Startup Addict Musings

If you’re trying to decide on a Franchising startup, you may want to consider focusing a business model aimed at baby boomers. Fitness centers, spas, senior care services and coffee shops are among the leading franchises. If you are an entrepreneur that is industry agnostic and just want to make money then consider the fact that a baby boomer retires every 16 seconds, talk about a built-in customer base. Even homebuilders have catered their inventories to Boomers to help insulate against the busted real estate market.

Kiplinger reports:

A quick look at the demographic trends shows why senior service franchises are so popular. By 2010, one in five Americans will be considered “senior,” and the number of Americans over the age of 65 will grow to 53 million by 2020. Moreover, average life expectancy has increased 15 years since the Social Security system was established in the 1930s.

Franchising comprises 10% of the private sector in the United States and will continue to blow full steam ahead in the boomer demographic. Be sure your business plan reflects the appropriate geography for the boomer demographic. Destinations like Fort Collins, CO and numerous cities in North Carolina have enjoyed steady growth.

Be sure to take a look at the top 10 investments to capture the baby boomer demographic as well.

Tags: Startups by Startup Addict

Lively by Google is a new asocial network that is set in the 3D virtual world, very similiar to second life. The power of lively is that it ties into your Google account. My interest in Lively is how it came in to existence and where it is going from a monetization standpoint. The original concept for lively was created during Google’s famous “20% time”. According o Mashables:

Lively came about during Google’s famous “20 percent time,” where engineers devote 1/5th of their time to their own ideas and projects. But, it’s safe to say that this project may turn into much more. Tying an avatar to your Google account that can be used anywhere there is a Lively room is a unique idea that takes advantage of Google’s huge user base

The 3D social network will tie into the data portability concept like, Open social, Friend Connect, Myspace and Facebook data all being a part of the 3D world. The monetization potential for Google to have premium rooms, sponsored clothing & accessories for avatars will be outstanding. Imagine logging into lively with highend sponsored Nike Gear on and every user who clicks on you to interact you receive Adsense. I quickly created an avatar in about 5 minutes and joined a room called coffeeHouse while experimenting with Lively, I’m the good look’in guy in the blue in the front.

You can also create your own room rather quickly by using my new favorite program I use reguarl for real estate development called Sketchup. Below is an embedded iframe for the “coffee house” room. This very easily good have been a “business center” room I created for liked minded entrepreneurs that read Startup Addict Musings.

Lively is further evidence social networks are migrating to the 3D space. It is the next evolutionary step from the current “profile” model in today’s social networks. I can only imagine what revenue streams will come from this and what Google’s built in userbase will do to Second Life.

Tags: 3D worlds by Startup Addict

Crowdfusion is on the move with $3 Million in the coffers from the likes of Marc Andreessen, Velocity Interactive Group and Greycroft Partners. The startup is attempting to be the next standard for “web publishing” (Think what wordpress did for blogging). There is a tremendous amount of buzz on this startup particularly because Andreeseen is involved. If you haven’t noticed his past track record, he basically has the midas touch. After signing up at the holder teaser page Crowdfusion relinquished this information:

Crowd Fusion’s mission is to revolutionize online publishing with a
unique combination of technology and strategy. Our platform is
engineered to help position topic-focused publications as the leaders
in their verticals by providing publishing engines for the entire web
content lifecycle.

The Crowd Fusion’s infrastructure and data-mining functionality equip
publishers with the ability to automatically scale as demand
increases. We provide a set of easy-to-use and dynamic tools that
accommodate a publisher’s needs as they arise.

The jargon laden business model sounds like the executive summaries I use to spew in my VC wars. What I find interesting is buddypress (a social version of wordpress) is right around the corner and with a 4 million plus built in audience. Matthew Mullenweg the founding developer of wordpress stated the following on his blog.

It’s clear that the future is social. Connections are key. WordPress MU is a platform which has shown itself to be able to operate at Internet-scale and with BuddyPress we can make it friendlier. Someday, perhaps, the world will have a truly Free and Open Source alternative to the walled gardens and open-only-in-API platforms that currently dominate our social landscape

As this category of more “integrated social publishing” heats up BuddyPress, Crowdfusion and many others are going to wage war on simplicity, monetization and plug&play for the little publisher who could.

Tags: Startups, Web 2.0 and Beyond by Startup Addict