Editor’s Note: This post was written by Douglas Finley, an entrepreneur in the #NOLAtech community. He is the founder of Social Chomp, the easiest way to create multimedia marketing campaigns using videos, photos, and text from your social media fans. Please feel free to give feedback in the comment section below.
Douglas Finley (left) and fellow SocialChomp team at New Orleans Entrepreneur Week in 2013.
Virtual Reality Developer Environment:
Programming from a laptop can be a hassle. With new technologies like Oculus VR and “Magic Leap”, a development environment for programmers to build applications using a combination of VR style goggles, Leap Motion gesture tracking, and a MIT Scratch like interface would open the capabilities to a new world of programmers. Programming needs an immerse interface to really take engineering efficiency to the next level.
Business Model — Charging developers for the “environment”. An app store for add ons. I always tell my friends…if you can play video games, you can program computers. The VRDE would be “THE Game” for developers.
Mentor Me:
I was the co-director of mentoring program at Georgetown, and I’ve been involved with mentoring youth ever since. The problem as I’ve gotten older is that I don’t have the time to dedicate anymore. Many young people and children in America are going through a variety of issues and really need a family/team to help them through their issues. Parents are busy, but it still takes a village to raise a child.
Mentor Me is a platform for parents to screen mentors to work with their child on specific subjects ranging from STEM or Public Speaking to Entrepreneurship. The difference is that all conversations between the child and mentor are recorded and parents/gaurdians would be able to listen/watch in realtime. The interface would use a combination of screensharing and facetime-like functionality. A user signs up for Mentor Me with skills and timeframes they would be willing to mentor/tutor. The parents and mentor would schedule the time, and the app would handle the rest. Security and Privacy would be baked in.
Business Model — Any transaction fees paid to the mentor/tutor. I can see a scenario where most people work for free, but some parents who have the money are willing to pay for a team of experts to engage with their child. They could have a schedule of people across various subjects stimulating they’re curiousity and reminding them how important they are. You could also bill parents for archiving recorded sessions.
Dropship Instant Storefronts with Unlimited Product Variations
Sales are the lifeblood of a business. Manufacturing systems are more advanced and building a business that can deliver personalized products on demand is the next wave of ecommerce. The process of creating and distributing engaging visuals is keeping consumers engaged but transactions are what allow businesses to innovate. Non profits, Small Businesses, Entrepreneurs have thousands of tools to create visuals. If those visuals could just as easily be transformed into products that ship to international customers, the power and value of every image created grows. Obviously, the key is that these platform users would not have to purchase the goods in advance. A middle school basketball team looking to fund they’re tournament, could easily create a marketplace of personalized products within seconds…all from a few pictures. This platform would definitely need to be integrated with social media networks to help streamline marketing. An API would allow this functionality to be embedded anytime any website to give platform users more places to generate revenue.
Business Model — A monthly fee to access the platform. The platform generate revenue from any merchandise sales and split the profits back to the users. A 15% fee of retail costs would be an intriguing opportunity for a variety of businesses looking to diversify their revenue stream.
If Dropship Instant Storefronts with Unlimited Product Variations are interesting to you, create an account on socialchomp.com or contactdoug@socialchomp.com.