Early Stage Areas/Companies I’m Watching
I have really enjoyed watching all of the innovation over the past few years and wanted to highlight a few areas that I think are really interesting for 2010/2011. In some cases, I may use company names as examples; unless otherwise noted, I am not an investor in any of these companies and this is not a sponsored post (cmp.ly disclosure).
Video
I think 2010-2020 is going to be the decade of digital video. Analog video will become digital and it will become indexable, optimizable, and interactive. For many reasons outlined in this previous post, I don’t think it’s going to happen overnight, but I do think that video is going to grow significantly. Many of my clients in the agency are asking for video (either to complement their digital plan or to substitute for their traditional TV efforts) for 2011.
One of the companies that I’m watching today is Milabra (Crunchbase Profile). The reason why Milabra is interesting to me is because they help us index what is in the actual video content. This is extremely important when we want to target, customize and index content.
Social Networking
It’s 2004 all over again. I wrote back in the day that social networks are like hot clubs – while they are all the rage now, there will be another hot one in the next year or two. Facebook has obviously dominated but there becomes a point where Fb will not have 100% marketshare.
One of the companies I’m watching is CollegeOnly (Crunchbase Profile). What I like about them is that their value proposition is easily understood and their media kit does a great job describing who and what they do… and I believe it.
Automated Advice
If we all had access to a lot of data, we can have it tell us things based on certain criteria we tell it to look for. In an age of large amounts of data, companies are going to emerge that weed out the middleman of giving advice/consultations for the opportunity to automate actionable decisions.
I’m specifically tracking two companies in this area: Plant.ly (Crunchbase Profile) and Profitably (Crunchbase Profile). There is no coincidence that they both start with “P” and end in “ly.” Plant.ly has access to a huge database of investment risk and returns over a few decades. Based on your risk tolerance and expected return, they can recommend the right fund/etf/etc for you. No need to pay a middleman to set that up for you.
Profitably is another startup that is innovating in the automated advice area. You give it access to your Quickbooks business information and it helps you decide where you can either trim costs or grow profits for our business. For someone who isn’t numbers adept, this could be very valuable.
Because both of these companies use technology to disintermediate humans, the can significantly reduce the transaction cost and still make boku dollars based off of scale.
Content Consumption
This is an area that I’m currently very active in. I’m a formal advisor to Fast Society which is launching in a couple of weeks, and I’m about to launch a project called Tomzy (currently the sole investor) that helps the world visualize vast amounts of information. I’m on a content consumption kick because in it’s current form, it’s broken. I have a whole post coming out on this upon the launch of Tomzy but essentially we cannot manage our current content stream and we’ve not even digitized the majority of our content yet… so how can we expect to keep up with it in the future?
While Tomzy is all about processing and filtering content based on its relevance to YOU, Fast Society creates a bbm (blackberry messenger) like service across any platform for a small group of people for a defined period of time. I can’t give too much away about Fast Society but it’s different than GroupMe (Crunchbase Profile).
Based on what you have read here, if there are companies who you think should be on my radar screen, I’m certainly willing to engage. Please contact me thru this form, comment below, or tweet me @dherman76.