Some startup ideas I’d love to see

 Here are some business ideas I'd love to see become real. 

An online junkmail account

 Imagine controlling the advertising you receive through your own account.

You can select the products you want to know more about, and local supplier’s brochures are automatically sourced and loaded onto your account.

Looking for a new car – end of financial year specials coming soon.

Looking for a new sofa – here are the latest deals.

Looking for a new computer – here are the hottest specials.

You name it, for work or home, I’d love to see it.

This would provide a direct marketing opportunity for companies, and would allow you as a consumer to control the deluge of catalogues you receive. It would also help save all those countless trees sacrificed to advertising catalogues for things that people aren’t interested in.

E-book libraries for companies

I love my Kindle and have started buying a lot of reference books on Amazon now.

Imagine being able to buy a few copies of a book, and being able to lend it out internally in your company. For example, only one person at a time can have a copy of that book on their reader.

This would allow for copyright control, same as for existing hardcopy books and magazines.

And, yes, I know you can have up to five people access the same book on Kindle at a time providing a business library workaround.  I want to make it the real deal with administration, etc.

Get to know your neighbours

In this day and age we have all become a bit weird about getting to know our neighbours. We all seem to be focussed on our work colleagues and old friends.

So how about having a circle like on Google+ that allows people on your street to tweet an invitation.

• “Lord of the Rings marathon on Thursday night at number 22. Bring some beer”
• “Barbecue on Tuesday”
• “Watch the finals, come on over”
• “Help wanted to move some logs in the backyard – sausage sizzle and beer afterwards”
• “Charity bakesale for Spina Bifida on Tuesday. Come over on Monday night and have some fun making cupcakes.”
• “Does anyone have a drill I can borrow?”

Legal/accounting advice by subscription               

There are heaps of day to day issues that we sometimes want to know what our rights are for. So think of this as group buying for essential advice – a kind of insurance.

Pay $250 a year and receive basic advice for up to 2 hours. Also, there would be a FAQ section to a website that could give examples and references for similar questions.

You could do the same for basic medical questions, dental issues, plumbing, house maintenance, etc. In all this, you are not obliged to buy services from the person who provides the advice.

I know that the professionals need to say that each situation is different, but most of the time we are just trying to get our heads around the fundamental issues – i.e. what is it, what does it mean and what are our basic options or next steps.

Fixed price rehab/physiotherapy

 I get injured a lot – so I have been in and out of physiotherapists regularly since I was a teenager.

What really gets under my skin is that you receive close attention the first day, then for the next 6-10 weeks you are going back a couple of times a week just to use their equipment, but you still pay full consultation rates for at most 30 seconds of personal time with the physio on these visits.

So, how about packaging it up so that there is a one off fixed price for complicated injuries. You get attention when you need it, and you can come back as often as you like to use equipment till you are fixed. If you really need ultrasound or something, why can’t there be on call technically trained staff who don’t need a full college education.

Turn the whole experience into a production line and pump them through. It might feel impersonal but in many ways it is more honest, cheaper for the patient, and most of all it is more likely to get the person to stay all the way through.

A single contacts list

In the smart phone and tablet world I would love to have a contacts list that I can use on any device anywhere. Even on any software anytime.

Ideally it would be totally independent of technology or operating system. It would be something I could have for life, and it would be regularly backed up.

I was recently traumatised by having my first mobile phone virus (via MMX) and this has really got me thinking about this.

In case you are thinking that this already happens – well, yes, but not really. Google and Apple don’t talk that well. Business card contact software is great, but everything has to translate to everything else, but database fields don’t always correlate. I have been juggling things between Blackberry, Google Apps, Android, iPhone, iPad, Outlook and Cardscan. It is making me go nuts.

Can we have a universal standard out there please.

Imagine receiving a call from someone and it would automatically upload their name, job title, contact email and address into your phone. It could be placed in a temporary group (circle) and you can then decide to keep it or not later.  As the person making the call you can provide a certain amount of information based on whether this is a query about a product, a call to a friend or a business call.

Let’s automate contacts folks.

Hot Desking Brokerage

 Just like AirBnB is helping people offer up their spare bedroom as accommodation to strangers, how about we advertise and offer up spare desks around town for people.

I can tell you who I want in my office – graphic designers, web designers, IT types, and all sorts of other freelancers. I’d be willing to rent them a desk for a month or year at a time at a much cheaper rate than they could otherwise get.

Yes, there are legal issues, but these are solvable.

Get rid of universities – give us proper online training

 I don’t mean this literally. What I mean is that there is a tendency to overcomplicate everything now.

A while ago I helped clean up my grandfather’s library after he passed away. I couldn’t believe how thin textbooks were. He studied business and accounting at night school in the 1930’s and when I read the content not much had changed except for the thickness of the texts.

Nowadays it almost seems like if you want to learn how to change a band aid you need to train how to be a qualified surgeon.

Let’s get back to the fundamentals, remember that until the 90’s university was the exception and not the rule, and recognise that vocational training is all most people need most of the time.

A lot of the online content nowadays is video clips. Sorry, but this isn’t really training. Mix it up a bit with readings, problem solving, essay writing, submit your own videos, etc.  Make learning and training part of our everyday lives and make it easy.