MBA Idea No. 15: Affordable Luxury Cars
In a world of Groupon and LivingSocial driving down the price of services and restaurants, a new startup aims to make the luxury car market more affordable.
“People don’t realize they can get a nice BMW for the price of a Toyota Camry,” said co-founder Corey Hulen, “they just need to know which locations and model years sell at the most affordable prices.”
As a demonstration, if you’re looking for a for sale within 300 miles of Menlo Park, California. Pricini shows you what a BMW X5 typically lists for across model…
[ Read more on MBA Idea No. 15: Affordable Luxury Cars ]MBA Idea No.10: Flying windmills
Joby Energy develops airborne wind turbines.
The machines generate electricity high in the air where winds blow powerfully and consistently compared to winds available for land-based windmills.
Other companies in the space include Magenn, which makes a balloon-based solution, Ampyx, which uses a plane-based solution, and Sky Windpower, which uses helicopters.
There are some kite-based projects as well, including: aeroix, KiteGen, and Laddermill.
Plus, China is investing in the field with projects from Hummer Dynamo and the city of Foshan.
Here’s…
[ Read more on MBA Idea No.10: Flying windmills ]MBA Idea No.9: Gamble Shopping
Swoopo.com lets people gamble against each other to win the right to buy TVs, electronics and luxury items at ultra-low prices.
Swoopo is bidding fee auction site.
Participants pay a non-refundable fee ($0.60) to place a small incremental bid ($0.01) on a product they want.
Each bid extends the auction time of the item by a few seconds.
When the auction time for an item expires, the person to cast the last bid wins the item for the last price listed. As you play, you can browse the history of…
[ Read more on MBA Idea No.9: Gamble Shopping ]MBA Idea No.4: Share purchase info with friends
Blippy lets thousands of people to share buying history from credit cards and e-commerce accounts with friends.
Find out what your friends are buying, where they shop, what restaurants they go to. Check out video.
In December 2009 CNN discussed the “death of privacy” using Blippy as a prime example of the risks of sharing private info.
Four months later, the press found credit card numbers from Blippy users available on the internet, uncovered via Google search results. Blippy claims the numbers were from only 4 beta testers…
[ Read more on MBA Idea No.4: Share purchase info with friends ]MBA Idea No. 3: Dating tricks using statistics
OkCupid offers free dating site services for over a million users.
To generate press attention, and for the good of science, it data mines user behavior to discover fundamental truths about the human condition with sample values (1.6M+ users) that righteously surpass the vast majority of sociological studies in academia.
Example: Analyzing 500K dating conversations, OkCupid notes the words you use in a first-time message weigh heavily in establishing future relationships.
Below bar charts show green as positive influence, red as negative influence as plotted against average…
[ Read more on MBA Idea No. 3: Dating tricks using statistics ]MBA Idea No.1: Startup Ideas from Silicon Valley
MBA Ideas.com shares daily startup ideas discussed by the MBA community at Stanford University.
This site has two goals: First, to bring to the world the most interesting new venture conversations in Silicon Valley. Second, to provide a platform for discussing entrepreneurship and investment with people from around the globe.
This blog is available via machine translation in Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Hindi, Portuguese, Russian and Turkish.
If you’re an entrepreneur, investor, professor or student of entrepreneurship, please consider joining…
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