Entrepreneurship

Mashups

By Johnny Fuery ⋅ November 9, 2005 ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

Bambi Francisco’s NetSense column today is pretty interesting.

She discusses mashups within the context of Amazon’s upcoming sell-by-the-page service. It sorta got me thinking about some of the other ideas floating around in the back of my head.

One of them was posited by a friend of mine recently: “given that there are already Flickrs for video, how about a DVD backup / archive service for those Flickrs or a broker for that type of service”. In other words an ofoto/shutterfly for video. All that digital data needs to run on some sort of media in the short-term, before we all have gigabits of bandwidth. Plus there are all of those DVD players that are still selling. Reminds me of Qoop, which I only know about from this Business 2.0 article. Here’s the excerpt that matters:

“Phil Wessells thinks he’s onto something just as big. Wessells has already made a small fortune from offbeat ideas — a big seller, for instance, was a computer wrist pad he invented in his Mill Valley, Calif., garage by gluing a piece of a wetsuit to some rubber foam. His latest entrepreneurial spark is Qoop, a startup whose software allows anything digital to be printed on demand. With his business partner, Bill Murray (not the actor), as well as a design whiz in Los Angeles, a Web guy in San Jose, and contract programmers all over the world, Wessells could well be building the Kinko’s of the Internet — and then some.

Qoop occupies the middle space between, for example, Yahoo’s photo-sharing site Flickr and printing presses ready to crank out a photo album when someone on Flickr clicks the Qoop button. The company is linking up photo community sites, pet community sites, blogs, you name it, with an industrial back end that can print an image of a schnauzer on paper, T-shirts, mugs, whatever. Wessells and Murray focus on providing the enabling technology in the middle and leave the ink and presses to printers literally all over the world. ”

Hmm. So connect dvd authoring mom-and-pops with the now-gestating v-flickrs/bloggers/podcasters. Create an infrastructre for sending revenue back to the content owner, the dvd authoring people, and keep some in the middle.

Sounds good. Potential problems:

+ Quality control. What does the finished product look like? What about color & washout? Or custom menus? As the middleman, the company would have to originate procedures and implement QA standards and processes for verifying against those standards.

+ Market size. How many people really want to pay for something they can view on the web for free? Sure, there will be the 50 copies of the family video sent out at Christmas, but is that really enough to build a business on? Part of the problem here is that video authoring is not a mainstream practice… and it may never be.

+ Business Development hassles of signing up the small shops for creating the output. Or, instead, creating it in-house. Either way, there’s a lot of work to do there. Best case would probably (gulp) do both — get a small in-house operation going to prove the concept, then setup an OEM signup process for hungry shops in other locales, switching focus to signing up the gatekeepers that provide an ongoing source of customers.