Startup: Kwedit – a promising way of payment, how about Habbo?

Posted: February 7th, 2010 | Author: Chim | Filed under: Education, Food for thoughts, Fun, Startups | Tags: Business, Business plan, Education, Entrepreneurs, Fun, Interesting, Internet, Money, Social Network, Startups | No Comments »

Kwedit is a strange name for a payment company. This is a startup that offers a new form of payment to social and interactive games that allows people to buy virtual goods. The strange thing is that it allows people to “promise” to pay for a virtual good and the user can pay the promise later with a bar code in a 7eleven store.

Even though this seems to be a great innovation, the idea of printing a bar code and pay it in a retail store is nothing new to date. The strong differentiator of Kwedit is the idea of promising to pay later. I wonder what would happen if everybody promises to pay but none of the actually pays anything. I believe that the CFO of the company would be scare of the increase in the account payable of the balance sheet.

This type of payment for virtual goods reminded me of Habbo Hotel. Habbo is a Finnish company that started its virtual goods operations before the internet boom. It is probably the first company to have a business model based on selling virtual goodies to users. Interesting enough, Habbo targeted in a very narrow market segment. Its targets on teenagers that love to chat in pixel-lated environment.

Habbo and its many forms of payments.

Habbo offers 7eleven payments too. OK, they sell pre-paid cards and Kwedit doesn’t.

In my humble opinion, Sulake could have grown much more if it had focused on the virtual good market as a whole market instead of just that niche teenager segment. It could have created a strategic plan of reaching all types of games and services based on virtual goods. Well, other companies grew upon this model and they are newer than Habbo. C’est tant pis.

Startup: CrowdFlower

Posted: January 22nd, 2010 | Author: Chim | Filed under: Education, Food for thoughts, Groups | Tags: Entrepreneurs, Entrepreneurship, Interesting, Startups | No Comments »

CrowdFlower is a company that allows companies to outsource their repetitive tasks such as data verification and filtering. I think initially this can be very useful for internet companies that need to have content verification and data check services. Usually, it is not cheap to hire people to do this kind of job and the error rate is quite high for this type of repetitive task. I think the value proposition is to offer this type of service where companies do not have to hire people and have higher quality of service. It is a promising service.

The company received an additional of $5 million funding as stated from http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/20/crowdflower-raises-five-million-to-boost-crowdsourcing/.

Canada at 11th in Quality of Life Index 2009

Posted: January 6th, 2010 | Author: Chim | Filed under: Education, Food for thoughts | Tags: Canada, Food for thoughts, Guide, Interesting, Internet, Sweden | No Comments »

I found out a quality of life index of over 100 countries. Canada is positioned at 11th together with other 8 countries.

Quality of Life Index 2009

Read more here.

Google Nexus One – the PC of smartphones?

Posted: January 5th, 2010 | Author: Chim | Filed under: Food for thoughts, Tools, Web 2.0 | Tags: Business, Entrepreneurs, Food for thoughts, Google, Interesting, Internet, Web | No Comments »

The smartphone industry is moving to follow the same path of the personal computer (PC). Both industries have a lot of manufacturers. For example, Dell for computers and Motorola for smartphone. PC and smartphones have operating systems. For PC, the major OS is Windows and for smartphone, there are more than one major operating system. There are iPhone OS, Blackberry and Android (Google). It seems that there is a platform war among the manufacturers and Google. Imagine that a company can implement a system that is used by most of the cellphone manufacturers. This company will be able to control the smartphone industry, just as Microsoft controls the PC industry.

Nexus One Homepage

Google launched its official cellphone with Android operating system today. It is entering the smartphone market by providing a free OS to cellphone and aligning with manufacturer to provide a better user experience through better applications and superior hardware.

Google may reach a dominance in the smartphone market if it can have more manufacturers using its OS. However, manufacturers are not going to rely 100% in one software company. At the same time, most industry players do not have core competency in software development, thus they may rely on Google Android this time.

Meanwhile, iPhone is growing and Blackberry is responding to the new threats in the market. Nokia and other cellphones company are losing ground. It is an interesting time for this fast changing industry.

My 2 cents.

ArticStartup – 10 Mistakes Entrepreneurs Often Make When Raising Capital

Posted: January 3rd, 2010 | Author: Chim | Filed under: Education, Entrepreneurship, Venture Capital | Tags: Articles, Education, Entrepreneurs, Entrepreneurship, Venture Capital | No Comments »

This is very helpful for my New Venture Project timeline.

Quick summary:

1. Trying to raise money too late
2. Trying to raise money too early
3. Lacking a realistic assessment of the companys’ value
4. Not building enough substance before approaching investors
5. Not splitting the message into smaller chunks
6. Preparing poor pitch material
7. Pitching to the wrong investors
8. Not pitching at all
9. Getting too greedy
10. Not willing to share risk

Read the whole post at Arctic Startup via 10 Mistakes Entrepreneurs Often Make When Raising Capital.