7 Business Startup Ideas

5 Cleantech Startups With Support from Intel

Intel Capital, Intel’s global investment organization, has invested a total approximately $10 million in five clean tech startups. Intel’s new sub-group, dubbed the Energy Systems Group will focus on the development of smart building, smart homes and smart grids.
The following startups received support:

*CPower (New York). The company delivers targeted energy management services and solutions that enable companies to optimize their facilities and operations through energy reduction initiatives and earn market payments for those reductions. This is Intel Capital’s initial funding of CPower.

*Grid Net (San Francisco). The company is a pioneer in providing the network operating system and management control plane for the Smart Grid. Grid Net’s Series C funding round includes Intel Capital’s third investment.

*Powervation (Limerick, Ireland). It provides digital power controllers for server, desktop computing and communications platforms that deliver capabilities in automatic configuration and self stabilization. Intel Capital co-led Powervation’s Series A funding round and this is its second investment in the company.

*Convey Computer (Richardson, Texas). The firm offers high-performance computing (HPC) solutions which aim to reduce energy consumption and boost performance. Convey’s HC-1 solution integrates advanced existing off-the-shelf hardware — namely an Intel Xeon processor and field programmable gate arrays — with compiler technology that minimizes the programming challenges. Convey’s Series B funding round includes the second investment by Intel Capital.

*iControl (Palo Alto, Calif.). The firm provides an IP-based platform that delivers monitored home security, remote home monitoring and home and energy management capabilities to security and broadband providers. iControl’s Series C funding round includes a follow-on investment by Intel Capital.

Top 12 Tech Startup Incubators

An incubator is a new type of educational institution. It teaches hands-on “entrepreneurial development” to the business owner in a very precise manner because the instructional method is not generalized. It teaches only what the business owner doesn’t know or can’t do. Since each business owner and each business is different, the methodology is designed to teach you what you need to know in the best way that you can learn.Startup Incubators have been the backbone of a lot of early stage startups.Funds sometimes range from $25,000 to $500,000 if you are lucky.Incubators provide not just the funds, but the entrepreneurs are provided with guidance/coaching, exposure to other vcs and investors, chance to present to potential customers.Once a startup begins to take off when all the funds have been used up on the runway,some of them approach venture capitalists with startup that have customers and a working product. The top 10 of such incubators I know are these:

1) YCombinator ;
Some of the companies YCombinator has helped in the past are:
AppJet, Heroku,Omnisio,WattVision,Loopt,Disqus, Reditt, Weebly, Justin.tv,scribd,thesixtyone, foodoro,dropbox, posterous.
2) BetaWorks : Average Investment : $100K
3) ATDC -Georgia
4) Slingshoit Labs-Myspace
5) Capital Factory
6) Tech Stars
7) Shotput Ventures
8) Start At Spark
9) LaunchBoxDigital
10) Dream IT Ventures
11) Green Ventures
12) Javelin Venture Partners

Web OS With Social Media Twist

Google is working on building a web OS for notebooks.A lot expects have predicted the emergence of a web OS in a year or two. Launched last week, Glide Engage is a stream front-end for the Glide , a Web OS which offers a suite of integrated Web Apps including docs, spreadsheets, photo and music uploading and sharing, calendar, email, Website creation and collaboration tools. Glide can be overwhelming. There is a lot there. But it has attracted its own loyal following of about one million registered users. In their own words “Glide is a free suite of rights-based productivity and collaboration applications with 10GBs of storage. Setup and administer up to six family member accounts including child accounts from your Glide settings panel. The Glide OS provides automatic file and application compatibility across devices and operating systems. With Glide OS you also get the Glide Sync App which helps you to synchronize your home and work files.”
You can even use Glide on virtually any mobile phone with a browser. To access Glide on your mobile go to www.GlideMobile.com

Saas Startup Ideas

Software as a service is being talked about everyday by trend experts, Industry Bloggers, and trend predictors.I have been Thinking about how best to to take advantage of this wave.But it is not that easy to build a startup to serve the businesses.I have been thinking about ideas that can fly and subsequently emerge into a company that can scale like salesforce. Salesforce is the leader of the software as a service market. The 7 Secrets to SaaS Startup Success by Salesforce is great.I am attracted to this market, but I need a lot of insight to run a company like that. Ben Yoskovitz has great insight in the saas market. What Do SaaS Companies Have to Prepare for 2009? has a lot of advice. .
For all the trends and companies taken saas to the next level visit. .

A couple of ideas I have stumbled upon whilst surfing the web:

• Professional Virtual Office Easily manage your data (emails, contacts, meetings, documents, tasks,…) in your virtual office from any computer with a Web browser and an Internet connection. Share yourdata and access shared data efficiently in the context of work or leisure groups. Your data are safe andavailable anytime on the Web, on a PDA (online or offline) or on a WAP capable cell phone.

• Simplify your Online Life . develop tools that improve Internet user’s digital lifestyles. Tools make it easier to communicate online, whether that means one web-based inbox for email and social networks or some other method the community has yet to dream up.

