ offices, clinics, emergency rooms and other healthcare facilities. Each holds 100 of some of the most often used medications that can range from pills to drops to creams and so forth. InstyMeds machines require that physicians create prescriptions electronically, which are then transmitted to the vending location. (Alternately, patients can take printed prescriptions to their regular pharmacists.) The machines include several safeguards to insure patients receive the proper medications their doctors ordered. From the patients’ point of view, however, the ordering process is relatively simple. They enter their prescription number and birthday via a user-friendly touchscreen monitor, then insert either cash or credit cards to cover co-pays, while their insurance companies are billed automatically. Besides saving time for patients, InstyMeds machines also save pharmacists the slow and potentially error-prone process of counting out medications by hand. Indeed, relieving pharmacists from such routine tasks could turn out to be the machine’s major benefit. With pharmacist salaries in the United States climbing over USD 100,000, the time savings can mean significant cash savings. The vending machines, which are accessible 24/7, likewise could help alleviate a growing shortage of pharmacists. Moreover, InstyMed’s founders note that by handling routine prescriptions the vending machines let pharmacists focus on more important tasks such as counselling patients. While start-up costs are likely to be high for any new venture in the heavily-regulated health arena, InstyMeds illustrates how entrepreneurs can devise niche products that handily meet customer needs while potentially chipping away at ever-growing healthcare costs. Website: www.instymeds.com Spotted by: Anne Rogan
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UK-based Ad-Air Group is taking outdoor advertising to a higher level with a planned network of flat-on-the-ground billboards, each five acres in size. All ads in the network will be strategically placed along the flight paths of the world’s major airports. Given their enormous size, passengers will have plenty of time to reflect on an ad’s message as their plane takes off or approaches an airfield. The company spent more than seven years securing strategically placed plots of land and will charge a reported GBP 40,000–80,000 per month based on an ad’s location. The first of what will be 30 of mega ad sites debuted in Dubai in October. The ad for a real estate company operating in the futuristic Middle Eastern city will be seen by an estimated 14 million travellers winging overhead each year. But its sheer size has already earned it a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records and provided the client company with plenty of free publicity. Of course, messages aimed on high go all the way back to Peru’s Nazca lines carved by the Nazca civilization starting in 200 B.C. Yet the medium still offers plenty of opportunities for entrepreneurs or those who simply want to get noticed. A German firm called Artfield specializes in creating ad displays in farm fields for clients that have included Swissair and Budget Rent a Car. Elsewhere, a crop circle that appeared in field of rye near Johannesburg, S.A., back in 1993 mysteriously resembled a BMW logo. According to the Museum of Hoaxes, a local ad agency created the display as a stunt – which reportedly earned its automotive client USD 1 million in free exposure. Finally, there’s Dubai’s own artificial islands extending out into the Persian Gulf that are home to some of the world’s most coveted residential real estate. Laid out to resemble a palm tree and even a map of the world, the islands indirectly serve as an advertisement for the city’s ongoing economic boom that’s large enough to be seen from space. Website: www.ad-air.com Spotted by: Murtaza Ali Patel
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Keeping track of little ones at home or school is hard enough, but a child wandering off at a crowded event or unfamiliar place can be a parent's worst nightmare—especially for kids who are too young to remember their parents' phone numbers. Tottoos offers an innovative solution for keeping clearly printed emergency information literally on hand for children while on trips and outings: temporary tattoos. Custom-made with high-quality, FDA-approved materials, Tottoos feature personalized text, such as “If I am lost, please call” or the name of an elementary school or other organization, plus an emergency contact phone number. They last 12 hours or longer (even up to a couple of days) if applied properly to clean, dry skin. Basic packages begin at USD 14.95 for 15 decals, and the tattoos can be purchased in bulk quantities for schools or other groups. Special Tottoos are also available to display important medical information, such as allergies or chronic conditions and what to do in case of emergency, making them useful for adults who might encounter dangerous situations while hiking, biking or enjoying other outdoor adventures. With safety on the minds of parents everywhere, this definitely could be one to start up in other regions or to enhance with special graphics and designs for greater kid appeal. (Related: Pace tattoos for runners.) Website: www.tottoos.org Spotted by: Willem Bonneux
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As the popularity of text messaging continues to grow, we’re seeing more ways that entrepreneurs are monetizing it. Take HouseFront, a US start-up that’s currently in beta, that greatly simplifies the process of shopping for a new home. Drive by a house and text in its address to 46873 (spells ‘house’ on a phone’s keypad). A moment later, the complete scoop on the property is returned by SMS, from its estimated worth to the number of bedrooms and baths. Users can also post comments about the homes for others to see, as can a home’s owner. And consumers who are seriously searching for a new home can save each address on the website for later review. While HouseFront was created to fill a practical need, some visitors have come up with a more entertaining use for the site: texting in celebrity addresses. Posted on HouseFront’s blog are direct links to the homes of Paris Hilton, Bill Gates and Jennifer Anniston, to name a few. That’s bound to generate some buzz for the start-up. But to succeed long term, HouseFront and any similar services may need to assure users right up front that they won’t be harassed by realtors every time they text in the address of a home that interests them. That said, HouseFront fits in with other commercial SMS sites we’ve covered over the years, like UK auto-pricing guide publisher Parkers, which lets users text in a car’s license plate number and receive information on the car’s year and model and its likely value. Similarly, Netherlands’-based CarSpotter (http://www.carspotter.nl/) lets users access price information via SMS. Like HouseFront, both auto sites empower consumers with useful information, when and where they need it. (Related: See-snap-buy?) Website: www.housefront.com Spotted by: Bill McMahon
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