What follows is a brief list (without much of an explanation I might add) of what I perceive to be gaps in the market. Opportunities if you prefer. Areas where the current state of the art sucks! Not good enough. Please fix. You’ll be making my life much easier, as well as countless others. You’ll probably make a few billion on the side too!
- Create a search engine that works – Yahoo, Google, Bing etc. Err, no. I’m not suggesting it’s an easy problem to solve (it isn’t) but with some of the biggest companies in the search game you would think they’d be able to come up with something that didn’t involve me still having to type in hundreds of different combinations of words in the hope of finding what I’m looking for (and still not finding it!). I find myself having to do this all the time.
- Develop a decent desktop mail client – I currently use the Mail application on Mac OS X. It’s woeful! I can’t tag individual messages so they are easy to refer back to and I still can’t figure out how to mark all items (in the RSS feed reader) as being read. Windows users’ have Outlook. Enough said. And the response, “But I use Gmail all the time …”, is not a valid one! I want something that works on my desktop.
- System for delivering targeted adverts – Firstly, I very rarely click on adverts. Period. Some people do, judging by the amount of revenue Google makes! Anyway, I have lost track of the number of times I have come across adverts on sites that have nothing to do at all with what the site is about. I once saw an advert for Crucial memory on some fashion site! It has been shown that if you have adverts that are relevant to the user, click-through rates are much higher. Now Google attempts to do this AdSense by looking at keywords in the page content but it doesn’t work well in my opinion. I used to have Google Ads on this blog but it kept showing adverts for belt buckles! I don’t tend to write about belt buckles much on this blog so not really relevant.
Anyway, these are just a few ideas to get you started. Now go forth and conquer and let me know when you’re done.