Lean Green Gems - The growth potential

Jewelry is a $30 billion a year business in the US. If this idea caught on, it could take a 10% market share and be a $3 billion dollar business.

Lean Green Gems - The monetization

I think the cost of the jewelry would be somewhere between the cost of cheap jewelry you see in shops and high-end jewelry. I expect the price to be between $50 - $200 for a pair of earrings. I expect the cost of manufacturing to be in the $30 - $150 range, evenly split between labor and materials. With intelligent use of machinery, there could be limited need for human labor, mostly assembly.  I expect the average price of a piece to be $100. The profit per piece would be roughly $30. Keep in mind that the quality would be of the same as most jewelry stores but 50% cheaper (because of the use of glass and other materials instead of stone).  

Because of the extensive use of kiosks, there would be very limited need for store employees. In fact, this could be done exclusively online.

Lean Green Gems - The idea

Gemstones always come with an environmental cost and sometimes a human one. For people who care about the environment and don’t like supporting 3rd world conflicts, buying synthetic gems is the best choice. With glass (and other materials with a higher index of refraction) it’s possible to make beautiful gems in almost any color and clarity. Also, if you are picky at all, it’s possible go through a store and see hundreds of different rings, earrings, and necklaces without seeing anything you like. There are far more jewelry design possibilities than can be reasonably stored in a brick-and-mortar store.

The best solution is jewerly-on-demand. A consumer goes into the shop and goes to one of the kiosks to start browsing for jewelry.  Selecting a type of jewelry or a stone color gives the user a set of options to pick from. Selecting the best few and getting similar items is the next step. After repeatedly pruning for several rounds, a fairly small range of jewelry is shown. The last step is to fine tune any properties of the jewelry: cut, color, index of refraction and translucency of the stones, the material used, and any other details or small flourishes. Once the selection has been made, the customer will get to see a detailed rendering of what the piece will look like and how it will look in different lighting. If they are happy with how it looks, they checkout at the kiosk and get an estimate for how long the piece will take to make. The order then goes to the manufacturing facility.

At the manufacturing facility, the workers heat up the glass or other base material into their liquid state, add chemicals to change the color and translucency then pour the glass into the gem mold. After cooling, the ‘gem’ is then cut into the perfect shape and set into the setting (which was made while the gem was cooling. This entire process should take only a few hours. If there is no backlog, then customers could get their jewelry delivered the same or next day.

Lean Green Gems - The motivation

There are few things worse for the environment than mining. Coal is frequently singled out is being dirty and bad for the environment, but gem mining is no better. That’s not even bringing up the conflict stones like diamonds or emeralds. On the consumer side there are also downsides. Stores frequently have tens of thousands of dollars in inventory and on display that move extremely slowly. Slow-moving inventory is a hidden cost of these businesses, i.e., if it takes six months for a ring to sell, then the profit you make is less than it would seem because of the effect of inflation over the last six months. Both the environmental damage from mining and the economic waste of maintaining inventory can be eliminated.

Microclimate Control - The pitch

Not everyone is comfortable at the same temperature. Why compromise? With microclimate control every room can be set to maximize comfort while also minimizing cost. Automatically turn off the AC while people aren’t home in the summer.  Heat only the bedrooms at night in the winter. And never have to argue with your family about temperature for the whole house.

Microclimate Control - The fun part

The reason why Nest is a huge success is that it’s really simple to use. Getting MCC to “just work” will be key to its success. I think that some clever machine learning and some good industrial engineering could make that happen.

Microclimate Control - The growth potential

There are about 100 million households in the US. If 1% of those households purchased MCC per year that would be one billion dollars in revenue. In the case of the rev share model, if the average household saved fifty dollars a month on their utilities and there was a 50/50 rev share, that would be $300 a year for MCC or $300 million a year if 1% of the population used MCC.

