A quiet revolution being led by young consumers is underway. Both of my young adult children are a part of this revolution. Many of you may be a part of it, as well.
Red Herring reports on a study by the Yankee group that highlights this quiet, but major change:

“The landline is going the way of the glove-box cell phone,” said Yankee Group’s wireless global practice leader Keith Mallinson. “Plenty of people have them for safety or backup but they rarely get used.”
More than 65 percent of the U.S. population owns a cell phone, the Yankee Group estimates. And the average number of cell phone minutes used by U.S. subscribers grew to 754 minutes per month-almost 13 hours-by the second quarter of 2005, Mr. Mallinson added. Much of that time used to be spent on home phones.
Young adults seem to be leading the trend, with more than 30 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds lacking landlines. In the U.S. population overall, the trend is less dramatic, with one in 10 cell phone users without landlines.

This trend away from the old land line phone is amazing to someone who remembers party lines, Ma Bell, and rotary phones. The big telecom companies have been preparing for this trend for years. And as it continues, this trend will create more and more new opportunities for entrepreneurs to exploit. Just look at all of the consumer behaviors tied to land line phone use and find ways to replicate or improve on them for the new mobile phone world.

From the StartupJournwal:

Matthew Younkle was a senior at the University of Wisconsin in Madison when inspiration struck. What the world really needs, he decided, is a three-second beer.

He was not the first college student to dream of ways to get to his alcohol more quickly. What set Mr. Younkle apart is that he chose, soberly, to follow through.

Ten years later, Mr. Younkle, 31 years old, is president and chief technology officer of TurboTap, a company marketing a finger-sized nozzle that attaches to standard beer faucets and pours draft beer at least twice as fast as traditional systems do, and with less spillage.

From one Cheesehead to another I say, “Good job der hey!”

The 2005 Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Award for small business was presented this week to Metabolix, Inc by the SBA’s Chief Counsel for Advocacy, Thomas M. Sullivan. Metabolix is a small business that is turning plant materials into usable plastics for a variety of applications.
The Metabolix web site describes their core technology as applying “the cutting edge tools of biotechnology to create a new generation of highly versatile, sustainable, biobased, biodegradable, natural plastics and chemicals.”
The Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Awards provide national recognition of outstanding chemical technologies that incorporate the principles of green chemistry into chemical design, manufacture, and use, and that have been or can be utilized by industry in achieving their pollution prevention goals.
Hat’s off to Metabolix for being a pioneer in what may become a major new industry over the coming years. Could they have done it without this award? Certainly, since the company has been working on this technology since 1992 and has entered into strategic alliances with companies such as BP and ADM to apply their technology to different markets.
Seems like the EPA is simply after a little positive p.r. with this one. Maybe we should just keep the overhead that it takes to run an award program like this in the private sector.

Great advice for any golfer is to swing easy. The harder you try to swing the worse your shots become. The easier you swing, the longer the ball seems to go. It seems like a contradiction, but it is true. The same holds for finding a business idea. Swing easy.
Don’t go for “the next Microsoft” or for a quick “home-run” idea. Find a need, find a niche, and keep it simple.
I have offered many examples and ideas that fit this advice and USA Today has yet another example this week — Brian Scudamore who founded 1-800-GOT-JUNK? is a great story of a drop-out who was not afraid fill a need in a less than glamorous business.
“As an 18-year-old, Scudamore was having a difficult time finding a summer job. While at a McDonald’s drive-through in 1989, he noticed a beat-up truck of a local hauling company.
“‘I said, ‘That’s it!’ ‘ he recalls. ‘I ate my cheeseburger and, within a week, had a business.’
“He bought a truck for $700, placed a newspaper ad that said, ‘The Rubbish Boys will stash your trash in a flash,’ and charged $80 per truckload.”
He grew the business with what he had to work with. His advice to entrepreneurs is to “start your business with your own money.”
Another tip for the average golfer is to keep your head down and your eye on the ball. In a word — focus.
Scudamore created a simple business with a clear plan. He never strayed from his original idea. It worked well so he grew it and continued to make the basic idea a little better. His warning to entrepreneurs is, “Don’t ever try to build a business without a crystal-clear vision.”
A simple idea with a clear vision that he has turned into a franchised business with over 1,000 employees and $72 million in revenues.
Swing easy. Focus.

