Now that twitter is awash with chatter about the opening of applications for Seedcamp Week ’09, we thought we’d put in our 2c about a few sectors we believe are worthy of startups tackling. As we’re all about seeding, I stress that these are a few thoughts to get you guys talking/working. We encourage and duly welcome the many other crucial problems you are working to solve. Also, just working on these does not take place of having a strong team and convincing us of your ability to execute and deliver a great product or service!
I asked a handful of investors, thinkers, and entrepreneurs what are some critical areas where they can see startups being in the right position to offer solutions and having the capacity to go at it on their own. Here’s 3 I’ll start with and continue next week.
Marketplaces – this is one area that is actively being invested in by both early and late stage investors and the next evolution is starting to happen. First-time marketplaces like referrals and builders are emerging as the recession puts pressure on cutting costs and moving things to digital as quickly as possible. And older online marketplaces are moving on as well, including social media, real-time search, and other advances that take them to the next stage and eek out ever more efficiences and customer satisfaction. And as I’ve presented in the past, there’s real money to be made here.
Presence and location – There are a myriad of point solutions and so many channels as to confuse the most savvy amongst us. We’d like to see startups tackling the challenge of bringing this into one holistic solution – with presence, device, and location awareness all rolled into one along with the ease of choosing the channel to interact whether it be twitter or sms or facebook.
Identity control management – Again, the challenge here is to bring this all together but we’d like to see more complete solutions around identity theft, privacy, and access control. I worked in M&A 10 years ago and this was still an issue. In all things security, there were too many point solutions and a few software powerhouses that usually just picked off these companies. And integration always proves hard. We’d like to therefore see more complete solutions.
So, if you are a startup and you think you’ve got some of these challenges cracked, we look forward to reading your applications for Seedcamp Week ’09.
I’ll be continuing next week with more seeds of thought so I encourage you to comment here or write to us directly at info@seedcamp.com or apply next week with your own killer startup ventures.
