Zyzz: Turning Internet Ideas Into Businesses

Our focus is on consumer and small business Internet and mobile opportunities.  Within that we have an evolving focus areas.  Some of our current themes include:

Printing 2.0
The global printing industry is a $1 trillion / year industry, that includes only the print cost, e.g. for newspapers which is upwards of $50 billion / year, it includes the cost of printing the newspaper, but not the advertising fees or the distribution costs.  95% of the industry is analog and only 5% is digital.  Sometime in all of our careers, that 5% will become something on the order of 50%.  Like wireless data, it's a matter of when and not if.  As that happens, what changes?

We've already seen some companies take advantage of the disruption that can occur:
- VistaPrint: Market cap of over $1.5 billion from "free" business cards and other basic printed products.  They actually print the majority of their cards still on Analog, however, they've taken Web 2.0 marketing and the digital workflow efficiency to dramatically change the economics of a very basic business. 
- Zazzle & CafePress: using digital technologies to enable mass customization of consumer products
- Photo services such as Snapfish, Shutterfly, Blurb: printing photobooks where everyone is unique.  Yesterday, that would have cost hundreds of dollars to produce, with digital it can be done for $40.

What other services are out there?

Mobile Advertising
Where are the holes and the opportunities?
Platform--->       Self Service    Some Tools     Full Service
Target Customer
Small Sites
Large Sites
Publishers
Advertisers
Carriers

In the early days of mobile advertising, there is a rush for coverage (types of devices covered, types of ad units served) and features (tools provided, targeting ability).  However, when does this market change to performance?  How will performance be measured, CPM, CPC, CPA? 

Mobile Location Based Services
- What does the convergence of GPS, social networking, local 'yellow pages' type information, peer and professional reviews and collaborative filtering yield?
- What business could emerge if someone could control a database of anonymous location based pings on any one of the major wireless carrier networks, i.e. where one cannot identify any personal information, but based on vector movements, one knows that ping X moved from point A to point B over the last 15 minutes?