The best startup ideas from 2011 (Image credit: Blogsaays.com)

Rafe Needleman at C|net just published an interesting piece on the best startup ideas from 2011. Net-net, he says the following trends made it big through a variety of startups:

1) A focus on bringing technology to the physical world: Products that reach outside the digital realm and enable interactions with the physical world in interesting ways. Augmented reality anyone? Location awareness to tie the information experience with the physical? What about devices like medical monitors and other real world sensors that augment the digital experience?

2) Excellent design: This one is a no brainer. If Apple and Steve Jobs taught us anything it is that well designed trumps not well designed even if the more aesthetically appealing product lags behind on speeds and feeds. In 2012, we remain excited to see how some of Apple’s design philosophy gets “embraced and extended” with PC Ultrabooks. But Rafe’s point is not just about computer hardware. He makes a broader and completely accurate point about design now being super important for the success of a product – hardware or software.

3) Mining data: Both in the consumer and enterprise worlds, data is growing at unfathomable rates. On the consumer end, we have things like photographs, notes, documents, music and videos all moving into the cloud, needing to be searched and organized. And on the business side we have ever-increasing digitization of records and transactions, a larger number of surveillance cameras providing higher quality digital footage than ever before, automated supply chains, enterprise application integration, ERP implementations moving down the chain and into the cloud and so on. There is LOTS of opportunity to mine data and make sense of it.

4) Platforms: True, the platform concept is a tough sell as either a new idea or something that too many people can get off the ground. But if you can build a platform and make it succesful by developing a consumption and supply ecosystem around it, it sure as heck makes for a killer business model with lots of inherent barriers to competitive entry. Facebook, after all, is not necessarily the finest implementation of a social network – just the most powerful and adopted platform of all social networking properties. That’s why Google and others can’t unseat it so easily. Building platforms is IN fo’ sho’.

5) Putting people/consumers in touch with each other: A central theme in the information revolution is breaking down barriers to communication. Theoretically, the Internet puts everyone on earth in touch with any other fellow earthling. In reality, the contact needs to be brokered within a particular context (i.e. education, social networking, commerce and so on). Properties that put people in touch with others and create some value from that contact – whether by enabling consumer to consumer commerce, or learner to learner education – are hot.

What do you think are some additional hot idea memes that took off in 2011? What do you think will stay hot through 2012? We’d love to hear your views.

For more on this, directly from the horse’s mouth, visit C|Net.

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One of the biggest challenges our local technology industry (and truly, all industry!) faces in our country is the lack of attention to quality and a shockingly frequent absence of good design. I don’t want to get into a philosphical debate about what constitutes “good design” and what are the 9 guiding principles and 11 succesful habits of good designers… let’s just go with a functional, bare bones definition… We’ll call the design of a product “good” when i) it does what it is supposed to ii) for as long as it’s supposed to iii) under the conditions it was intended for iv) by people of the level of skill it was intended for v) without any significant degradation in performance or functionality over the period of its intended use vi) while, aesthetically, looking “good” doing all the above.

Now that that’s out of the way, examples of poor design are all over the place in your neighbourhood. Examples of good design, on the other hand, are probably extremely difficult to come by. Step into your bathroom, loo, restroom, ghusalkhana or toilet. Whatever you call it. Look at the toilet seat cover… that’s the perfect case study for poor design. If your toilet seat cover is like most toilet seat covers in the country, it is made of plastic, matches the colour of your WC. A smaller, flat piece of plastic with hinges is affixed to the ceramic WC, while the toilet seat cover is in turn connected to this hinge with metal “pins” that allow the hinge to move.

If your toilet seat cover is like most in the country, it has probably come loose and moves around left to right. If it’s been in use for a year or more, the metal pins in the hinges have probably become thoroughly rusted, causing rust stains in their immediate locality. If your bathroom has a window that lets sunlight in, most likely the plastic used to mould the seat cover has also experienced some discolouration so it no longer quite matches. It may have some hairline cracks as well. Finally, the metal pin was probably too thin and by now, the plastic channel it was running through has probably become brittle and at least one hinge is now non-functional. Either the plastic has broken or the pin has slipped out or something of that nature.

This is an example of poor design across almost every dimension of our definition. We all know these toilet seat covers suck. Yet, they are all over the place. The reason that’s the case is because as a society, we’ve developed a tolerance for poor design. Sliding the seat cover back, dealing with the broken hinge, not caring about the discolouration, being fine with the rust stains… that’s all part of the grand compromise. After all, how many times are you going to complain or feel badly about bad design?

But we’ve paid a price for this quiet neglect. Because we put up with poor design, many of us think that other will too. The people we build products for , for instance. In Information Technology industries like Hardware and Software, especially when dealing with export markets, that is absolutely not the case. How do you get a crack QA team from a group of people, the majority of whom, have seldom experienced products that have really good design? It’s an exposure thing… and for an organization, it can quickly become a DNA thing.

So think about this the next time you design something. Make it beautiful, make it cool and make it functional. Put some extra thought into how it will weather over time. If it is a physical object, think about how someone will hold it, what it will feel like when held, how heavy or light it should be. Every attribute of an object is affected by its design. Surround yourself with stuff that works, and stuff that’s designed well. It can be an inspirational exercise before you launch into a QA cycle on that Web 2.0 product you did for your Norwegian customer…

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