BobbySullivan.com

Tracking your business ideas in a system can be a really fantastic way to help your ideas mature. Having documented them, you are not able to criticize your own ideas. That’s something you can’t do accurately when they’re in your head. Additionally, now you can share them with someone else for a (hopefully) objective analysis. That’s my favorite part. I regularly bounce my mediocre ideas off my dad, brothers, and friends so I can get outside input. Naturally, I’m not buying my product or service, so it doesn’t really matter whether or not I think it’s valuable.

I use SugarCRM for my business-idea tracker. Why? Because it’s a business and anything I try to develop has the end-goal of making money. It’s the perfect system for tracking the idea, tasks, meetings, contacts, etc.

There are no services yet offering SugarCRM for free - I think it’s a huge business opportunity. Advertising and affiliate sales could drive the revenue. If you built a sales & marketing content portal around it with forums-based community/chat functionality you’d have a really great business hub.  I’m going to try to do that with PipeLime.

Until then, you can set up an account on a system that equivalently equipped of functionality (for us small users). It’s called FreeCRM. The same concepts apply and you can still download your personal data if you want to move to another service - it’s worth the try (I did).

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Traditionally speaking, NEW products are released upon inception of a cool new idea which is framed up with hard work and covered in marketing. Once the product is released there is an army of cheap knock-off product producers racing to get their imitation products to market thinking they can ride that wave of fame.

Craigslist.org - Any local newspaper (like Boston Phoenix) is starting to offer free classifieds.

Apple’s iTunes Music Store - Every other online big-media company has created their own music store.

Search Engines? - …

Social Networks - Friendster came out with a bang in 2003 and within months there were lots of sites where you could assume they were developed by the same person because they’re the same with one small bit of focus.

So, for your next online (or otherwise) project, I suggest to be transcendent. Like Google Maps or Google Base or Ning.com, be transcendent. These applications with sustaining organic growth are incredibly rare because it takes real vision to produce them. What’s the difference between a platform where you can integrate with maps to create any sort of fun mapping function, localized advertisement, geography searching, etc. and a mapping program like Mapquest? It’s not the shiny/interactive user-interface though that is a difference. It’s just that they have an extensible platform of which many people on many applications can share a part.

What other transcendent application opportunities are there? My examples are bad, thus I’m writing this blog from my cubicle in suburbia instead of my window office downtown Boston.

* Community Management - There must be some way to help bridge both online and offline organizations. There are too many sites focused completely on the online audience and they’re missing out on the offline community. I’m pretty sure your small-town government body wants to hold meetings and have collaborative discussions both in person and online. Bridging that electronic divide isn’t as expensive as it once was… local advertisers have been consolidated into organizations like ThePlaceMatPeople and other groups where you could poll for local ads when delivering physical content. Heck, if someone could ever get micro payments figured out your accounting would be fantastically easy to distill.

* Advertising - ThePlaceMatPeople create those paper placemats you use in diners and cheap restaurants. I don’t know about you, but there are lots of web sites that I go to which contain localized ads: “MEET GIRLS OF MEDFORD”. What if there was a transcending advertising agency that could operate online and off, handling automatic distribution of television ads, web page ads, instant messenger ads, electronic billboard ads, radio ads, etc. Micro payments, people!

* Analytics - Business Intelligence (BI) is a new buzz-word your resume should not be without. Google has its own analytics package which is very convenient, simple, and though lacking features, makes up for shortcomings the Google way (being free). There’s many Terabytes of freely available data out there on the web - what if there was a site that could allow people to model data and author algorithms in the public or in private groups to further research and help the human race - of course, making a few bucks along the way. Naturally, one must make the service available to process data and provide plugs into other analytics applications.

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Opportunity: Product

The world is under a pandemic of over-hyped car “tuning” enthusiasm. Every drive to work includes at least one lowered 10 year old economy car equipped with very dark tinted windows and a HUGE muffler trying to zig-zag through traffic in the right lanes. I’m glad to report they’re a minority on the road (at least in the Boston area). In fact, for every one of these wishful-thinking drivers there is, at my recent counts, at least ten people driving the same 10 year old car without modifications, driving in the right lane under 65 to conserve gas/cost.

Most cars from 1996 forward come with a standard engine diagnostics port called ODB-II. This is a standard little connector usually by your feet while you’re driving. The government standardized on this interface to make sure any mechanic could service your car to keep the auto-repair market and open market.

This data port relays information like engine speed (RPM), ground speed (KPH/MPH), mass-air-flow sensors (G/S), etc. Right now on the market you can buy a device which allows you to connect the port to a computer and watch/record the data in real-time. There is another device out there that records all the output for you to download later to your PC.

Engine diagnostics with computers is becoming a truly huge market. Without making physical changes to your engine you can improve your power / efficiency in less time than it would take you to change your oil.

I propose a small microprocessor device to connect to this port and help you with your driving with a small display to be mounted on your dash. You can install it yourself because the port is readily available from inside the cabin and it can stick on your air-vent holes or some other equally uncreative place.

With gas prices climbing every day, imagine the value of a device that tells you: “Your fuel efficiency has been reduced due to your high speed, return to 67MPH for optimal efficiency.” The device could pay for itself in a couple months and could be a valuable tool for helping to teach the next generation how to drive.

Yes, gas mileage indicators are on nice, big, fancy cars like Cadillacs and the such - but those of us with normal front-wheel-drive cars are the ones who’d really value that display and we don’t have it.

Of course, the device could be smart enough to understand the best time to shift due to power bands and then all the people with the race-car type economy cars would want them too.

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The world of the operating system is coming quickly to a “who-cares” point. Server virtualization is allowing companies to run multiple services and servers on a single machine. Applications are more and more being written to be cross-platform and even Apple has joined a Windows benchmarking group.Linux? Micro-kernel? Windows? Apple? Does it matter as long as it can serve applications through HTTP?

What percentage of your day is spent online? I’m online 8 hours a day for work, then a couple hours a night for recreation and additional work. Using Java WebStart to run applications directly from vendor’s web sites, web sites containing all the application code, and even the biggest (and baddest) ERP vendors are going to web-browser client interfaces.

The last peice of software I bought? No clue. Why buy a peice of software for 100$ that I can only run from one computer and must maintain the upgrades myself? Sure, some things like video editing are best suited for the desktop market… or are they? More and more applications are being offered online as services to which you can subscribe - CRM, office collaboration, project management, word processing, spreadsheets, calendaring, games, etc.

What kind of processor do you have in your computer? 15 years ago that was an important question when talking about running software. Now, you’re virtually guaranteed that anything you’ve purchased recently will run Windows/Whatever equally as well. Now that the hardware has been comoditized the next step will be the controlling software. Windows/Linux/Whatever are all going to be reduced to the lowest common denominator… do you care what operating system my web site is running? Nor do I. My operating system is Mozilla Firefox.

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