Hey everyone, I’mmmmmmm back … Today I want to talk about a Dragon’s Den style symposium I watched online. The symposium was titled “Web Start-Ups Pitching Their Companies” the video can be found at http://www.viddler.com/player/5a15be50/
The way it worked was a couple of web start-ups were invited to give a sixty second pitch to a panel of experts who would then rank the presentation on the merits of the company and how the experts feel the company would do in a real world environment. Of the companies that were showcased there was a voice chat based company, a online raffle company, a social marketing tool for brands, an online diary site and a online roll playing game with a new twist. The business models varied from subscription services to selling online currency.
The first company to present was Phonefromhere.com. From what I understood of their presentation was that they were offering a direct voice chat solution for companies as a customer service solution. Basically what they want to do is allow companies to have their API on their site and by using the API they without a headset, and just the built in Microphone and Speakers from their computer can call and talk to a customer service representative. The idea has some merit, but also can seemingly be easily imitated or duplicated.
The next company to present was Raffleit.com. They were an online raffle company where depending on how much you want to get for a product you sell tickets at $1 a ticket up to the amount of money you are hoping to get for the product. The company Raffleit.com gets a percentage of the final sale. I thought this platform had promise but also a lot of competition from similar sites.
The third presenter was Theiplatform.com which is a site that sells their API to companies to help them utilize social networking properly. This company allows you to tie all of your social networks together under 1 platform to save you the time of logging into multiple sites. This is something that is being done in many different ways all throughout the web, so I don’t think it is unique. Plus their revenue stream is limited as there are similar apps out there that do similar things for either free to little cost.
The fourth presenter was Diary.com, an online Diary site aimed at women who normally write in their regular book diary. This Diary site would allow them to be a little more interactive with their Diary but did not seem to offer much more than the name Diary.com. There was no clear revenue stream or anything unique about the site at all.
The final presenter, turned out to be the most interesting which was erepublik.com which was an online multi person role playing game which was free. The games sole source of revenue comes from selling virtual currency for virtual items sold throughout the Online World. The site is based on the real world, like a version of the board game risk where you look to conquer the world or just your part of it. Because of the FREE aspect of being able to play for FREE but having to buy online currency to make in game purchases is a great route to go. The site was well developed and the business plan is simple yet effective.
All in all I enjoyed watching the symposium, it was interesting to see a Dragon’s Den style conference with real world online companies competing for the Judges approval. I think of the companies profiled that phonefromhere.com and erepublik.com had the most promise. Although the Judges didnt necessarily understand phonefromhere.com, I understood where they were going and thought if done properly had some merit. I didn’t agree with their proposed revenue stream, but that is something they could fix within their business model. erepublik.com though using the FREE model is on the right track. This is an exciting venture to keep an eye on from both a gamers point of view to a businessman’s view.
Below are links to the companies mentioned above, feel free to look at their pages, watch the video and decide for yourself which has the best business model and who you think will be the most successful.
http://phonefromhere.com
http://raffle.it
http://theiplatform.com/
http://diary.com/
http://www.erepublik.com/en
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