How To Find Great Business Ideas From All Over The World

November 1, 2013 Leave a comment

How To Find Great Business Ideas From All Over The World

JULIE BORT OCT. 31, 2013, 10:55 AM 1,134

Do you want to start a company or come up with that genius idea for your current company?

Of course you do.

But if it was easy to come up with the Next Big Thing, we would all do it. So here’s a secret. There are two websites created by the same guy, Reinier Evers, that have some 17,000 thousand people worldwide scouring the world for the coolest, most creative business ideas and reporting on them for all to see and be inspired: Springwise and trendwatching.com. For instance: Former Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart is using a mind-reading EEG headset to create thought-controlled visuals and music for his Superorganism tour. A smart scale and Kickstarter project called the Prep Pad is a chopping board and weighing scale that can determine the exact nutritional content of the meal being prepared, and tracking users’ eating habits. Yahoo! Japan has created Hands On Search, a machine that allows users to search by voice and receive a result in 3D-printed form. A new 3D printer called LumiFold is designed to be folded, so it can fit in a backpack.

A clothing designer Elizabeth Fraguada, founder of the Jorge & Esther studio, has created a collection of clothing that embeds LED lights into the fabric (like color or cuff) and these lights can change color via a smartphone app. We recently caught up with Chris Kreinczes, managing director for the Springwise blog, to ask about the business of trend spotting.Business Insider: Why have two sites that seem to do basically the same thing?

Chris Kreinczes: The companies are actually very different in what they do. Trendwatching.com focuses on trends, offering free monthly trend briefings and, as part of their Premium service, access to their Innovations Database, Industry Bulletins, Trend Reports and an Apply Toolkit.

Springwise differs in both its content and its delivery of that content. The site is designed as an online magazine for daily viewing, and we deliver free weekly and daily newsletters (170,000+ subscribers total). The content consists primarily of overviews of innovative startups (we feature three a day), and we offer an interview series with founders.

We also offer a service for professionals called Springwise Access, giving access to our database of over 4,000 innovative business ideas, a personalized homepage tailored to our clients interests, and bookmarking and folder sharing features.

BI: How many spotters/Trendwatchers do you have currently?

CK: There are now slightly over 15,000 Springspotters and 2,500 Happy Spotters (the trendwatching.com equivalent).

BI: Can anyone be a spotter/trendwatcher, or are these contract, trained, paid jobs?

CK: Anyone can sign up to be a Springspotter and they will be automatically accepted. To become a Happy Spotter, applicants must first meet certain criteria. Both sets of spotters can earn points for accepted spottings, redeemable in our gift galleries.

BI: In 2013, what would you say are the big tech trends that define the year so far?

CK: According to the trendwatching.com team, a tech trend we highlighted last December as being key for 2013 was “Mobile Moments,” how consumers would look to their mobile devices to maximize every single moment.

We’ve since seen an explosion of innovations that tap into micro pockets of time, from the boom in mini video sharing (including Vine and Instagram), to the high adoption of ephemeral messaging platforms such as SnapChat or Frankly.

Another trend that broke from the lab and into the consumer market was what we call “Emotive Tech,” technologies that read and respond to emotions. It is a strand of the larger trend of “Intuitive Interfaces” where devices are designed to be natural, and therefore more pleasant, to use.

An example of Emotive Tech would be the Japanese-developed Mico headset, a pair of headphones that measures the wearer’s brainwaves and selects music to fit their mood. Another is the recently funded Kickstarter project PIP, a stress detecting biosensor that helps users relax through gameplay.

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Unknown's avatarAbout bambooinnovator
Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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