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.
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.
Posted: December 23rd, 2009 | Author: Chim | Filed under: Food for thoughts, Framework, Shopping, Web 2.0 | Tags: AdWords, Business, Food for thoughts, Google, Interesting, Internet, Money, Productivity, Useful | No Comments »
The Science of Managing Search Ads
There is an amazing article about Google AdWords from the New York Times.
It illustrates the management of an online campaign in AdWords for a company called Tiny Prints. This company advertisers on Google and gets a substantial part of its revenue and customers from AdWords. The company has stopped advertising for a day, trying to decrease its acquisition cost, but it ended up losing customers and allowing competitors to grow. Its management team decided to advertise again and it started to manage its campaign more closely, balancing the ads spending, competitors’ bids and profits.
The article gives an accurate view of how advertisers live with AdWords. To have success in that platform, you need to have quick decision, money and knowledge to use this powerful tool.
Read more here: The Science of Managing Search Ads
Posted: December 8th, 2009 | Author: Chim | Filed under: Entrepreneurship, Food for thoughts, Fun, Shopping, Startups | Tags: Business, Canada, Entrepreneurs, Entrepreneurship, Food for thoughts, Fun, Internet, Startups, Tools, Trends | No Comments »
It is hard to make money on the Internet. Currently, there are two famous ways to monetize on the Internet: advertising and e-commerce. In the advertising side, we have Google AdWords, Yahoo Marketing or Microsoft Advertising. These companies make money by having big audience that attracts advertisers’ money. For instance, Google gets money when users click ads. In the e-commerce side, we have eBay, Amazon, Newegg, etc. They gain profit from buying low and selling high price. They have strong brands and first-mover advantage. It is almost impossible to create a company to compete against these behemoths.
However, that did not stop entrepreneurs to come up with more startups. A lot of entrepreneurs created other viable ways to make money on the internet. One of the most interesting way is the Make-Your-Own-Stuff Web 2.0 companies. They are characterized by Ajax site structure with big buttons and fonts and crowdsourcing or customization features in their websites. They make money by selling cool things that a lot of people like. Some companies sell t-shirts, mugs or print arts for your iPhone.
I’m going to present four companies that fit in this Make-Your-Own-Stuff Web 2.0 category:
Threadless home page 2009 winter
Threadless is a company that sells crowdsourcing designed t-shirts (from Chicago). Simply, people send their t-shirt designs; other people vote for the best and cool designs; Threadless make t-shirts from those winning designs to the mass. People buy them. [This is a classic successful web 2.0 company that relies on crowdsourcing and social interaction.]
Gelaskins Canada Startup Homepage 2009
Gelaskins is a Canadian company that sells cellphone and other electronic gadget special skin protection with very interesting design. They have a lot of designers that create cool designs for all those cellphone protectors. The protectors are made of a special plastic-rubber easy to remove and glue that not only make your iPhone or Blackberry more beautiful, but also protect your gadget from scratches. [Great potential to grow.]
Scarfmaker an Estonian startup
Scarfmaker.com is a startup from Estonia and it allows users to customize scarf with their own designs. I think the idea is great and it may grow very very fast. Currently, I think the company is backed by Swedish VCs. I will be watching the developing of this company.
Crazy Custom Caps Home page 2009
Crazy Customs Caps is a typical company that offers customized caps. There are many many companies that allow people to create customized caps but not many of them set up a website. Although, the idea of this company may not be original, the business framework of allowing users to customize their products is definitely catching on in the web 2.0 landscape.
All these companies belong to the e-commerce category of money making website, but they are able to compete against big players because they have a special value proposition to customers. Most of them offer unique items created by the crowd or by user’s customization of the product. Interesting niche market.
Posted: August 15th, 2009 | Author: Chim | Filed under: Food for thoughts, Guides, Readings | Tags: Business, Education, Entrepreneurs, Entrepreneurship, Interesting, Internet, Market, Mobile, News, Readings, Web, Wireless | No Comments »
There is a news from the CNET that tells that Smartphones and low-cost handsets will keep dominating the wireless market. The post tells that despite the fact of economic downturn, demand for smartphone remained high and this category grew 27% compared to the same quarter a year ago. Also, smartphones have been the fastest growing segment of the mobile industry. Moreover, the prices for smartphones have been decreasing steadily in the last 5 years.
In my experience, smartphones were quite expensive. For instance, Palm Treo 700p was launched on 2005 and its price was around $650.00 with a two year contract. Now, you can get an iPhone with 8G with two year contract for about $99.00. I am not even counting the fact that we can do more things in the current generation of phones and we have more services than in the past.
Palm Treo 700p with two year contract around $650.00
From Gartner report from 2008, Market Share: Smartphones, Worldwide, 4Q08 and 2008, the Global sales of smartphones in 2008 reached 139.3 million devices, up 14% compared to 2007 . The smartphone market is definitely growing. It is expected that with the economic rebound, people will upgrade their mobile phones and they may buy more smartphone if the service costs and the phone become cheaper.
Looking at the Table 4, Worldwide: Smartphone Sales to End Users by Operating System, 2008 from Gartner, we can see that in spite of the 13.9 growth for the overall smartphone market, Research in Motion and Mac OS X grew really well with 96.7% and 245.7% respectively.
Smartphone market landscape 2007 - 2008
This type of growth is similar to what happened with the PC industry during the 80s and 90s.
As you can read these excerpts:
Chip makers post record results bolstered by booming PC sales
HOME COMPUTERS, 1994
PC Sales Over Holidays Rose 33% From '93 Level, 1994
Strong Gains For U.S. PC's, 1995
As you can see 1994 and beyond were the years when the PC industry had the greatest growth in history. The growth relied on the consumer market. While B2B has always been the initial driver of the PC industry, the B2C market was essential for the popularization of the personal computers.
Also, late in the 1997, the PC manufacturers started to sell PC in the sub-$1,000 category. This happened at the same time with the first big internet growth (Yahoo!, Amazon.com, etc.) and the high adoption of internet. In the following graph from ITU, the internet user’s rate grew 70% (the blue line from 97 and 98).
Internet users per 100 inhabitants 1997-2007
Also, the sales of PC grew immensely with the introduction of PC that cost less than $1,000.
Sub-$1,000 PC sales soar
As you can see from 25-Years PC Anniversary Statistics , the number of units of PC sold jumped from 5.7 million in 1981-1985 to 1,540 million in 2001-2006. That is a 27 times growth!
25-Year PC Anniversary Statistics
25-Year PC Anniversary Statistics Chart
Although, we do not have the power to see the future, there are some patterns from the PC industry that shows us that the smartphone industry will also have a spectacular growth. Definitely, there are differences, such as the number of operating systems and platform and also the fact that in the wireless industry, the manufactures and the carriers have a big say in the definition of the market, but undoubtedly, smartphone will growth.
And if the smartphone market grows as big as the PC industry, there will be a lot business opportunities and innovation.
