PersonalRIAMark Cuban: "I hate the idea but it still could work." How do you vet investment advisors and protect from fraud? Roelef: reminds me of Cake financial. You take advantage of sloth and greed: people want to make money and they are lazy. Primary question is customer acquisition?
Emergeinvest: Enabling foreign investments and trading information finding. Roelef: likes it alot. Solves personal frustrations. Cuban: Disagrees with Roelef. Sources of information are critical and this is not unique content. "Why would I come to you unless I am just window shopping?" Kevin: why can't Yahoo be the Yahoo of emerging markets?
ExchangeP: Virtual fantasy stock market for private companies. Think fantasy markets and protrade for web 2.0. Roelef: important question is can you have cash work here instaed of fantasy. users need to have a real ante and skin in the game; without that, I wonder if users will behave appropriately. Mark: interesting idea but wrong business. You won't have enough users to make real money. Become the toolset for people to create their own exchanges (ala Ning). Interesting... I agree here Don: value is in other verticals. what is business model here?
Me-trics: Google Analytics for you. Kevin: needs to be automated. The fun will wear off over time and difficult to keep people posting / updating. Don: interesting idea and takes advantage of our focus on health and fitness. But lots of these sites are popping up. Getting people to input data is tough - and implausible for things like blood pressure. Kevin: integrating with products like Wii Fit is a no brainer. And the marginal cost to consumers is low enough that people would buy as value-add.
iCharts: 40,000,000 onlne charts. 900,000,000 charts printed each year (really?). Trying to MS Excel + SlideShare. Roelef: Interesting idea because I spend too many hours slaving over Excel. Intrigued by the idea but we are dealing with an explosion of information and there is value in distributed inforamtion. Don: I love it. Search-ability is the big win and advancement. This might be a feature - not a company though. Kevin: I like the idea but spend time with the design. Critical here. What do you think of Google Charts API? Mark: you have the easiest business model of anyone we've seen todady. License the proudct to all of the other presenters today. People forget to follow the money - this is easy.
Favorites from this morning from the panel Roelef: iCharts and Emergeinvest / PersonalRIA. All three can get a Sequoia meeting. Don: iCharts is the best. Emergeinvest is second. Financial market is so huge. Kevin: Me-trics for what they could be. Mark: Me-trics has best long term opportunity. iCharts has quickest to money opportunity. ExchangeP can be big if they become ExchangeEngine.