Ingot Tree

Who's got the best idea for a startup? Students from university programs around the country face off in FSB's annual contest. Check the ideas out here.

Categories: business, idea, contest, fortune, small, business

Business 2.0 Magazine --

"Jeff Hayden preys on smallish companies on the brink. Not because he's a vulture investor seeking to turn around a struggling business. He just wants its real estate. And he wants it cheap, so he can then rent it back to the company for a juicy profit.

His strategy is a new twist on what's known as a buy-to-leaseback - a deal that's long been used by big companies such as Walgreens that want to get real estate off their books and raise cash.Plenty of investors are glad to have healthy, household-name companies like Walgreens as tenants, so they purchase their properties and then lease them back.

But Hayden is striking deals with companies that big real estate investors ignore, and his approach could mark the emergence of a wide-open multibillion-dollar opportunity."

Read more at Be a landlord of last resort.

Categories: landlord, lease, premium, business, idea, buy-to-lease-back

Red Hat shares have plummeted to about 18.20 of late, hitting a 52 week low in the process. This in spite of the general upswing in tech stocks.

The drop has largely been attributed to rumours that Oracle may soon be throwing its own hat in the linux ring. For details read Oracle Rumors Surface Once More, Spooking Red Hat Shareholders, By Rick Smith, LocalTechWire. Excerpts:

"On May 8, Red Hat shares hit a 52-week high of $32.48. The surge in stock price came after Red Hat announced the acquisition of Atlanta-based JBoss, an open source software developer for servers. The move struck a positive chord at the time as Red Hat seemed to be broadening its product capabilities.

But the JBoss deal caused heartburn in a number of different quarters, apparently including in the executive suite at server giant Oracle. Ever since the JBoss deal, Oracle’s Larry Ellison has taken potshots at Red Hat, including in the pages of the prestigious Financial Times. Maybe Oracle, which has worked with Red Hat in the past, needed its own Linux version, Ellison said.

Red Hat chief Matthew Szulik responded in those same pages, writing that Red Hat really wasn’t challenging Oracle. And IBM, another Red Hat partner that relies heavily on server business, issued warm and fuzzy words about the JBoss deal.

But the Oracle-Linux rumors persist. Egbert’s report only exacerbated them,

"(O)ur independent checks in the past two weeks indicate that Oracle seems to be close to introducing its own software 'stack.’,” she wrote. Egbert proceeded to cut her target price on Red Hat to $21 from $24.

Not everyone concurs that Oracle will go the Linux route. But Ellison could choose to partner with another Linux developer, wrote Tim Beyers for The Motley Fool.

“My problem isn't with analyst Katherine Egbert's sources, or her conclusion that Oracle is talking with the makers of Ubuntu Linux about working more closely together. My problem is that she believes the collaboration could result in an Oracle-branded Linux appliance. Frankly, I think that's crazy,” Beyers said.

Not so, others say. On Slashdot.org, the website bible for all things Linux, a poster picked up on the Oracle theme on Tuesday:

"There have been rumors floating around of Oracle working on their own distribution of Linux. If this is true, it is widely believed that this enterprise edition of Linux would be in direct competition with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. What is spurring the rumors? Well, Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison said, 'I'd like to have a complete stack. We're missing an operating system. You could argue that it makes a lot of sense for us to look at distributing and supporting Linux.' I know that Oracle has been doing a lot more than databases recently, will they go the extra mile and create their own stripped down Linux kernel? If they do, will companies switch to database solutions that are running Oracle only software for the benefits of support and (hopefully) stability?"

Meanwhile, some people continue to doubt the wisdom of the JBoss buy.

Peter Goldmacher, writing in the Wall Street Transcript’s “Enterprise Application Software” issue, blasted Red Hat.

“Open source is very interesting, because the poster child for open source has been Red Hat (RHAT), and it seems like Red Hat is losing their grip on their market because they have branched out into incremental functionality that they only needed some of their larger partners for. So if their larger partners feel like they want to get back into the business that they had previously allowed Red Hat to do for them, I think Red Hat could be in trouble.”

The Oracle rumors and recent sell-off have ruined a rebound for Red Hat. Shares dropped a whopping $6.11 on Sept. 27 after a third quarter earnings report that was regarded in many quarters as “weak”. The news sent RHAT to $20.12 as 62.7 million shares - 10 times the daily trade average – changed hands."

If the Oracle rumours are, simply, rumours, this lowpoint in Red Hat prices may be worth exploiting.

Categories: red, hat, oracle, stocks, shares, tech

2 related articles by Fortune Magazine are worth a read, reminding us that talent isn't the formula for greatness, hard work is.

