Keep me updated!
Business Ideas April 23rd, 2007The Problem
A few years back while reinstalling my PC, I thought how wonderful it would be for a single resource to see the latest versions of the programs and drivers I have installed and used. Obviously when reinstalling your PC, you want to make sure you only install the latest and greatest version of your programs and drivers you want to use.
So what do you do in this situation, well you go off to 20 different web sites to find out if the version you have stored on your PC is still the latest. It’s a pain and time consuming.
The Solution
So the idea being a web site that you register with and list the name of products and drivers you have and the version you are running. The site would then provide an update if it new if a newer version was already available, but more importantly could provide this update when you wanted to reinstall or update your PC.
Adding on to this, a software company could post updates to their product on the web site and anyone who has registered against that product could be notified of new versions or updates etc that are available.
Making Money
Initially you need to get critical mass. Sign up as many people as possible and provide a way for people to email companies who are not registered to put pressure on them to sign up to the service. Again initially let companies sign up for free. Once you get this critical mass you can start charging the companies for using the service. Also you could cross-market other products, based on the users profile of their registered products.
It would definitely a long term project and something that might not be possible now to get off the ground (this idea was originally thought of circa 2000). The web has moved on, but if you’ve got some bottle and could get some good PR then it could still be done - PR probably being the key. It would require a considerable amount of custom site design.
Is it a runner? Well yes I believe it is and thought it was, I even went as much as registering a whole load of domain names for it. That might not sound much now they are so cheap, but in 2000 domains were still pretty expensive. This is one for long term gain, high chance of earning no money, or high chance of earning a fortune. Just need to work out a way to monetise the service.
April 23rd, 2007 at 9:47 pm
I don’t like “Register with and list the name of products”.
Putting on my lazy head (I have one too!), I’d want some software that ran on my machine and registered what I was installing (not sure how Vista would cope with that XP probably would have done).
As for monetising, Adsense maybe?
Upgrades would be good for monetising, you’re going to know the exact version of a printer that someone has, how about selling them the next version up, or the consumables for it? You could either retail it, dropship, or just affiliate?
April 24th, 2007 at 8:20 am
That would work too. Register or a program to scan your PC. Either way, but there might be a privacy issues over a program. However this isn’t an issue that would stop it from working.
In fact scanning a PC is effectively what corporate networks have now to audit software licenses and installation of non-authorised software.
I was also thinking that until a company signed up to use the service, you could register on their newsletter and then get the system to receive it and post it to the users who have registered they use the software. Also a button for users to easily nag the company to join would be a good way - companies often can not ignore their users.