Needs at HOME

Came across this : http://www.needsathome.com/

The next big startup idea could be ours

Hey Guyz,

Wake up....!!!!

You gotto read this dude..!!!

Its about a VC asking for startup ideas that he is looking to fund. He put the ideas vaguely enough that people can use their creativity.

Jot down your immediate reactions on each idea and print the whole thing out dude. So that you can go through it again and again during different parts of the day. You never know when your mind picks one up as your destiny.
http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html

Some of the more attractive ones are:

"Simplified browsing. There are a lot of cases where you'd trade some of the power of a web browser for greater simplicity. Grandparents and small children don't want the full web; they want to communicate and share pictures and look things up. What viable ideas lie undiscovered in the space between a digital photo frame and a computer running Firefox? If you built one now, who else would use it besides grandparents and small children? "

"Fix advertising. Advertising could be made much better if it tried to please its audience, instead of treating them like victims who deserve x amount of abuse in return for whatever free site they're getting. It doesn't work anyway; audiences learn to tune out boring ads, no matter how loud they shout.

What we have now is basically print and TV advertising translated to the web. The right answer will probably look very different. It might not even seem like advertising, by current standards. So the way to approach this problem is probably to start over from scratch: to think what the goal of advertising is, and ask how to do that using the new ingredients technology gives us. Probably the new answers exist already, in some early form that will only later be recognized as the replacement for traditional advertising.

Bonus points if you can invent new forms of advertising whose effects are measurable, above all in sales"

Go ahead and read the complete article here.

Start posting your thoughts here and maybe we could develop the next big IDEA

**************************************************************************

Updating you on whatz going on the professional side.

Guyz who've been in touch with me know that I'm in hyd now and am waiting on an immigration document before I go back to my job in US. I've been grouping with Shashank very often, discussing startup opportunities and scouring for ideas.

It was good to see Rama Chaithanya's enthusiasm for a startup, the last time we've chatted. I know that Vamshi also is working on a plan.

PC Laundry system

Hey,

Umesh Sainani from Mumbai started a PC Laundry system, which takes care of cleaning up PCs in office once a month.

"Sainani now has a decent customer base that includes 15 big offices, and 20-25 small offices. For these customers, Sainani holds a contract of cleaning the PCs once every month. Ask him how much he charges for his services, and Sainani replies, “It really depends from company to company. In a setup of 50 plus PCs, the charge could be around Rs 5,000.”

You can read the entire article here.

Networking website for school goers

Recently my cousin, who is studying his 6th class, came over to my house for his vacation. He immediately ran over to the computer.
I was curious about his enthusiasm and followed him to find out what it was, that has evoked such a strong feeling of attraction. He opened the site: http://classteacher.com/horlicks/ He was very strongly influenced by the advertisement in TV which is aimed at school going kids. It just has a couple of games and a little relevant info, but it certainly caught my attention as a wonderful business model.

I see this is as a good opportunity in a relatively blue ocean market with massive potential.

We will build a portal aimed at specifically at school goers.

What do we provide:

• Add online games which can be played along with their classmates. This is such a thrill, if u've ever played online pool with your classmates or other friends. (Directly buy the games from developers)
• Add ideas for science projects, link things to www.howstuffworks.com. So they have abundance of ideas, whenever they need to work on something. (This is a huge plus, my little sisters keep wandering all over the place and net for ideas.)
  
• Target the students from 4th standard to 10th standard. Pore through their books. Provide detailed info on every topic. Provide ideas for essays, school debates, etc. (Hire some teachers to provide this info on a pay-by-work basis.)
• Keep interacting with schools to assess the needs of the students.
• Post math tips in an animated way.
• Provide a platform, where the kids can post personal experiences and award them with their day of glory by posting it on the homepage.
• Provide tools to unleash their creativity and help them develop their distinct personal page, which they will be proud of and flaunt it to their friends.
  
• Provide an online interaction-social networking platform similar to facebook, targeted at school-goers.
• In short-make the site such an attraction that kids want to spend all their online time with the site because it provides both educational stuff and fun stuff. Cater to all the needs of the school goer.

Revenue making model: The primary advantage of this site is that you have a large saturated group of target audience withing the same age group and with almost similar tastes. So any advertising just hits the core group unlike an advertisement on a hoarding. I can see this primarily as a advertising based model. If you boast of a high number of registered users or everyday clicks, kid product companies would not want to miss this opportunity to advertise. Better still, approach leading kid based product companies like Boost, Maggi, chocolates, etc to sponsor the whole thing. It helps them build a strong bond with their target consumers.