1. What it takes to be great

2. How one CEO learned to fly

del.icio.us tags: greatness, practice, hardwork, talent, success

In an attempt to bounce back into the tech limelight, Sun Microsystems has come up with something that may actually work.

Computing Data Centres in a box that can fit into a parking lot. Saving corporations time spent building their IT systems and, more importantly, saving rent on prime real estate, these black boxes are a simple yet innovative way to use existing contraptions to solve a problem worth solving.

For more on these black boxes, check out these articles in the New York Times and Physorg.com.

Categories: sun, microsystem, data, centre, problem, solution, business, idea, innovation, IT, tech, space, rent, real, estate

This guy has loads well, 40 over, ways to make money on the net. I've yet to look through all of 'em but the blog is worth looking at.

Categories: money, internet, ideas, blog

"Once upon a time it was easy to tell the difference between a small business and a large competitor: Big firms had access to more capital, diverse markets, better technology, and economies of scale; small companies had to make do with whatever they could afford. But as technology has advanced, that distinction has blurred. Just as mainframe computers gave way to cheap PCs on every desk, Yellow Pages ads are being replaced by low-cost websites, and regional sales forces by search terms purchased from Google and Yahoo. Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen cites overnight shipping as another of history's great leveler, giving smaller manufacturers the ability to send parts across the globe in less than a day and robbing big firms of a competitive advantage.

The past couple of years have ushered in a new wave of tools for entrepreneurs who want to play big, as software and service providers have begun to adapt their offerings-previously available only to large firms-for small businesses. "The attitude used to be, 'We're going to take this product we have for enterprise, strip out a lot of functionality, and small business is going to have to use it,'" says Chris Hazelton, senior analyst at IDC, an IT market-research firm based in Framingham, Mass. "Now companies are either building products specifically for small business or making the products modular so they're lower-priced and scalable."

The result: startup multinationals. Small firms with bigtime online security. Low-profile companies using high-powered software to perfect their websites. No-name startups with big-name shipping partners. Over the next several pages you'll meet entrepreneurs who are taking advantage of new technologies and strategies and learning a powerful lesson: It's never been easier to play big."

- From this interesting article on some interesting examples of big corporation efficiencies now available to startups.

Categories: startup, entrepreneur, software, tool, big, multinational, corporation, compete, logistics, VPN, startup, website, efficiency

Categories: healthy, medical, startup, doctor, HL

- Not knowing what problem your invention solves
- Poor intellectual property rights protection
- Poor licensing agreements
- Poor marketing

For more tips, check out this poor genius' story at Fortune Small Business.

Categories: intellectual, property, rights, licensing, agreements, marketing, genius, invention, fortune, small, business

For the first time, consumers will be able to download and burn movies onto DVDs legally - that is, with the copyright protection technology that the movie studios demand.

Despite the advent of movie downloads, DVDs are still highly sought after. They pack more information than the typical downloaded movie. Their quality is far superior than streaming movies wirelessly - which are going to look horrible on a regular Wi-Fi connection.

You can lend DVDs to friends and family. They're easy to mail. And you get instant access to all of their features and every scene in a movie, instead of having to wait for the download to end.

This week, software developers Sonic Solutions and Macrovision Corporation made a deal that could save retailers a lot of rent money. Sonic makes software that helps consumers burn discs, while Macrovision sells copyright protection services to the entertainment industry.

Because suddenly it becomes possible for stores - both online and off - to burn DVDs on demand.

A video store offering hundreds of thousands of movies, instead of, say, the thousand that currently fight for space on store shelves. Amazon will be a big winner because it will be able to burn discs as customers order them, thereby reducing inventory costs and boosting margins.

This post was adapted from DVDs: They will survive.

Categories: DVD, copyright, movie, inventory, costs, margins

A friend of mine has started selling a battery pack that may be used with almost all portable electronic devices, from laptops to mobile phones. One power source to rule them all.

You can select the appropriate voltage to suit the device, and use the the appropriate adapter to connect the battery to the device.

This would save business travellers from carrying numerous duplicitous chargers for their phones, laptops etc.

Brilliant example of someone finding a good problem to solve.

It's going for around S$235, in case anyone's interested.

