154th 1M/1M Roundtable For Entrepreneurs: New Year Challenge Voting Round Begins
By Guest Post at December 21, 2012 | 8:21 am | Print
154th 1M/1M Roundtable For Entrepreneurs: New Year Challenge Voting Round Begins
Today we hosted the last free public 1M/1M roundtable for 2012. In a characteristically international session, we had three presenters from Israel, one from India, as well as entrepreneurs from Chile and Malaysia.
Webbing
First Avraham Orbach, from Jerusalem, Israel, pitched Webbing, a social media concept that has at its heart a desire to help people discover new, like-minded people through a process of analyzing their social media profiles, the content that flows through them, etc. My strong feeling on a concept like this at this stage of the industry’s evolution is to focus on a specific community – options that Avraham presented ranged from brain sciences to Jazz music. I suggested to Avraham to look at the Tagged case study on our blog.
I asked Avraham about the business model, as well as how he plans to sustain his company while he ‘gets tons of users’. The rather clichéd answer came back: ‘Angel investors.’
In case you have missed this, I want to share with you this 1M/1M cartoon in this context. It speaks for itself.
Next, Yoram Nissenboim from Haifa, Israel, pitched Locification, a technology platform to enable location based apps on smartphones to be able to keep monitoring the location information without burning through battery power at a fast pace. Sounds great, except the chief competition for the technology comes from Google, who is making this part of the operating system’s core functionality. Currently, Google’s technology is behind the Locification technology, but unless there is serious IP protection around it, Google will catch up. I don’t see how this business can be defensible.
playrock
Then Tamir Rosenblum from Israel but pitching from New York, presented playrock, a gaming platform app that aims to assemble a large number of games from various developers and publishers, and offer better match-making among gamers. In addition, for game developers, Tamir’s solution offers the ability to turn single-player games into multi-player games, as well as viral cross-promotion – each of which are attractive value propositions. I liked the concept, and with 25-50 game developers on board, Tamir should be able to experiment with the concept pretty specifically. I also believe that this is a highly monetizable concept.
Finally, Switen George from Kerala, India, pitched returnCABS.com, a taxi cab service that comes with an interesting value proposition: cabs that go from one city to another, often, come back empty. Using this service, consumers can hitch a cab ride with one of these returning cabs at a third of the price. Switen, however, has no experience of building a web or a mobile application, and is currently offering the service to 1000 cab owners and 3000 consumers for free. The concept is ideally built as a mobile and/or web app, and it will require either Switen getting up-to-speed on what it takes to build such a business, or finding a technical partner.
You can listen to the recording of today’s roundtable here.
Also, I want to encourage all entrepreneurs who want to apply for the 1M/1M New Year Challenge to submit your completed applications today. You can check the official rules for the contest to find comprehensive instructions on what questions need to be answered to qualify for the voting round that begins tomorrow, on December 21.
By
Sramana Mitra is the founder of the One Million by One Million (1M/1M) initiative, a virtual incubation program that aims to help one million entrepreneurs globally to reach $1 million in revenue and beyond. She is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and strategy consultant, she writes the blog Sramana Mitra On Strategy, and is author of the Entrepreneur Journeys book series and Vision India 2020. From 2008 to 2010, Mitra was a columnist for Forbes. As an entrepreneur CEO, she ran three companies: DAIS, Intarka, and Uuma. Sramana has a master’s degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