Having been in the mental health industry for many years (and in business with two trained psychoanalysts), I was intrigued by this example at StartupJournal of a furniture maker finding a niche within the market of traditional psychoanalysis, which has seen significant decline since the advent of managed care. It seems that even though there are not as many analysts as there used to be, they still need couches. Entrepreneurs seem to find opportunity everywhere and anywhere!
As the old joke goes:
When the entrepreneur was a young lad growing up on the family farm, he had asked Santa for a pony one Christmas. After all the presents were opened that Christmas morning–no pony! I little while later his parents spotted him in the back yard digging in a large pile of manure.
His parents shouted, “What are you doing out there??!!”
The future entrepreneur looked up, smiled, and replied, “I just know if I dig deep enough there is a pony in here somewhere!!”

I have written before about the risk of jumping too quickly into writing a full-blown business plan or even impulsively launching a business. A key skill that successful entrepreneurs learn is to more efficiently and quickly assess possible opportunities before they make extensive commitment of time and money. It allows them to weed out ideas that don’t have a good chance or working. In effect, it gives the entrepreneur a chance to fail on paper.
I have entrepreneurs examine three basic questions to assess opportunities:
1. Is there a MARKET? Examine the size of the market to make certain that you only need a small portion of the market as customers to make your business work. Make sure that they are interested in, and more importantly want and need your product or service. You don’t have time or money as an entrepreneur to educate them. Begin to get an idea of how much they will be willing to pay. Too many times this becomes a last minute guess by the entrepreneur.
2. Is there a MARGIN? Figure out the basic economics of the business. How much will the product or service sell for and how much will it cost to produce the product or offer the service? At this stage you should really look for opportunities that offer at least a 50% margin. Generally, when all is said and done this will typically result in actual profits of about 15-20% once the business plan is developed and all of the true costs are determined.
3. Is this for ME? There are many periods during the growth of the business when the entrepreneur needs a true passion to carry them through. This is not just a simple financial investment. It becomes much more personal and emotional than that. Many entrepreneurs tell us that the profit part of the business opportunity is only one of many reasons for launching their businesses. It also helps to build a business that takes advantage of your experiences, knowledge and skills.
These three basic questions should become the first thing you do when you look at an idea for a new business. If the idea passes this test, it offers real potential as a true business opportunity and should be pursued further toward a possible launch. Using opportunity assessment will help increase your success rates with business start-ups. It will also help you deal with an idea and move on if it does not seem to offer a good chance of success. That is, it helps you clean up the mental clutter of too many business ideas floating around in your head.

Red Herring has an interesting interview with Randy Haykin, who heads up Outlook Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm. Haykin identifies what he considers to be the “hot” market spaces in technology these days. On his list:
-Digital Security (although it may be peaking right now)
-Virtual Patches for Microsoft systems (temporary fixes until Microsoft sends out the offical patch)
-Products that help manage permission and access control for IT systems in larger companies
-Software
He is not very excited about offshoring firms, however, which used to be a hot sector in technology. It does not seem to deliver the cost savings that everyone thought it would when it first became the rage.
VC activity in technology firms should continue to increase as valuations are up significantly over the past three years. What is interesting is that it is attributed in large part to better bootstrapping. Seems that VCs like to see their money spent on producing and selling rather than administrative overhead.