I am still not convinced by this revenue model and open to ideas on how we could milk this cash cow. This is a largely untouched market segment.

Waiting on your valuable input

(This is cross posting from my blog http://lessonsinentrepreneurship.blogspot.com/)

Online Supermarket-5

Hey another rapid upcoming grocery store Storrz.

This is their description:
"We have come up with a concept of shopping groceries online through our product www.storrz.com where customers can shop their daily needs like vegetables, fruits etc online.We have introduced a very convenient payment option for the customers like swiping their credit/debit card and using Sodexho meal pass at the time of delivery .The option of swiping the Credit/Debit card on delivery is really appreciated by our customers in Bangalore. We have our own delivery team to deliver products across Bangalore.Storrz.com is currently limited to Bangalore only when it comes to perishable goods but provides 24 hour delivery across the country for other products. We have tied up with Blue dart to deliver our products across India."

A littl criticism
"Curious to know how Storrz intends to make itself sustainable? It operates on a two-part business model of commissions as well as targeted advertising based on user activity and profile data. Basic enough, and in line with general trends in the industry. But it may be a bit too eager on the commission front. 10-25% of the sale price, is its claim for success."

-Raghu

Online Supermarket - Part 4

Raghav, thanks for the posts.. It did throw some light on some of the questions I was pondering on..
Some points which I wanted to add just to extend my idea.. and a few questions which should be answered before we can even think of the feasibility of this stuff...
Website:
For sure there are enough web technologies in the world to get a nice user friendly site up.. which doesnt make you go multiple pages to even select one item.. I saw the site you mentioned.. I felt it was not very user friendly.. They used ASP.NET pages but nothing else...
We can make the website incorporating AJAX.. which is supported in .NET 3.5 framework.. I have been using AJAX at workplace for some of the online tools we have developed for our customer... Infact one of the applications is only a single page with multiple tabs and everything.. every query you make is an AJAX call.. and the user never sees a page reload..
We could remember a customer's previous month's order.. or let him set up a custom order.. and store it in a SQL database or something.. and we should assure them of security...
Logistics:
Since we cannot have transport at once to cover a complete city I believe it has to start off with some areas where it will click off the most.. the most affluent areas or areas with busy people.. like IT employees concentration... etc.. The main problem is how to deal with home deliveries... what sort of transportation facilities will be needed for delivery personnel to carry on with their work... and how to facilitate taking orders etc... this is one major concern as far as this idea goes.. and tops the list of expenditures.. and how many people to start off with?
Support:
Do we need support? Issues desk to resolve any issues reported by customers? Do we need it immediately or can put it on hold?
Advertisements:
How will people come to know of such a portal? What should be the advertisement strategy? Something as simple a pamphlets will do?
Tie-ups:
With what sort of retailers would you like tie-ups... Once this idea gets into their minds.. our portal is out of question.. they definitely have enough potential and resources to make a better one.. so competition.. but can we afford to buy all rations by ourselves before we can start off with the portal.. will people buy? And can we give them an advantage of choosing from multiple retailers...? Like buy Boost from Reliance, Coffee from Heritage and Surf from Food Bazaar.. (they may do this as the respective retailers might be providing these at lowest prices).. What sort of agreement if any should be maintained with the retailers..
Online Payment:
This is one thing which obviously is an issue.. tie up with a bank or anything like that is bound to take time.. and with so many banks around it much more tougher and can we rely on our personnel completely for taking payments from customers? Is it a safe bet.. One solution is tie up with an already existing portal like Paynet, which supports online payment from many banks..
Min number of items:
And yes we would definitely need to set a min amount for which door delivery will be provided.. obviously a customer cannot ask for a single matchbox on our website and we start delivering it..

These are some points I was pondering upon.. well guys let me know what are your views....

Whats the scope?

Just read the blog today and this seems interesting and congrats to Raghu for starting this.  

Saw some of the ideas posted here and firstly what I wanted to ask is,  what kind of users are going be the targets here? The regular PC users or mobile users or both? As we know, we are going to see some sweeping changes in the way mobiles phones are gonna be used in the next few years especially with the 4G network which Sprint is going to introduce soon in an year or so. And speaking about mobile technology, how about the idea of developing apps for iphones and pdas? Also,  mobile gaming is something which is becoming a universal craze day by day and is here to stay for long.  The gaming industry is only getting bigger and bigger. What do you think guys?