Is that tune original, or just a boy-band re-mix?

I'm having flash-backs. As I sit in class listening to our various guest speakers, each of which has been excellent, I have come to realize that everything old is new again. For me, the experience is kind of like listening to the radio while driving to work. I'm hearing the same old tunes, but this time they lack static, contain edge, and have a certain snap that was missing in the originals. Consider MeetMoi, and our entusiastic guest speaker. Numerous wireless dating services were developed, promoted and ultimately shut down during the boom-bust cycle of the late 1990's early 2000's. In fact, once upon a time, in a country not too far away, the author of this very blog, and a few of his finest mates, established a company, raised $500k, and entered the nascent location based services industry. We developed an system that automatically pinpointed user location to within a few city blocks, thus negating the need to enter a zip code (as with MeetMoi), and we tested a number of services, one of which was wireless dating. But wealth and riches were not to be. Firstly, we were far too early. Few people had compatible handsets, and even fewer used them for data services. Secondly, the roll-out of new handset models in the market was as slow as molasses. Don't ever rely on the ridiculous forecasts generated by consultancies. Futhermore, we lacked a viable revenue model. Now, don't misenterpret what I'm saying here - as we were well aware of the need for a "good model". We just couldn't find one, and we tried many. Unfortunately, the models we tried were either too complex for a small company to implement, impossible to implement given the state of technology at the time, too expensive to implement, or so clumsy from a user perspective that they destroyed the service. One "attempt" involved developing a location based advertisting database. Our goal was too serve-up location based adverts to mobile users, so as to pay for the service. The idea was far from original, even then, but it introduced too many problems. Fortunately, as our guest speaker mentioned, premium SMS is changing everthing. Thanks to premium SMS, it's easy to monetize wireless services. So, my advice all you budding young entrepreneurs is - go for it. Now is the time. Capitalize on opportunity premium SMS offers, but be sure to learn from the mistakes of the past. Visit sites such as businessplanarchive.org and learn about what was done in the 1999-2000 era, consider what has changed since then - and use the latest ideas to refine "old ideas gone bad". Perhaps then, like the gent. from MeetMoi, you too will soon have a viable young start-up on your hands.

On my end, I have more than a few ideas for wireless services - and I'm always searching for more. Happy times indeed!!!!

Drop me a note sometime.

All the best.
Jack_Shalak
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