Technology and innovation are changing the market place rapidly, and clever start-ups steal ground from established businesses. This fast paced world plays in our favor: if we can think about our business as a continuous start-up, a continuous redefining of customer needs and awareness, we can stay ahead of the game.
Welcome to the new world, everyday.
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Open Green Map is a community site that makes the project accessible to all, letting users add new locations as well as exploring the recommendations of others. Participants can bring entries to life with Flickr photos or YouTube videos to support their text descriptions. The site has also boosted its usefulness with the development of applications for mobile devices. Users can now upload content the moment they discover it, and log in to find the nearest fair-trade coffee shop or ethical fashion store whilst out and about.
Combining the expansion of the mobile internet and the desire to live green, Open Green Maps uses technology to connect communities in the real world. As well as making it much easier for users to track down world-changing initiatives in their own neighbourhoods, the site might help foreign ecopreneurs discover new ideas to introduce to their home markets.
How can you both keep operation costs down and appeal to your environment-conscious clients by adopting green policies?
The internet allow you to tap into a global market. That means you can reach more customers and offer your products at a unprecedented price due to ecomomies of scale. The company we are discussing today puts magazine publishing in the hands of individuals buy harnessing the globalizing power of the internet.
The printed page is not dead yet and MagCloud, a new self-publishing magazine service from HP Labs, is enabling anyone who can create a PDF to publish a magazine.
It costs you nothing to publish a magazine on MagCloud. To buy a magazine costs 20¢ per page, plus shipping. For example, a 20-page magazine would be four bucks plus shipping. And you can make money! You set your issue price and all proceeds above the base price go to you. Shipping is a flat $1.40/copy (USPS first class mail) for quantities 1-9, or a flat $13 for quantities from 10-100 (per box of 10-100).
MagCloud uses HP Indigo technology, so every issue is custom-printed when it’s ordered. Printing on demand means no big print runs, which means no pre-publishing expense. Magazines are brilliant full color on 80lb paper with saddle-stitched covers.
All you need is a PayPal account or major credit card to buy magazines, and publishers will need a PayPal account so we can pay you earnings. To create a magazine, you’ll need to upload a PDF, which means you’ll have to create your magazine in a program that outputs high-res PDFs like Adobe InDesign.
During Beta orders must be sent to a US shipping address.
MagCloud tapped into the economies of scale to find new customers in new markets. What is it you could offer cheaper if you sold more of your product? And how can you re-define your product or services to appeal to a larger audience?
New York based Sunday lets busy people in the US, Canada and the UK delegate chores as they arise, with monthly fees starting at just USD 29 and no cost to join. The site's agents are available 24/7 by email or phone, ready to make outbound calls, arrange travel plans, set dinner reservations, enable remote access to numerous websites and take action in emergency situations—virtually anything that can be handled remotely.
Here's how it works:
It's a business model that uncovered a new need amongst customers by focusing on our ever diminishing time and our vanity. And it found a financial model to make it affordable.
Progressive Insurance of Ohio capitalized on our ever diminishing time by identifying key needs in owners of expensive luxury cars. Because drivers in this segment are time stressed and their repairs are expensive, the company reasoned, they need to be processed quickly by the company's claim operations, including the assessment, adjustment, repair and claims processing.
Progressive created packs with features such as twenty-four-hour immediate-response accident hot lines, highly responsive claims management and its Adjustment Office on Wheels, that comes to the spot of your accident settles the claim there and then. Progressive realized that this segment happily pays more for the convenience, and drilled deeper into a lucrative market.
For all of you in the services industry, how could you find new segments by focusing on time-stressed customers?
How can you make your products and services easier to use, or appeal to the need of your customers to express or enhance their perceived status through the products they acquire?
Do you know the needs and wants of your target groups. Could you further segment them and identify sub-groups who have need that are unmet?
Medical recruitment agencies focus on the nuts and bolts of the job when attempting to attract doctors and nurses.
MedRecruit has shaken up the game by explicitly including lifestyle in the process of matching doctors with positions. Doctors who sign up for their free service not only detail their medical specialty and grade, but also specify the location they want to work and what sorts of family, cultural and recreational opportunities they are expecting, whether it is skiing, surfing or bungee jumping.
MedRecruit proudly states that their service results in happier doctors and higher retention rates for the hospitals that hire them.
Are you working for a recruitment agency? Are there hard to fill positions that could benefit from this approach?
Or how could you further segment your target audience, by looking for needs that are yet not catered for?
To stay in the same industry: Connect moms found an unexpected gap in the market when they started an employment agency for young moms.
When competing with major corporations, you can use the power of communities to level the playing field. Songvest understood this perfectly and inserts a new competitive business model to compete directly with record labels when it comes to funding new bands.
Aiming to connect songwriters and fans in a new way, SongVest has developed a platform for live and online auctions of songwriters' rights that lets consumers buy as much as 100 percent of the rights to a given song—including the associated royalty streams.
SongVest is a music auction breakthrough that connects fans with the songwriters behind the music they love. Highest bidder at our song auctions owns a share of the rights, including a nice chunk of the song royalties that come streaming in every time it gets played—plus a one-of-a-kind gold or platinum record with handwritten lyrics. SongVest sellers pay a commission of between 10 and 15 percent when their song sells, while buyers pay a commission of between 15 and 25 percent, depending on the final bid price.
The company's first major auction is today, including songs made famous by Aerosmith, Ringo Starr, Cher, Ozzy Osbourne, Bon Jovi, Carrie Underwood, Faith Hill and The Monkees.
The internet democratizes industry models that were once owned by major corporations. Where once record labels were all powerful, the internet now connects consumers directly to artists, helping artists to fund their records while remaining independent, and putting the fans in charge.
Our organization attempted a similar thing, using the internet to take on design agencies who charge outrageous prices for website maintenance, and sought to make technology available that puts the consumer firmly in control of their site.
Are there aspects of your industry that are currently dominated by big corporations, but that you could somehow bring to the consumer in a more effective way? Imagine tapping into the power of a collective.
The printed page is not dead yet and 
Aiming to connect songwriters and fans in a new way, 