Download PDFWe often hear from a couple of new startups that are trying to break into a new segment of an existing market. Of course, it’s quite hard to be truly disruptive - though it’s easy to be annoying, “counter”, and other things that seem truly different. That’s one camp at least.
There’s also the set of businesses that see new opportunity in the blending of multiple media, features or industries to put something new together. While we’ve seen countless cool innovative startups put together in “days”, we’ve also seen a full set of startups launch that are betting the farm on it.
Janko Roettgers, writing at GigaOm, makes an interesting observation:
The same goes for many Web 2.0 start-ups that have popped up during the last few months. People have been questioning the commercial viability of mashups for quite some time now. Is it possible to make money, build businesses with someone else’s data feeds?
Maybe that question was wrong from the beginning. Instead, we should have used mashups as a kind of litmus test for commercial web offerings and asked: Is there really a business model for a start-up if someone else could achieve the same thing with a quick mashup?
I’ve written about this problem previously and concluded one thing:
Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s much option to the world as it stands today. Entrepreneurs will pour themselves into every unfilled crack they see in the landscape. Most won’t make it out alive but most all will learn something useful for the future. I know I certainly learned something the last time I got slammed into the wall.
Interestingly, the Photobucket Blocking initially discussed in this post finally was resolved: MySpace bought PhotoBucket for an estimated $250M. Seem the opportunity for edge-based R&D is still quite viable, or, every cloud has a silver lining.
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