The Specs, according to the website are:

myPower ALL Tech Specs

• Weighs just 11.8 oz (MP3300) and 15.9 oz (MP3400)

• Size is 3.28” (W) x 6.80” (L) x .92” (D)

• Output current: 4A max

• Rechargeable lithium polymer battery

• 4 hour charging time

• Supports multiple voltages

• Output power 40 Wh (MP3300) / 56Wh (MP3400)

• Includes 8 adapter tips that connect to most devices

• Comes with leather carrying case with belt strap

• Full one year warranty

The sales pitch I received by email is as follows:

Unique Selling Point of the MP3400 in Singapore :

Come next year, the government’s iN2015 plan will include a nationwide wireless internet implementation. By then, we can get connected wirelessly in a lot more places and not only limited to hotspots. More people will be working on their laptops outdoors but the only problem they will always face would be : Power ! There is no power outlets in the outdoors readily available to let you power up your laptop or PDA when your laptop/PDA battery runs out. Your only option now is only to buy a spare laptop battery proprietory to your current laptop brand/model, when you change your laptop, this extra battery will be deemed useless as most likely than not, it is not compatible to your new notebook, even if it is of the same brand.

BUT NOW, you have a choice !!

1) myPowerall MP3400 Universal Rechargeble Battery aims to solve the problem of providing additional battery power, by extending your outdoor laptop power usage by another 3-4hrs. In total, a typical user whose laptop battery lasts 2 hrs can basically get 5-6 hrs of total usable power in the outdoors instead of the usual 2hrs from his current laptop.

2) The MP3400 is not limited to your current laptop model or brand, if you are using a Toshiba now and changing to Compaq later, this battery can still be use, the Universal MP3400 is compatible to over 80% of all the portable electronics (including laptops) in the market.

3) The cost is near or equivalent to most laptop batteries in the market. If you are considering to buy another laptop battery, why not consider this new option that gives you not only more power but also more value.

4) It charges PDAs, MP3, portable DVD/VCD players, mobile phones and digital cameras etc.

5) It is also much safer than the conventional Lithium Ion battery (as in the laptop battery recall incidents recently).

Categories: battery, pack, electronic, devices, adapter, problems, solution, business, ideas

I've been rather impressed with the ideas this dude has collected and recorded since 2005. His post containing business ideas for the broke is pretty neat. Check it out.

Categories: business, idea, money, broke, blog

WARNING: THIS IS ONE OF THOSE APPETITE DESTROYING POSTS.

Recently I received a forwarded email that alleged that somewhere in China eateries are cheating customers by serving deep friend rats as chicken. The email even serves up the steps in the culinery process. Unbelieveable? Check these pictures out. Personally I don't think the finished dish looks like chicken so it's also likely that the eatery sells it AS Fried Rats...



BURNING THE HAIR OFF THEM


WASHING THEM BEFORE COOKING


CUTTING THEM UP INTO PIECES THAT SIMULATE CHICKEN PARTS


PREPARED FOR DEEP FRYING


WELL SEASONED TO TASTE GREAT!!!!


ALL DONE AND READY TO EAT!!!


CLOSER LOOK


THE OTHER "WHITE MEAT"


Categories: rat, chicken, taste, con, china, restaurant, appetite

The Youtube story is another classic fairy tale. Recently acquired by Google, Youtube's simple beginning must be a lesson to learn. Solve a problem, one small step at a time. Here's the Straits Times' account:

ALL Mr Chad Hurley and Mr Steve Chen wanted to do was share some videos from a dinner party with a half a dozen friends in San Francisco.

It was January last year, and they could not figure out how to do it. They tried sending the clips by e-mail but they kept getting rejected because the files were too big. Posting the videos online was a headache, too.

So last February, the two buddies got to work in Mr Hurley's garage, determined to design something simpler.

What they came up with was a website called YouTube - and the rest is Internet history.

BusinessWeek, in its April 10 issue this year, told this story of YouTube's young founders - Mr Hurley is 29 years old and Mr Chen, 28.

They met at an online payment service PayPal where they were among the first 20 hires during the second half of 1999. They became good friends and part of a tight-knit PayPal clique that remains close till today, said the magazine.

In fact, their venture money came in part through their connection to Mr Roelof Botha, a partner at Sequoia Capital, a top venture capital firm and early backer of Google. Mr Botha had been PayPal's chief financial officer.

Mr Hurley, YouTube's chief executive, also had an entrepreneurial streak from the start. He grew up in the Philadelphia suburbs and tried to sell paintings from his front yard at the age of five, said the magazine. He studied design at Indiana University of Pennsylvania and landed at PayPal after reading about it in Wired magazine and asking about a job via e-mail.

During his interview he designed a new logo for PayPal, one that the company still uses today. He left after PayPal was sold to eBay in 2002, working with a few companies as a design consultant.

Mr Chen, YouTube's chief technology officer, has been a maths and science geek since high school, said BusinessWeek.

