Finding new opportunities – gada.be

The company you work at and the company you keep both make a big difference.

Being in the silicon valley, I get to meet and talk to entrepreneurs
almost on a daily basis and get to hear about cool things that they are
working on. It’s amazing to see how these folks look at the same things
that everyone is looking at but will find an opportunity that no one
else has seen.

Every time there is a paradigm shift or a discontinuity, there are a
ton of opportunities. RSS was a paradigm shifting technology and that
lead to a ton of opportunities. Here are some examples:

* It was difficult to visit so many sites and created an opportunity for RSS readers (eg: Newsgator, Bloglines)

* As a publisher, it was difficult to find out how many people
subscribed to your feeds and that created an opportunity to manage
feeds (eg: Feedburner)

* Search engines were not indexing blogs in a good way, that created an opportunity for blog search engines (eg: Technorati)

* Bloggers were not able to monetize beyond AdSense as more people
subscribe to their feeds and not visit the site. That created a RSS
advertising opportunity (eg: Pheedo)

* For every one person who is using an RSS reader, there are 99 who may
not know what is RSS. This created an opportunity to send blog entries
via email (eg: Feedblitz)

Now for the latest innovation – you now have so many sources to search
and that created an opportunity for a meta search engine (eg: gada.be)

I was one of the fortunate few to hear this idea when Chris
was literally writing it on a piece of paper at a conference a few
weeks ago. I was fascinated by the simplicity of the idea and now that
the service is launched, I am not only fascinated, I am amazed at the
power of this service.

I can search for something by putting the search term  as a sub-domain in the blog url. So typing something like http://rajesh.setty.gada.be
will actually report back results from a few search resources (for
‘rajesh setty’) all in one page + the search results can be output as
an RSS feed. Check it out. You will be glad you did.