What’s the next Billion $$ Market?
There’s a great survey on Quora about the next Billion Dollar markets. As of Today – the highest voted answer is by Nathan Ketsdever, a Nashville based Entrepreneur and self-proclaimed Fan Boy of Steve Blank – Paul Graham – David Cohen.
Here are some of the ones that stood out for me, for good and bad, out of the 32 he listed:
- “Cloud Resellers” – what’s changed in the market? It used to be that you’d buy technology through a reseller or your internal IT department that implemented the systems for you. Today you have subscriptions across the board that don’t integrate or price with any consistency. There is an opportunity there in the enterprise.
- Mobile Payment – Finally? Juniper said it would be $600B with NFC by 2013… companies like Boku has mobile enabled payments for wireless carriers in the US and globally. Forrester Research says it will be $90B US in 2017. Near Field Communications (NFC) – not likely in 2013, unless you’re in Japan.
- “Social Commerce” – yup, I think this will be a big area as well as Facebook tests how to monetize their customer base. Wildfire was a great purchase by Google for that same reason, that’s why the team had a speculated $100M golden handcuffs.
- “Mobile Healthcare” – in the emerging markets there is a lack of Doctors actually available in the country, so making healthcare mobile will be an important option to extend healthcare. In the US the market is being influenced by the uncertainty of government’s role. In both cases, it’s a convergence of two enormous markets. While healthcare continues to have uncertainty due to the government’s role in the US, the overwhelming need to drive efficiencies will create opportunities. I was in my Doctor’s office last week for a referral. He provided two, on a folded 8.5×11 sheet of paper. REALLY?
- Government – ironically, government has money to spend, although I’m not sure it’s caused by the same need for efficiency as in health care. I expect transparency is something to be forced on government from the outside, not something they will embrace from inside. It’s our country, the data is available. Go make it useful.
I’ll stop before commenting on “Savings”, not sure how to make money with that one in the US market.
Interestingly, Big Data wasn’t on the list. From a laymen’s perspective, Big Data is about determining the signal from the noise – read Nat Silvers new book – from ever growing data sets. For most small companies you don’t get enough traffic or customer data to be concerned, but if you’ve created a mobile game, you have more click data than you know what to do with and you’ll need to tools to figure it out.
Pick a market, do the research, there are a lot of interesting opportunities and markets.