Microclimate Control - The monetization

There are two potential pricing models. First, this could be sold as a normal consumer good that requires the user to install and setup Microclimate Control (MCC). I think the price of the MCC main controller, 5 vents, and micro controllers would be around a thousand dollars.  The second pricing model is to have a rev share setup. For sharing revenue, or more accurately cost savings,  all that is required is the previous year’s energy bill. Any money that MCC saves would be split between MCC and the customer. If the customer lives in an area that gets hourly summaries of energy usage, it could be possible to calibrate the system to be even more accurate than just looking at previous costs.  I expect that MCC could save the average household $25 - $200 per month (some houses in the north-east have $400 heating bills per month in the winter).

Microclimate Control - The idea

The primary problem that I see with climate control is that it isn’t very targeted. One of the nice things about Nest is that it sets the temperature of the house to change with what people require, e.g., turn off the AC when people aren’t there.  Nest allows time targeting for climate control, but it still is at the granularity of a household (or at least the climate control system).

Microclimate control would have a main wall controller like Nest, but it would also come with a set of two other things. The first would be a set of wirelessly-controlled AC/heat vents. These would replace the normal vents and could be opened and closed by the Microclimate controller. The vents would be wireless and come with a long lasting battery. The last part would be room controllers. These would look like smaller versions of the main controller, but they would have a suite of sensors to detect what’s going on in the room. A combination of a temperature sensor, light sensor, IR sensor, and a sonar sensor could determine if the lights are on, warm things (people) are in the room, and if there is movement in the room. These inputs would help the system to learn when people want the house at different temperatures.

Let me walk through a few scenarios. During the winter at night, you may want the bedrooms warm but the rest of the house can stay cool. The user would turn the main controller down and the ones in the bedrooms up. The sensor data could be used to model what the room looks like when people want it cooler or warmer than the rest of the house (such as when people are in the room). Once the models are well-trained, the heating system could respond to unusual events like someone getting up in the middle of the night.  The heat would be automatically turned up in the other rooms where the sleepless person spends time until they go back to bed.

One small point is that the system would have to learn the relationship between the different wireless vents and the room controllers. If there isn’t an exact one-to-one ratio, then this relationship could be a complex. For example, it may be necessary to run the vent in a room next to the one you want to heat if there isn’t a vent in the room with the controller.

Microclimate Control - The motivation

For many people one of the largest recurring costs they have is from heating and cooling.  Most thermostats are pretty stupid and cause us to waste a large amount of electricity. Nest is a step in the right direction, but just a start of what could be.

Talent-on-Demand - The pitch

If uncertainty in future demand is preventing you from hiring the people you need to grow your business, then use Talent-on-Demand to help you stay nimble.  Whether you only need help for a short time or you are experiencing a temporary slow-down, Talent-on-Demand will make sure you have the best people when you need them.

Talent-on-Demand - The fun part

The goal here is to make this opportunity beneficial to all parties and to find good matches. Getting word-of-mouth out about this for a target industry would be a good start. This program would work pretty well for software engineering and engineering in general, but less in very specialized industries.

Talent-on-Demand - The growth potential

This is a bit hard to estimate, so here goes. The US has a labor force of about 150 million people. If at any given point about 1% of those people are idle (or underutilized such that they could be idle if others picked up a little slack) and make around $40,000/year, then Talent-on-Demand could make at most $3 billion in revenue.

Talent-on-Demand - The monetization

Talent-on-Demand would take a small percentage cut of all transitions. For example, if Abe’s Custom Chairs rents 5 woodworkers for 80 hours at $20/hour ($8,000 total) and Talent-on-Demand took a 5% cut, it would make $400 from the deal.

Talent-on-Demand - The idea

If you are running a small business and business slows, then you have some unpleasant options to consider. First, you could do nothing and continue to lose money via idle workers. Second, you could keep all of your staff and cut hours (furlough). The last, and hardest option, is to fire some of your workforce. None of these are great options.

That is where Talent-on-Demand comes in. When work starts to slow, you post that you have idle workers with a given skill set. Another company who is experiencing what they think might be a temporary spike in demand, could request to “rent” your employees for a few weeks to a few months. Your employees would then have the option to temporarily work for the business experiencing a spike in business while remaining on your payroll. The business needing the help would pay you and that money would help you keep the idle staff while your demand is low.  When business picks up, your employees could return and everything goes back to normal. When you hire a new employee, they can opt-in (or opt-out) of this program.