• Contact Management Easily create, manage, and search an unlimited number of contacts, export to vcards, even share contacts with any email address. On the run? Seamlessly download and view your contacts on your phone, laptop, or iPod. Gone are the days of business cards piling up and sticky notes on your desk, Keepm makes everyone you know searchable, shareable, and always accessible.keepm.com (good concept)

• Segment: “Platform as a Service”. Product: a web-based development & hosting platform allowing small businesses to model , build and manage autonomously their own information system, for a small monthly fee.

• Web hosted Virus scanner for enterprises instead of relying on downloadable software. Enterprise subscribes to scan their computers automatically.

• As search engine that crawls and searches for reports on Africa and developing countries. Information aggregated are bundled as reports and sold to companies that needs market analysis and other info for business decisions.

Twitter and Facebook Are Not Alone,How Different Is TipDrop

The new micro blogging term is “What do you know about that?”.Can this statement overtake “Whats on your mind” from facebook and “what are you doing” from twitter .Th micro blogging space has grown tremendously since the twitter went mainstream. But twitter is still figuring out how to make the most of the application.Revenue generation has not been so good. Yammer has built the same concept for enterprises

TipDrop is a place where people come to give and receive tips on just about anything. When you see a tip sheet you know something about, simply answer the question posed.So, how does it work? People post tips that relate to specific topics found in tip sheets. For instance, a user might create a tip sheet with the title, “How to save money in a down economy” and another user might add a tip that advises, “Pack your lunch instead of eating out when at work.” In fact, in its first five days the site has had 1,000,000 page views and more than 3,000 tips.

Google Storms Africa With SMS Search, But….

Internet penetration Africa is not as rife as it is in the US, Europe or Asia.Few people have phones in their homes.It may be a walking distance, but access to internet does not come handy.Internet access in Africa is still very low compared to the rest of the world.The latest internet usage in Africa as published by Internet World Stats is 54,171,500 compared to the 1,542,098,608 the rest of the world share.Google the leading provider of search on the Internet has brought the search service to Africans on their phones through SMS. Google has partnered with some mobile telecommunication networks to provide search capabilities for Africans on their phones.Individual keywords are sent via SMS to the network by short codes.The result is also sent back by SMS. Africans don’t need to be on the internet to access the service.Africa has the world’s highest mobile growth rate and mobile phone penetration is far higher than Internet penetration. By focusing on SMS-based service, Google will be able to reach a far larger number of potential users than by working on web-based apps.

The service in Ghana where I come from is not as popular as I thought it will be.The service is still Available on one Network provider.The usage is still low.Just maybe the message did not go down well with the target market.I found out about the service on one of Google sites.A lot of African who do not have internet access rely on Radio and Television for information such as Daily News, Sports, Health, Weather and Stock prices.A new service like what Google provides needs a lot of marketing at least in Ghana my home country.

Startup Business Ideas

I have been looking into ideas that can possibly be turned into a company if the market analysis are done right.These are some of the ideas I have been thinking about.

•“There are plenty of customers and business partners that are willing, and even anxious, to tell a business exactly what they need, how to improve a product, or even become involved with the design and innovation process in order to contribute their experience and requirements. It is through empowering the people and letting their contributions be heard that the great advances are made.”

• Diskaunt
Online deals and discount provider which lists all available shopping discounts. Discounts on flight, hotel, bus booking, credit card, flowers, cakes, electronics, mobiles, laptops, computers books and cloths in a geographical area of customers’ preference.

• SocialShop
Social Commerce (online shopping). It helps shoppers interact and share before making decisions to purchase. Add feature that allow shoppers to create wish list with price quotations and receive sms when the price matches their wish list and in a geographic area of choice.
• Myrr
Borrow books online and add to your profile and read for a period within a period. Pay based on number of books borrowed.
You can also think around these:

• Ideas that could become new companies
• Ideas that could become new products for existing companies (mine or someone else’s)
• Ideas that could become great new features for existing products
• Ideas that could improve existing features of existing products

How to Allow Users to Submit Posts to Your Blog

I started Using wordpress last week,and I must confess it has been very useful for me.I am creating a user generated site,and I want my users to submit content as well. The TDO Mini Forms Plugin has ben very useful. I downloaded the zipped file from the link sited above AND uploaded the TDO Mini Forms folder in my wordpress folder in the directory i created on my localhost. Here: .C:\Users\tom@s\workspace\wordpress\wp-content\plugins. I then went straight to the WordPress Dashboard and clicked on the Plugins link.I then activated it and clicked on the form creator which took me to the default form.I replaced the default form with custom fields.In each custom field, as I was typing the name of the field I enabled the “Append Custom Field to Post Content ” saved it and now I create post right from the site by using my own forms. I also allow users to submit posts(my custom fields are purposely built for users to submit restaurants and events in thier locality.

TechCrunch Network Search Engine

I have been using techcrunch a lot to find out about technology news and emerging startups on the internet.Recently I stumbled upon the TechCrunch Network Search Engine .Its a great tool that has helped me tremendously.I have been looking for a site with startup directory like what techcrunch provides.All the startups featured on both TechCrunch and Crunchbase are presented in a way that makes it possible to track what they do easily. What makes it very useful fro me is that I type particular industry and it returns all the startups that are featured under it in a perfect way.Its especially useful if you are conducting research under competitive analysis.