For a change I made my prediction public on the blog unlike my mostly private observations of many other technology trends. With facebook said to be valued at 15 Billion USD, social networks are flying high on the radar screens. Now Sequoia Capital's 7 million investment into Minglebox looks like a possible future winner.

mginger.com is a new mobile consumer site targeted at mobile ad marketers to reach willing end-users at a fairly low cost and with an added incentive for users to control what communication they want to receive and get a part of share from the marketing budget. I haven't tried their service so I don't know how it works this are just my thoughts on this revenue model.

UPDATE: Looks like mginger folks are a bunch of hardcore spammers. I see a lot of popular news sites spammed by them/their affiliates.

For a long time I considered that people should pay me(revenue share with the site operator) to view my profile/resume on a resume/social networking site and this might make some model. Very logically people should pay me for viewing the ads/clicking on ads, pay me to send me "SPAM" I want. Yes the barrier to entry to mginger.com is still very low.

This is one of the democratic solutions for click-fraud, un-wanted spam on mobile phone space especially in a country like India where implementation of privacy related laws is weak. I remember a domestic BPO ( which shall remain un-named ) trying to hire me as a business development head for their 'crown-juice' verified telephonic database (with so much more information about you than you can imagine ). Their answer to my question as to how do they get their 'raw' information was 'I don't want to know that'.

A solution I had been in mind for mobile phone spam was to create an addressbook backup/synchronization service which runs on the phone or the server side using a direct SS7 link to each mobile phone operator and stores 10-100 numbers, depending on the size of the addressbook which show up as SPAM1, SPAM2 numbers(stored in the addressbook itself for more popular spammers) and whenever an un-solicited caller calls who is not in the addressbook of the user can mark it as a name SPAM in the addressbook and that gets synchronized into the addressbook backup's central database and gets pushed to all the other users of the service. Kind of like Vipul's Razor for Un-solicited calls.

Maybe a combination of the two approaches is a space for yet another mobility startup.

Update: Later I found this startup bankaro.com that implements the above idea of telephone spam filtering using a trusted network.

Whatever happened to Startup ideas 1-9.
I noticed there is a startup space available for free resume searching service for employers without paying a hefty rental to the current job search sites. Targeted ads over this and premium services and a few candidates who decide that shared reverse billing for approving who gets to see their resumes can be interesting business models.
Candidates for uploading resumes can be pitched "Earn by submitting your resume and choose who sees your resume's contact info". And make it easy to upload a resume in any format and parse it at server side instead of making it freaking difficult for candidates filling up pages full of forms.
And extend the deep job search engines which crawl job listings on Internet to be complemented with resume crawlers.
Technology to use
Ruby on Rails
Amazon S3 for storage and retrieval
Bootup Time: 2-3 months

Over last couple of years, it happened several times that I became serious about certain idea and decided I want to do it in another 6 months and got caught up in life. And in another 6-12 months I found someone else independently thought of the same startup idea and actually did something about it. Moral of the story if you have a startup idea at the least claim it on your blog before someone implements it if you don't plan to implement it within next 6 months.

So this new series of blog posts is dedicated to a cursory glance at my "money making" thoughts as they happen now and then.
"Presentation Verifier":- A huge number of people have to view presentations from a variety of sources throughout the year. Typically a lot of people base their decisions on "facts" presented during these presentations. How nice(yes! its nice to have and not necessary) would it be to be able to run your presentation through a Presentation Verifier BPO employing smart net-surfers and access to most reports from major analyst firms who can verify facts and present basic or advanced results.
e.g. of basic results
1 Fact #1: True
2 Fact #2: False
3. Fact #3: NOT Verifiable

e.g of advanced results
1. Fact #1: True
Detailed References
Credibility of References
...

If not anyone else atleast the buyers of IT software/hardware and Venture Capitalists ought to love this tool. Instead of relying on the built in bullshit meter, a real report on truth about facts and figures presented might help make decisions better.

Barriers to entry for competition
1. Hiring of reasonably smart Internet researchers well versed in information retrieval from scholarly articles and indexed analyst(s) reports
2. Trust built as a first mover

Why would Google/Other big guys not want to do it.
Google/Many of Other big guys don't get into BPO businesses generally speaking

I thought of this idea while listening to someone's presentation where I doubted a few facts and was wondering how much time I am willing to spend on getting the facts right. Wouldn't I rather pay someone to verify all the facts for me.