Like many of us, the only time I read the USA Today is when I travel. We just got back from a trip to pick up our daughter from college. While in the hotel in Gaffney, SC I came across a feature that USA Today ran on the state of the entertainment industry. While much of it has been said elsewhere, it really provides a fascinating looking at where music and the rest of the entertainment industry may be headed. USA Today put together a diverse group of people who are helping to shape the industry’s future. As I read through the comments of the assembled panelists, I was struck by all of the immediate and longer term opportunities in the entertainment industry. Here are a few of the impressions I took away from their comments:
– What I am doing here this morning will soon be out of date. Blogs are just the early, archaic form of new ways to share ideas and communicate. The sprit of blogging will continue on, but its form will most certainly evolve and morph into other media.
– The market will no longer be such a “mass market”, but one that is full of product and market segmentation. The “long tail” of the market will become the focus of business development. The “long tail” refers to that part of the market that does not favor the popular choices in music and entertainment. They are made up of countless little market niches out there hungry for their specific interests to be satisfied. About half of the culture is in the very tall popular culture part of the curve, but there is an incredibly long tail of that curve that continues off to the right that contains all of the various sub-markets for entertainment. With this diverse group of consumers and new means to reach highly specialized market niches, the opportunities are limitless.
For example, there are bands making a nice living off of a very small, but loyal group of followers. They can reach them through the Internet in ways that build loyalty and intimacy that most marketers would kill for. Thousands of blogs have hundreds or even thousands of very loyal readers, who share a strong and passionate commitment to a common interest.
– New forms to catalogue, store and search through all of this media that will be at our fingertips in the soon to be wide open market will need to be developed. Think of it this way; right now I have all of my favorite CDs in a 200 disc player. I have little booklets that hold the covers of these CDs for me to look through and I have the CDs grouped in blocks by musical genres (classic rock, blues, country, folk, old jazz, new jazz, classical, and so forth). While this allows me to do some rudimentary searches for a specific song, artist or musical style, it takes time and effort for me to search through all of that. iPods have a more powerful search feature that allows you to search by title, artist, etc. Both of these are limited in space by the storage capacity and neither search feature is really satisfactory, especially when applied to an open market of music that will not be limited by or defined by any hardware that I happen to own. But how to we find and organize all of that? Certainly Google is not the answer. In fact, if the now corporate Google does not reinvent itself ten times over in the next few years it, too, will become irrelevant.
Soon you will be able to communicate your mood or the setting and artificial intelligence that has learned from your past decisions and information combined with an almost limitless database of entertainment will be able to, well, entertain you beyond anything you can now imagine.
– Advertising will need to reinvent itself as an industry, as well. Again, think of that long tail of little market niches that stretches on and on. Mass marketing techniques to a captured audience will not work in this space.
– The devices we use for music, video and other forms of entertainment in 2015 may not have even been dreamed of today in 2005. Convergence of our current devices is just an attempt to fit a bunch of round pegs into square holes. Eventually there will be a breakthrough or a series of breakthroughs. There will be another group of entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates who will bring this new world of media technology to us.
– Even what forms media takes will change. Video, audio, the Internet, as we now know all them, will all seem like quaint antiques within a decade or two.

Market? Margin? Me?
Those are the three questions that my students hear over and over when they come to me with new ideas. One of the most important keys to becoming a successful entrepreneur is learning how to ask and assess these three questions. This is not the stuff of some full blown business plan. It begins, instead, with a simple, common sense look at the market.
StartupJounral explores the “Market?” question recommending that potential entrepreneurs use easy to gather data, that often is right at their finder, tips to validate their ideas. Talk to people in the industry. If you don’t come across as selling they are usually happy to give you their opinions. Use the Web to gather information on major trends that may help or hurt your idea over the coming years. And get to know how your potential customers think and what is really important to them in making purchasing decisions.
Find out if the idea is a non-starter before you invest your time and other people’s money in the deal. Learn to fail on paper.

Disabled Americans have more freedom of movement, more access, and more opportunities than ever before. Fortune Small Business examines this growing market.
“After he had driven four hours to buy a wheel-chair that would allow him to play tennis-and was ignored by the salespeople at the company that made it-John Box was so angry that he decided to do something about it. When Box returned home, he and a brother, both engineers, teamed up to invent their own athletic-oriented chair. Box was soon marketing it at the wheelchair tennis matches in which he competed around the country.”
As we baby-boomers are now old (no longer getting older–just old according to my students), this market may become even larger over the next 20-30 years. Even today this market includes about 50 million Americans.