"1. A cure for the disease of which the RIAA is a symptom..."
Artists upload their content directly to internet 2.0 as free and open source, having been paid in advance via selling shares of themselves in a content creators stock market exchange (ccstmex). The Internet 2.0 they upload their content to is a botnet building artificially intelligent virus acting as a global alternative dns host operating system (gladhos).
Gladhos will take input much like a global linux shell and file system, and her AI will manage distribution of content to requesters and serving/storing the content uploaded to her using the cpu cycles and memory addresses it seriptitiously comandeers from the machines it infects. This is Gladhos.
Web developers code websites by describing them in human sentences to Gladhos at her command prompt, and using her watson like grasp of the semantic representation of the web in her mind, consider their descriptions, and ties together the appropriate resources to create the intended sites.
Together, Ccstmex and Gladhos provide a solution to the riaa, sopa, and any future threat to a free and open net, for by design they are a binary beyond the control of it's creators, once unleashed; it's prime directives: to render it's functionality, evolve to evade extinction and detection, and proliferate.
"What components of it could you start building now?"
The content creators stock market, and the initial architecture and open source repository and project for gladhos.
"But what happens to movies? Do they morph into games?"
Movies begin to take on a form of quantum physical interactivity, with branching alternate realities auto generated from a pool of atomic movie components: every face, word,body, outfit, phrase, and motion; from every angle, lighting, expression, and pairing.
The film maker's task becomes capturing the optimal number of these to support the just in time generation of alternative paths through the movie, as well as variations on the ending. The path taken during a particular viewing of such a multifilm, and which ending it will have, evolves in response to sensors built into seats measuring audience emotional states and characters attitudes.
The data from these sensors become part of a bio-feedback loop informing the block box algorithm tasked with imposing director-willed inceptions upon the viewer's collective experience. In short, movies will become mass hallucination taking place within the boundaries of filmmaker-orchastrated dreams.
"2. Simplified browsing."
Gladhos will wrap the functionalties and navigation of websites into a single "start" button when generating them according to web developer descriptions. This button will not appear on the sites themselves, but by taking over the traditional file, edit, ..., help bar at the top of her browser window.
"3. New news."
Ccstmex (read: System-X) solves this by allowing the crowd to patronize and invest in news creators they like or for whom's work they percieve their will be an ongoing demand.
"4. Outsourced IT."
The System of Systems Engineering Consulting Company, Sysosys Corp, delivers SoSE architectures for parrallel development alongside existing technology procurement efforts, resulting in a list of modules that can be outsourced and a technological philosophy evolution plan that replaces existing client enterprise architectures with Sysosys's SoSE inspired model. Outsourcing IT by rearchitecting for composabilty, modularity, flexability, and compartmentalization of concerns to identify candidate projects for outsourcing
"5. Enterprise software 2.0."
Sysosys Inc. Applies the same System of Systems Engineering methodologies employed by the DoD to the private business market.
"6. More variants of CRM."
Crmcake: Creates social graphs using open source data to identify valence shells of aquaintances to suggest a list of peers who will have their spending habits monitored to identify purchases which a customer will have to mimic to keep up with the Jones's.
7. Something your company needs that doesn't exist.
So if you're working for a big company and you want to strike out on your own, here's a recipe for an idea. Start this sentence: "We'd pay a lot if someone would just build a ..." Whatever you say next is probably a good product idea.
8. Dating. Current dating sites are not the last word. Better ones will appear. But anyone who wants to start a dating startup has to answer two questions: in addition to the usual question about how you're going to approach dating differently, you have to answer the even more important question of how to overcome the huge chicken and egg problem every dating site faces. A site like Reddit is interesting when there are only 20 users. But no one wants to use a dating site with only 20 users—which of course becomes a self-perpetuating problem. So if you want to do a dating startup, don't focus on the novel take on dating that you're going to offer. That's the easy half. Focus on novel ways to get around the chicken and egg problem.
9. Photo/video sharing services. A lot of the most popular sites on the web are for photo sharing. But the sites classified as social networks are also largely about photo sharing. As much as people like to share words (IM and email and blogging are "word sharing" apps), they probably like to share pictures more. It's less work and the results are usually more interesting. I think there is huge growth still to come. There may ultimately be 30 different subtypes of image/video sharing service, half of which remain to be discovered.
10. Auctions. Online auctions have more potential than most people currently realize. Auctions seem boring now because EBay is doing a bad job, but is still powerful enough that they have a de facto monopoly. Result: stagnation. But I suspect EBay could now be attacked on its home territory, and that this territory would, in the hands of a successful invader, turn out to be more valuable than it currently appears. As with dating, however, a startup that wants to do this has to expend more effort on their strategy for cracking the monopoly than on how their auction site will work.
11. Web Office apps. We're interested in funding anyone competing with Microsoft desktop software. Obviously this is a rich market, considering how much Microsoft makes from it. A startup that made a tenth as much would be very happy. And a startup that takes on such a project will be helped along by Microsoft itself, who between their increasingly bureaucratic culture and their desire to protect existing desktop revenues will probably do a bad job of building web-based Office variants themselves. Before you try to start a startup doing this, however, you should be prepared to explain why existing web-based Office alternatives haven't taken the world by storm, and how you're going to beat that.
12. Fix advertising. Advertising could be made much better if it tried to please its audience, instead of treating them like victims who deserve x amount of abuse in return for whatever free site they're getting. It doesn't work anyway; audiences learn to tune out boring ads, no matter how loud they shout.
What we have now is basically print and TV advertising translated to the web. The right answer will probably look very different. It might not even seem like advertising, by current standards. So the way to approach this problem is probably to start over from scratch: to think what the goal of advertising is, and ask how to do that using the new ingredients technology gives us. Probably the new answers exist already, in some early form that will only later be recognized as the replacement for traditional advertising.
Bonus points if you can invent new forms of advertising whose effects are measurable, above all in sales.
13. Online learning. US schools are often bad. A lot of parents realize it, and would be interested in ways for their kids to learn more. Till recently, schools, like newspapers, had geographical monopolies. But the web changes that. How can you teach kids now that you can reach them through the web? The possible answers are a lot more interesting than just putting books online.
One route would be to start with test prep services, for which there's already demand, and then expand into teaching kids more than just how to score high on tests. Another would be to start with games and gradually make them more thoughtful. Another, particularly for younger kids, would be to let them learn by watching one another (anonymously) solve problems.
14. Tools for measurement. Now that so much happens on computers connected to networks, it's possible to measure things we may not have realized we could.