Crystal Gazing: 7 big things in Tech

Over there at MSN Money, Jim Jubak outlines the next 7 big things in technology, which are disruptive in nature. He also outlines some of the key elements in getting into the disruptive mindset. - via Sadagopan

Once you've identified a promising patch of destruction, how do you find the profitable opportunities? I'd offer three general rules:

• Look for companies that actually have a plan for profiting from the disruptive shift in technology. Innovation is neat, but for investors it's not nearly as important as a profitable business plan.
  
  
• Don't pay too much. Yes, it's notoriously hard to value the stock of a truly disruptive technology company. More than 20% of the readers who responded to my pre-IPO survey on Google thought the stock was worthless. But since the odds are that at least 30% of the stocks that you pick as disruptive opportunities will head south, the key is not to pay so much for them that the successful picks can't put your portfolio comfortably in the black.
  
  
• Don't ignore established companies that are willing to cannibalize their existing business in order to reap the potential profits of disruption. Since these companies aren't betting the store on the disruptive technology, the returns to you, the investor, won't be as high as with a home-run-or-bust bet. But the losses won't be as large either.

Tags: Disruptive Technology, VC

Prosper: The eBay of Loans

This is the most important roll out for this year, if it proved successful. In a world of Web 2.0 wannabes, one man trys to shackle the foundations of the banking system at its roots. Simply said, when traditional "market place" is moved to eBay today, why not "traditional banks" move away to another web based portal. California based Prosper wanted to be an eBay for Loans.

Post eBay, people worldwide have realised that you can still do a business with a person you are never going to meet at all. This invisible marketplace is now taking shape in a more serious area like "loans". Prosper says anything under $25,000 can be taken from a group of lenders for a borrower.

Businessweek's article clearly illustrates that the world is now getting bigger. Read the article - Prosper: The eBay of Loans?

» Web Office Suite: best of breed products | Web 2.0 Explorer | ZDNet.com

» Web Office Suite: best of breed products | Web 2.0 Explorer | ZDNet.com

TracBac - Share | Comment | Interact | Revise | Collaborate

Well. Well. This is sorta shameless self promotion. In the last 4 months, we are working with a secret project [next to Nasa, to be precise ;)] TracBac. TracBac is a web application [Web 2.0 application] which is predominently useful for advertising agencies, design fanatics, creative professionals and so on. The idea is to utilise the power of Macromedia Flash with some good old solid open source databases, digs deeply in PHP, XHTML, CSS, RSS and you get TracBac. Cutting the matter short, this is a visual project handling, digital white board, version tracking tool for the designers worldwide. We are taking invites now. The first month will be absolutely free. Go for a sign up now and help us to build a better product to the world

Technorati: tracbac, online collaboration, design, advertising,
web2.0

Gmail for your domain

Google is providing a beta for hosting your organisation's email accounts with them. With this, google wants to kill the email client market dominated till now by Microsoft in the form of Outlook Express and Microsoft Outlook. You can sign in for a beta here - Gmail for your domain