"It's easy to tear ideas down, Ramit"
My post on stupid frat-boy business ideas got a ton of feedback. Check out the 50+ comments here. As another commenter noted, "Funnier than the post, in a sad sort of way, were the dissenting comments by those outraged to have their bubbles burst." (Other comments were not so charitable.)
Anyway, I got a lot of emails from people saying "It's easy to tear ideas down, but do you have your own? What do YOU think will be next?"
But I'm not a futurist, and I never said I was. Plus, they have notoriously bad results.
Still, I'll take a stab at it: Companies have no idea how young people are using technology, and there's a huge opportunity for people our age to educate them. We live it and breathe it. Older people do not. I was once hired to talk about blogs, social networks, etc, so I decided to have some fun with them. I can personally tell you that there's nothing like opening http://www.myspace.com/forbidden (PS--not safe for work) to a room full of VCs.
Other things I find promising: Helping people work together online sounds like a pretty good thing, in whatever form, as does targeting the always-increasing luxury segment. So does creating a platform for political discussions and news. But really, take what I say with a big fat grain of salt. I'm just one guy.
And finally, I want to mention one thing. I'm tired of Quicken and MS Money's arms race of more and more features. I don't need 5,000 things. I just want an easy way to enter my spending, with automatic downloads from banks/CCs, easy categorization, and charts that show me where the money is going. Bonus points if you can aggregate data and let me compare my spending with others to see if I'm in the same ballpark.
If any of you are developers interested in developing a simple, beautiful personal-finance app, let me know. I will personally help you spread the word about it.
