Give me fuel, Give me fire, Give me that which I desire

2. an utopia

I always like to think about what would be a great idea for a new business. Recently I thought about green tech and energy problems… We are told all day long that the future for entrepreneur is green tech… So what is the biggest energy problem incoming ? We are going to lack oil. So ok it takes millions years to produce oil naturally… Why not generate it ? Silly isn’t it ? That’s also what I thought !

I was actually too quick and too late on this idea…

• too quick

It was too quick because I discarded it as soon as it came… One of the best idea developed by Denise Shekerjian in her book “uncommon genius” is that the difference between a genius and the normal guy is that a genius is able to let an idea live a little bit longer than the usual guy (remember : he did not know it was impossible so he did it!). On the other hand, a genius is able to admit an idea was crap and to cut it… So as I discarded this idea really too quickly, I am officially not a genius (not yet!).

• too late

Yes it was too late because some guys at Solazyme already had the idea. It was about 12 years ago and they implemented it! They are near mass production (actually they announce everywhere that they could be able to sell their oil in two to three years).

• How is it possible to generate oil?

They actually found that the quickest organism to produce oil is algae. So they trained and specialized them in order to generate oil. Instead of using direct photosynthesis, they feed their algae with sugar (plants, diverse wastes…). That is the great thing. The plants take CO2 to grow, algae transform it to oil, and then the oil is burnt and releases the CO2. So their process is not releasing fossil CO2 in the atmosphere…

On top of that, from what they say, their oil is more pure than natural oil. So it pollutes less, enable your car to run longer… They already obtained various cerfications for their oil including US Military specs. What they are producing is raw oil, so they can produce diesel for your car, but also jet diesel, plastic, lipstick … anything that could be build using fossil oil can be built with their algae oil.

From what they are saying, the price of algae oil is not so far from being competitive with classic oil.

If all this is true, these guys are soon to become the kings of the world! Their technology is green, clean; the business plan is all done. It is just too beautiful to be true!

See their website and videos at http://www.solazyme.com/
Also they are around COPENHAGEN Climate Conference 2009. It is possible to try a car powered by their algae oil.

Business ideas in bulk

Just some notes on some business ideas I had and the research I did about it…

1. The realistic one

My girlfriend is a pianist. Everyday she carries a heavy bag of scores. Chopin, Mozart, Schubert… All magnificent musicians, but they are breaking her back! For a geek like me the solution seems easy: just use electronic scores and a kindle-like device for reading them everywhere! If you know a musician, you know that reading score is not enough, this device should also let the musician write annotations on the score.

On top of the huge advantage of being lighter, some features could be added:

• Real Time analysis of the music played and page turned automatically (did you noticed that a pianist often need someone to turn his pages?)
• Learning functions like showing the notes names, hiding a part of the score to train learning by heart…
• Playing the score with midi to give and example or to play the orchestra part…
• Transferring annotations (e.g. between teacher and student)

On the business side, the system could be coupled with an itunes-like system for selling scores. The simplest paper score cost 10 to 40 euros. To my mind it would not be difficult to sell them really cheaper over the internet (I am not naive, they are not expensive because of paper cost! However the usual take less margin, sell more could work).

When I first thought about this, I was really convinced it was a great idea! Then I thought about what I learnt at It Transfert barcamp: if you do not have competitors, this is because there is no market for that. So I checked a little bit what could be the competitors for my idea. I found two of them:

Music Reader, http://www.musicreader.net

This is a software that allows displaying electronic scores. It can run on desktop, laptop and tablet pc. The advantage is that it is really cheap (less than 100$) if you already have the hardware. However I do no know that many musician having a tablet pc, and laptop or desktop does not seems convenient. It implements all the features I talked about previously and add a special pedal to turn pages, half-page turn (to have the end of the current page and the beginning of the next one), metronome… Actually these are some good ideas to get inspired by.

In the “about us”, we learn that the company has been founded in 2008, and that the software has been started in 2002. It has been written by a student during his master. Wanted to check the turnover but did not find relevant information.

MuseBook, http://www.musebook.com

This software is built by a Korean company. It is designed to be installed on a tablet pc however the cost is 900$. They intelligently provide an academic license which is 600$ for 5 licenses. An interesting function is that if you are playing to piano, it can listen what you are playing and turn the page automatically. The website has not been updated since 2004…

Ok this seems really great! Why isn’t everyone using it?

I think this business cannot be profitable, or at least not yet. Musicians, like a lot of readers, like to have the “score” object in hand and write on it. Someone willing to make money with this idea should be really careful about this and take it into account from the start of product design and marketing planning.

On top of that, if I think about my wife, she is playing piano 4 to 8 hours a day, and already sometimes suffering from headaches… What if she would have to look at a screen all day long? It would be awful. I think a big competitive advantage would be to implement the thing on e-ink device (which can be difficult because it must have the annotation features)…


next ideas later ...