He threw himself into programming and computers at Illinois Mathematics & Science Academy and went on to study computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

During his last semester, he was recruited by Mr Max Levchin, co-founder of PayPal and a former classmate. Mr Chen remained at PayPal until early last year to help finish launching the company's expansion into China.

By the time of the fateful dinner party last January, the two men were both between jobs and carrying substantial credit card debt.

They founded YouTube in February as a classic Silicon Valley garage start-up with another friend, Mr Jawed Karim. Mr Karim left the company just before it got its first round of funding in November last year to go back to full-time study at Stanford University.

Mr Chen, the programming expert, used Adobe's flash development language to let users stream video clips on their browsers. Mr Hurley, the user interface expert, designed ways to let users easily share the videos they liked and put descriptive remarks or 'tags' on their favourite clips.

They let users paste YouTube clips right on their own Web pages - a trick that led to the exploding popularity of YouTube, especially on another popular website, MySpace.

In an interview yesterday, Mr Hurley told Reuters that he and Mr Chen gave in to Google, after rebuffing other offers, because of its resources and assurances of independence.

They get to keep on running the company and YouTube retains its name and its own corporate offices. The Google stock they will get in a deal worth more than US$1 billion (S$1.6 billion) must have been hard to resist, too.

Categories: youtube, beginning, google, choosing, problem, startup, entrepreneur, chad, hurley, steve, chen, video, sharing, solution, paypal

I chanced upon an (almost) interesting paper on the result of an experiment, to test the business ideas of undergrads, sort of.

One of the issues raised is that smart people are trained to solve problems but not spot the right problem s to solve ("right" being defined as a start up idea).

The article is rather long but here's the beginning and the end:

This summer, as an experiment, some friends and I are giving seed funding to a bunch of new startups. It's an experiment because we're prepared to fund younger founders than most investors would. That's why we're doing it during the summer-- so even college students can participate.

We know from Google and Yahoo that grad students can start successful startups. And we know from experience that some undergrads are as capable as most grad students. The accepted age for startup founders has been creeping downward. We're trying to find the lower bound.

The deadline has now passed, and we're sifting through 227 applications. We expected to divide them into two categories, promising and unpromising. But we soon saw we needed a third: promising people with unpromising ideas.

...

The good news is, choosing problems is something that can be learned. I know that from experience. Hackers can learn to make things customers want. [6]

This is a controversial view. One expert on "entrepreneurship" told me that any startup had to include business people, because only they could focus on what customers wanted. I'll probably alienate this guy forever by quoting him, but I have to risk it, because his email was such a perfect example of this view:

80% of MIT spinoffs succeed provided they have at least one management person in the team at the start. The business person represents the "voice of the customer" and that's what keeps the engineers and product development on track.

This is, in my opinion, a crock. Hackers are perfectly capable of hearing the voice of the customer without a business person to amplify the signal for them. Larry Page and Sergey Brin were grad students in computer science, which presumably makes them "engineers." Do you suppose Google is only good because they had some business guy whispering in their ears what customers wanted? It seems to me the business guys who did the most for Google were the ones who obligingly flew Altavista into a hillside just as Google was getting started.

The hard part about figuring out what customers want is figuring out that you need to figure it out. But that's something you can learn quickly. It's like seeing the other interpretation of an ambiguous picture. As soon as someone tells you there's a rabbit as well as a duck, it's hard not to see it.

And compared to the sort of problems hackers are used to solving, giving customers what they want is easy. Anyone who can write an optimizing compiler can design a UI that doesn't confuse users, once they choose to focus on that problem. And once you apply that kind of brain power to petty but profitable questions, you can create wealth very rapidly.

That's the essence of a startup: having brilliant people do work that's beneath them. Big companies try to hire the right person for the job. Startups win because they don't-- because they take people so smart that they would in a big company be doing "research," and set them to work instead on problems of the most immediate and mundane sort. Think Einstein designing refrigerators. [7]

If you want to learn what people want, read Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People. [8] When a friend recommended this book, I couldn't believe he was serious. But he insisted it was good, so I read it, and he was right. It deals with the most difficult problem in human experience: how to see things from other people's point of view, instead of thinking only of yourself.

Most smart people don't do that very well. But adding this ability to raw brainpower is like adding tin to copper. The result is bronze, which is so much harder that it seems a different metal.

A hacker who has learned what to make, and not just how to make, is extraordinarily powerful. And not just at making money: look what a small group of volunteers has achieved with Firefox.

Doing an Artix teaches you to make something people want in the same way that not drinking anything would teach you how much you depend on water. But it would be more convenient for all involved if the Summer Founders didn't learn this on our dime-- if they could skip the Artix phase and go right on to make something customers wanted. That, I think, is going to be the real experiment this summer. How long will it take them to grasp this?

