A “good” idea

This is probably the largest misconception in the non-startup world. People usually say “I would do a startup but I can’t think of a good idea.” Ideas, in my view, are the easy part. With all due respect to Lewis Carroll, the 6 impossible things before breakfast can be seen as the entrepreneur ethos: an impossible thing is merely the root of a new solution.

At the end of the day, ideas are the start but an idea does not a startup make: turning that idea into a reality is what makes a startup real. In my mind, the people who see the idea as the thing needed for a startup are not really interested in doing a startup, they’re interested in having done a startup. Startups are about taking that idea and executing on it.

So are ideas important to future sucess? Only marginally so. I remember seeing facebook for the first-time and thinking “this looks like sixdegrees.com.” Six degrees was an early social network (how early? it was part of the dotcom boom!) where people could connect to their friends and post updates. Sixdegrees begat friendster, which inspired myspace, which inspired Facebook. The main difference: execution.

The initial idea for Keepskor was good but nowhere near as good as what we’re launching with. As we refined it, improved on it, and then discovered other areas that were previously uncovered, we managed to zero in on something that is radically different from what I had originally envisioned.

Ideas are easy and a good idea generally attracts people. At this very time, I suspect that there are no less than two other startups trying to do the same thing we’re trying to accomplish at Keepskor. They’re toiling away in obscurity, as we are, trying to solve some of the same problems we’re trying to solve. And they may or may not get a product out in the marketplace before we do. But where I think we will win is because everyone at Keepskor is focused on delivering the product and making the necessary changes our customers will undoubtedly required.

If you’re having a problem about ideas, here are a few: find a way to create a reliable wireless communication system; find a way to provide foreign language kid TV series undubbed outside of their initial market; find a way to create add an internet connection to a TV or computer screen that doesn’t have one; Create airplay for Android; create a service that will merge my SMS, MMS, email, instant messaging and social network discussions in a way that makes them easily retrievable in the future; create a service that will allow magazines and newspapers a cheap and turnkey way to deliver their content to multiple platforms (ipad, kindle, etc…) in one felt swoop; offer a turn-key solution for renting trucks and getting all the necessary permits related to food-truck services… and those are just things that came off the top of my head as I was writing this.

I’m sure there is something that bugs you out there: make that thing better and there’s your idea. Then go execute on that idea.

But will all that, I still can’t put it as succinctly as Ashleigh Brilliant did: “Good ideas are common. What’s uncommon is people who will work hard enough to bring them about.”

Note: this is part of a 5-parts series about startup myths. You may want to read all the parts: ideas, path, risk, money, capital.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Myth: Startup success is all about the idea. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

$700 billion is a pretty large figure (TechPresident has a good post that puts it in perspective) and it’s one that will only increase the national deficit.

But interestingly, there’s a way to cover the $700 billion. If we are in a time of crisis, we all have to tighten up our belts: the president has said that the alternative is a really bad economy so I’d assume we are all in this together and we all need to pull in. With the figure of $700 billion being rougly $2300 per person, there’s no way we can ask for everyone to chip in that exact amount. But what if we decided to spread paying it back over several years.

So I started playing with the national budget simulator, a handy little tool which has older budget figures but can give us some ideas.

The first thing I did was repeal the Bush tax cuts from 2001 and 2003. If we are in an economic crisis, we have to figure out a way to get the country back on track so repealing tax cuts that were creating when the economy was arguably in a better state might do the job. Doing so against the 2006 Budget would have yielded $294.88 Billion. That gets up about a third of the way through paying for the bailout. So, if you repeal the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts over a 3 year period, you pay for the bailout. In times of crisis, that might work.

But that was the easy part. What if we need to pay for this in one shot. If that’s the case, we’d need to find another $400 billion in the budget:

• Get rid of reconstruction aid for Iraq gets us $6.84 billion. With $80 billion in oil revenue currently running for the Iraqi government, we could argue they can cover their own reconstruction cost and eliminate this.
• Cutting untaxed foreign profit would yield another $15.74 billion. You could argue that in times of crisis, we need to focus on internal profit and foreign profit is fair game.
• a 20% cut in defense research and development would yield another $13.62 billion (from base of $68.129 billion) but slow down our ability to develop new weapons.

But those are all small cuts and other cuts could have negative impact on the economy so, looking at most of the budget, the only way to get anywhere near the $700 billion mark would be to repeal those tax cuts from 2001 and 2003. They were expensive then but are now downright unaffordable and one could argue that it would be our patriotic duty to cut them.

Ideas, comments, suggestions as to how to raise the $700 billion are welcomed in the comment thread.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Paying for the bailout. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

There is no competitive advantage in offering a different charger and yet it seems that every vendor has come up with a different approach when it comes to the charging port. As a result, scores of users have to pack multiple chargers when they travel. Just off the top of my head, a typical user would generally pack different chargers for each of the following devices: laptop, mobile phone, camera, mp3 player, and PDA. Granted, a way to solve the problem is to aggregate devices (for example, as I do with the Treo, use a smart device that includes many of those functions) so you have to carry fewer chargers but ultimately, there’s always more than one and few people around with a charger that is compatible.

