Monday, April 23, 2007

Free startup idea

Web 2.0 startups of all shapes and sizes are springing up by the handful. The ones that seem to take off are those that have cornered a niche market with a disruptive service. It was after shortly after emailing my sister about her wedding that I skimmed over the TechCrunch and Webware posting on kyte.tv's new service when the idea for a wedding web 2.0 wedding startup came to me.

I got to thinking about how cumbersome the coordinating process has been for gathering input and pieces of sentiment from related parties and how a prominent feature of web 2.0 functionality is the automatic synchronization of uploading/posting/publishing content to a given web page. Commence hovering light bulb.

What if future bride and grooms could create wedding accounts at some personalized media mashup that would give you either a direct url or a widget that others could plant on their blogs or social site of choice, which enables friends and family to send past sentiment/romantic/childhood/how they met/stories/etc… via drag and drop through the widget or direct sends to the url for content coming via cellphone cameras, web-cams or even services similar to Twitter. All of which would auto-populate a wedding template to create a rolling blog/web-site, which not only documents but presents the wedding content for onlookers in an interactive manner. You should also be able to upload traditional wedding footage for an ultimate online scrapbook experience.

Whether or not this startup is feasible is certainly up for debate since it requires a degree of web/tech savvy-ness by those who would adopt the service but I envision it as something future brides or grooms could appoint to their Maids of Honor or Best Man as a project they’re responsible for driving (the generation of those getting married now is the one that grew up with computers). I realize there's hundreds of other things that could go wrong and hurdles to be overcome out but I'll leave that for the entrepreneurs.

I won't go into the business model of selling ad space and injecting "My Perfect Dream Wedding" promotions throughout the user experience or if this service should or should not evolve into a network based social site but I will end this post with the following. There's definitely money in weddings and the processes of this niche market are virtually untouched by the world of web 2.0.

1 comment:

DaveSchappell said...

Post #1 in the upcoming stream of ideas from Joey -- my only recommendation is that you number them, and after you've thought about them a bit, start to rank them (i.e. which one you think is better/worse than others). When you get one that's a clear #1 over all past ideas, with sound rationale and good competitive potential, then go for it!