We decided we ought to have T-Shirts for the SFP, and we'd been thinking about what to print on the back. Till now we'd been planning to use

If you can read this, I should be working.

but now we've decided it's going to be

Make something people want.

Categories: choosing, problem, smart, people, train, experiment, paper, business, idea, management, customers, startup, entrepreneur

Just when my Apple shares were back in the black, Apple decides to get caught up in an options backdating scandal. The Financial Times:

"Shareholders in Apple Computer on Thursday took a wait-and-see approach in the first day of trading after the company said an internal investigation had cleared Steve Jobs, co-founder and chief executive, of any wrongdoing in options backdating at the computer maker.

Shares in the company fell 0.7 per cent on Thursday to $74.83, a day after Apple said a group of independent directors found Mr Jobs was aware of "a few instances" of improper options backdating between 1997 and 2002. The company's investigation had concluded that Mr Jobs was unaware of the accounting implications of backdating and had not benefited personally from it.

The independent directors behind the investigation are understood to include Al Gore, the former US vice-president, and Jerry York, former chief financial officer of IBM and Chrysler. Eric Schmidt, the chief executive of Google, joined the probe after he became a member of the Apple board in August, according to a person familiar with the matter. Apple declined to comment.

Analysts on Thursday expressed cautious optimism that Mr Jobs might emerge unscathed by backdating, a practice in which the grant dates of stock options are manipulated to coincide with low points in the value of a company's shares."

Steve Jobs nicely acknowledges that he was aware of these naughty deeds but claims to be unware of the "accounting implications". Sounds like a set up for the defence of bona fides which is rather lame if you ask me... or anybody else. See Can Ignorance Put Apple's Jobs in Clear? By MAY WONG and Apple: Rotten at the Core by the Motley Fool.

Think I shall dump my shares. Fast.


Categories: apple, shares, options, backdating, scandal, steve, jobs, accounting, implications, legal, defence

Check out Business 2.0 Magazine's list of 12 startup ideas.

Some of 'em are pretty interesting.

1. Build cheap Wi-Fi networks for Brazilian resorts.

2. Become a biodiesel producer in Argentina.

3. Create an ad network for India's mobile content developers.

4. Launch an exclusive social network for Russian millionaires.

5. Open an American-style restaurant in one of China's fast-growing cities.

6. Remodel homes for China's burgeoning middle class.

7 Flip mining claims in Bolivia.

8. Export the planet's next great wines - from Greece.

9. Import fine wines to upscale restaurants - in India.

10. Export gourmet coffee from Rwanda.

11. Become a social entrepreneur in South Africa.

12. Be among the first to invest in the new Libya.

Categories: cheap, Wi-Fi, networks, Brazilian, resort, biodiesel, producer, Argentina, mobile, content, developers, Russian, millionaires, restaurant, China, India, Flip, mining, claims, Bolivia, wine, Greece, upscale, gourmet, coffee, Rwanda, social, entrepreneur, South, Africa, Libya

There has been quite some hype about bloggers making loads of money from advertisements. See Blogging for big bucks. The formula is simple. Write enough interesting stuff, people will read your blog. Enough people read your blog, advertisers will pay you for some advertising space.

But (good) blogging is hard work. Fail to accomplish Step One and there's no gold at the end of the rainbow. Enter the forum. What's more clever (and interesting) is having a website which content feeds itself or is fed by its readers. The money-making formula for online forums is similar to blogs' save for Step One. Instead of writing interesting stuff, you choose an interesting topic that begs discussion and market your website as THE place to have these discussions. Once established, the readers provide the content, the traffic snowballs and advertisement money floods in.



Two examples that come to mind are www.sgcarmart.com and www.singaporebrides.com. Both have established themselves as virtually THE place to go to check out the latest information.




SG Carmarts is now synonymous with online used car classifieds in Singapore. SingaporeBrides is where frenzied brides-to-be go to discuss where better to splurge on (some would say unnecessary) frills for that Big day. The beauty is that the public provide the content while the site owners rake in the dough.






Another key example is www.hardwarezone.com. I think just about anyone in Singapore (and possibly Asia) wanting to build his own pc or check up the latest prices and reviews of techno gizmos goes there to read fellow consumers' reviews on the product discussion forum. I just read today that its owner Hardware Zone Pte Ltd has been bought over by Singapore Press Holdings for a whopping S$7.1m.

How do I install a forum feature on this blog?

Categories: internet, forum, blog, money, advertisement, content, provider, member, sg, carmart, singaporebrides, hardwarezone