There is, however, a competitive advantage for vendors in establishing a standard. That advantage goes to the age old issue of price. If two players agreed to a similar set of power chargers, they could not force their vendor (chargers are generally subcontracted) to build them and then work on creating competitition between those vendors, hence putting pressure on prices. Innovation could then start appearing in that market as the vendors would be forced to look at features they could use to remain competitive. For example, one could see companies developing chargers that are smaller, recharge batteries faster, or consume less energy when converting power. In the future, one could even envision a world where “power charger not included” would become more of a de-facto rule from electronics vendors.

End users would, of course, benefit from this since they would be able to go anywhere and find a charger that is compatible with their devices. One could go to a conference, or visit friends, or go to a hotel and easily find a way to recharge. Furthermore, if one lost or forgot their charger somewhere, they would be able to easily replace the missing charger cheaply.

All and all, the current state of affairs when it comes to the power issue is sad and I wish the electronics industry would agree on coming up with a common standard and set of approaches when it comes to power, which would benefit everyone.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Standard Power Chargers Would Be Nice. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

At $30/month, Wi-Fi service can currently be seen as an expensive toy for the mobile worker. But if you consider the possibility to make phone calls for the same price, the price seems low. Compared to most cellular phone programs that offer a few hundred or thousand minutes every month for roughly the same price, the idea of unmetered service could represent a huge growth opportunity for anyone offering a hotspot. However, the issue will then become one of available bandwidth. As more and more hotspots are added, the pervasiveness of Wi-Fi makes the possibility to bypass the phone network more real.

The next step in that evolution would be for the Wi-Fi protocol to include some kind of mechanism to check the strength of signal. If you think of the cellular phone system, you will realize that your cell phone conversation moves from station to station as you are moving. Every second, the cell phone checks where the nearest antenna is and changes access accordingly. This ensures that you get the highest signal possible and allows for the phone to stay connected even as you get further away from the original antenna you used. Wi-Fi does not currently have that checking capability in place but when it does, Wi-Fi phones could become more common.

It is interesting to see this happen as cellular phone companies might find themselves displaced in much the same way they are starting to displace land lines. New technologies keep cropping up that disrupt the way business is done and put more pressure on revenues (because they are, invariably, introduced to users at a cut-rate price in order to gain market shares).

However, the economics of wireless networks rely on a limited use of equipment (for example, as more people sign up for a mobile phone service, the quality of the service drops because more people are trying to use the same equipment). With the rise of Wi-Fi and the introduction of small operators (coffee shops, etc…) it will be interesting to see what will happen. My guess is that we will eventually see all the large mobile phone operators introducing Wi-Fi plans over the next 12–24 months. We will then see the rise of one or two new companies that will hook up smaller operators into a different set of networks. As the cost of providing the service increases (because more bandwidth will be required), the smaller players will shake out of the market. Once that has happened, the winners in that fight will start to increase prices again.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Disruptive Technology. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Here’s how it works:
First, there’s an XML definition to say this is an XML feed:

This is followed by the tag which says this is my full disclosure feed.

Generic information similar to an RSS feed includes the weblog title, weblog URL, the RSS URL (this is important because some people may only read a site through an RSS reader), the type of site (this can be either personal (for a personal site), corporate (for a site run by the corporation pushing the product), or marketing (for marketing agencies, advertising agencies, public relations companies, and other outside agencies promoting a product on behalf of a client), and a contact part (this can either be an email address or the URL of a web form to contact the person or company).

We then go into the section For every type of ad, we include a „ , and . Let me go into more details on this:

Type

: There are a number of ways in which a marketing placement can appear. It can be through the form of a banner, a button, a pop-up ad, a text-ad (similar to Google textads or metafilter’s), a links (within a blogroll, or navigation area, or an entry. If you want to make it clear, you might want to include all of them, or you can pick and choose which ones you will include.

Compensation

: This covers what kind of compensation you received. It can be none (if you just want to say we don’t run this type of ad), goodwill (if you think you’re going to get good karma out of it), cash (the hard stuff), product (if you got a free product out of it) or link (for example if you link to a friend and they link back to you).

Value

: This is a free form field where you can list what is the value of the goods, services, money you received. Some of it could be free traffic, for example.

Entry

: This one is in the off-chance that one day, you did decide to do a one-off deal on a particular entry or if you want to section off particular types of marketing to a particular section. It can be all (for all entries), none (for no entries at all) or a URL (which would be the permalink of the particular entry this applies to).

That’s about it. I just mocked it up in a few minutes so I expect a lot more fleshing out to happen. In that attempt, I invoke the LazyWeb to discuss further.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Marketer, Marketer, where have you been?. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.