This idea benefits all parties: the worker doesn’t get fired or furloughed, the original employer gets some value from what otherwise would be an idle resource, and the other company gets skilled temporary workers at a discounted price.

Talent-on-Demand - The motivation

There have been a number of startups that have aimed to monetize otherwise idle capital, e.g., Relayrides, Airbnb, and TaskRabbit. Talent-on-Demand is most similar to TaskRabbit, but applied to skilled labor.

One Person Camera Crew - The pitch

Make great movies on the cheap with One Person Camera Crew. Our combination of hardware and software make it possible to do almost everything normally done while shooting in post-production. Don’t like the makeup? Change it! Don’t like that light source? Remove it! The power to save money and make a great product is in your hands with OPCC.

One Person Camera Crew - The fun part

This project is a great mix of hardware and software. A team that understands the interplay between the two could make an amazing product that was cost effective but still made great films.

One Person Camera Crew - The growth potential

This product is great for small scale films. With the growth of niches on the internet like channels on youtube and other video sites, there are tens of thousands of people who want to make high quality movies. I think this could grow into a $100 million a year business.

One Person Camera Crew - The monetization

The product here is both the hardware and the post-production software. Depending on the feature set included, I expect that package costs could range from $5,000 to $20,000. The time to recoup the cost of the product could be around 70 to 280 hours of shooting, or about 4 short films.

One Person Camera Crew - The idea

The goal of this project is to reduce the number of people on the film crew to one person. I’ll take each job and explain how it could be automated or combined with other jobs

Lighting

A lot of lighting work can actually be done in post-production. With modern software like Lightroom and Photoshop, photographers can reduce or increase the effects of shadows. It wouldn’t be very hard to mark different areas in the scene or parts of an actor’s face as being the same color and locally adjusting the lighting to remove all shadows. If the camera is paired with a distance measuring sensor, like a Microsoft Kinect, then it should be possible to add additional light sources in post-production. We’ve learned a lot about subsurface scattering and can do a much better job of modeling the effect of light on skin.

Makeup

Like lighting, makeup could also be done in post-production. If the parts of an actor’s face were painted with makeup in a handful of keyframes, the software could track the person’s features from keyframe to keyframe and put the makeup on each in frame in between.

Audio

Cameras are getting smaller and lighter, that frees up weight for other things to carry. It’s possible to make a small backpack that does that work of a boom operator including making sure that the mic is always out of frame (if it’s controlled by software looking at the live camera footage). In addition to removing the need for a boom operator, it’s possible to do a little more with audio. If the cameraman is also armed (or decorated) with a set of microphones, then it’s possible to do better audio processing in post. With several microphones, one can determine difference sources of noise and select which one(s) we want to hear, or the mix of different sources.

One Person Camera Crew - The motivation

Making TV shows and movies is expensive. Even web shows might have a crew of ten people to set up the scene, the lighting, the sound, and the makeup. That all costs a lot of money. If it were possible to reduce those costs, you could make high quality content for niche audiences that make a profit.

Micro Meets - The pitch

Are you a Fran Kranz fan? Have you always wanted to meet Day[9]? How would like to have lunch with Levi Meeuwenberg? Now you can. Just follow your favorite people on Twitter as if you don’t already and when they come to your town, see if they want to host a Micro Meet. All you need to do to get a chance to meet them is to buy a ticket, it’s that easy.

Micro Meets - The hard part

Micro Meets really gains value as it gains popularity. The key would be to first go after more niche celebrities and their fans and show (using their testimonials) that larger celebrities would benefit from using Micro Meets.

Micro Meets - The growth potential

Time for some rough math. Let’s say there are 1,000 celebrities that sign up with Micro Meets and on average each celebrity does a meet four times a year. Using my previous estimate for the value of a meet to Micro Meets of $2,500, that amounts to a revenue of $10 million dollars a year.