We love ideation sessions. The more post-its the better. We just insist all the ideas relate to real people, real pain points or real desires. Here’s a few we think are begging to be addressed:
We have devices that can capture our every location, photo, text and mood state but that data remains hard to aggregate, review or act on. We may desperately want to know how much we’re working, how many calories we eat, how many miles we’re gone, or how many people we’ve met, but pulling all that data together is mind-numbingly difficult. Yet some are doing just that. We think they’re living in the future. To meet them, attend any meetup of the rapidly growing and globally distributed Quantified Self community.
Students are paying for high priced college degrees in greater numbers, yet have only anecdotal information on how that degree will benefit them in the future. Usually when a purchase price is in the thousands, evaluative tools and databases abound. There’s nearly 18 million US post secondary students hoping to benefit tomorrow from their choices today. But so far no Trulia or Trip Advisor for career paths.
If we want tickets to the next giant global tour, a few clicks will secure our seat, but if we want to know what local event is happening around the block, the local print news is often the only choice (Pew). A large market awaits the app that provides a cheap, easy and highly local answer to the perennial question: “What should we do today?”
Despite their desire to be forever young, Baby Boomers are going to die. All 70 million of them. Most within the next 20 years. They aren’t going to think about this until the last possible minute, but their needs for remembrance, continued online presence (or not) and a novel send off could fuel a fleet of new companies. Eventually someone will figure out how to make this inevitable conclusion seem more like a great movie ending than a large hole in the ground.
We’ll end on that sobering note but we’ll be back soon with some potent ingredients a startup might want to consider.
