Ricky’s Online Business Blog

I had a conversation recently with friend on the famous Million Dollar Homepage owned by Alex Dew from England.

Alex, a student years ago, intended to raise money for his education. He thought of a very good idea, to sell advertisement space on Internet pixel by pixel for $1 each. He successfully sold all pixels in the 1000 x 1000 pixels space on his web site, and became a millionaire!

Since then, many web sites surfaced hoping to copy his success story. Any similar attempts from Malaysia? Yes, Million Ringgit Malaysia is one of them.

Two years ago, a teenager contacted me and would like to partner up with me to develop such an idea. I immediately saw it’s a copycat idea and didn’t go ahead with him.

Years have passed by and I have not heard anyone become another Alex Tew so far, either from Malaysia or around the world.

Recently, I came across TwoMAds.com owned by two young Malaysians. It seems they not only want to go for one million, but two million! I’m not sure how they are different from the original Alex’s idea. But from the statistics they publish online, it seems they are not selling too well as yet.

But just as two years ago when the youngster proposed to me, I still maintain that such idea to earn big money through pixel advertising does not work any more, not without changing some if not most elements of the business model.

But I venture to say that it may work under at least two circumstances. Firstly, the idea is not used for profit making, but to raise fund 100% for charity or a social cause.  How about use it for venture capital for social entrepreneurs?

Secondly, the idea maybe applied to other things that may generate such income. To start with, just list down all kinds of measurements you can think of, and see how you can sell one unit each for $1. But this is still “thinking inside the box”.

Any idea?

Today I attended the “Ideas Generation Workshop” organized in the MIRC KL SME ICT Summit 2008.  All participants should agree that we have been so blessed by the sharing of the speaker David Lo from sixbrands.com, who has a wealth of experience in business, branding and marketing.

I was in the workshop to learn about how to generate and evaluates new business ideas.  Actually I already have some ideas myself,  some even few years old!  I want to know how to choose the best idea to work on, or as the speaker said, which idea to sell my house on!

At the end of session, we were told to submit a one-page summary of our business idea by next week in order to apply to MDeC’s (the organization behind MSC Malaysia) pre-seed fund for up to RM150,000 in order to further develop.  Never did I notice that the workshop was aimed for the fund applicants.

But now I’m seriously considering applying for the fund.  It’s a grant, free money!  The money will help in bootstrapping the new business and shorten the time to market.  Also, I will go through some process and learn things that I never learned.  In fact, I will be paid to learn!

Perhaps most importantly, this will instill discipline in me to act on my business idea now, rather than letting it collect dust for another few years.  Since it is a conditional grant, I must achieve certain project milestones and develop a prototype within certain time period, failing which I will need to pay back!

So now, which idea should I submit?  Well, this is not play play and I think I will submit the best one.  Wish me luck

I missed the just concluded FOSS.my event which was about movement for free and open source software.  Heard it’s been AWESOME!  Of course it is.  Who in the world will want to devote so much time in helping to develop and promote a software free of charge?  It must be for their belief and passion in the idea, product and community of people.  Long live FOSS!

Daniel Cerventus of Entrepreneurs.my led a session in FOSS.my and shared what businesses can learn from the open source.  An open source movement, or any movement for that matter, is all in and about its community of people believing in its cause and collaborating together to move it forward.

It makes me think that an open source movement is like a religion, or even a cult with its own sub-culture.  The people are crazy for the idea, work tirelessly to build up something for the good of all, and become “evangelists” to promote the software.  In fact, the term “evangelist” is a religious term, isn’t it?

Daniel likens the community to the supporters of a restaurant who strongly believe the food and beverages it provides.  I have a real story to tell here.

A customer recently asked me to join a cafe restaurant business as “member”, having joined herself.  The idea is that, the café owner offers “shares” (not real shares) of profit to all members of the public who invest into the business.  In return, the owner shares the monthly profit back to the members, with minimum fixed returns guaranteed.

In effect, these members will naturally want to help the restaurant do well and become “evangelists” for the restaurant.  It’s a “community café restaurant”.  Isn’t it a good idea?  What a different business model for an F & B business!

By the way, are you interested in investing in the café? Let me know and I’ll gladly connect you with my customer.

Now what if the members also help to develop every part of the café, from the decoration to the menu, just like the software developers help in open source software development?  Will it not become a real “open source café restaurant” then?

Is this achievable?  So what can we learn from open source movement for business?