A month ago, I wrote a post about the need for companies to port hit games/applications from iPhone over to Android.  OpenFeint is one company playing in that space, and already 50% of their games are in the Top 15 apps in the Android Marketplace.  There’s still room for other companies to do the same.

8 of the 20 games announced have already launched and seen success. Half of the launched games on Android have hit the top 15 in the Android marketplace. 2 games, MiniSquadron and Fruit Ninja, hit the top two spots for paid games within 72 hours of launch. OpenFeint also crossed 40 million users across games on iPhone and Android, a gain from 3 million users last month, making it the largest mobile social gaming network in the world.

One of the business ideas that people seem to throw at me without cease is that of mobile applications.  For sure, I am surrounded by enough talented people (and seed money) to put together a modest company writing mobile games and personal productivity apps.  The ideation (see: brainstorming) and execution of the games is not the issue.  I am fairly confident that I can do either.
To be frank, the issues I have with becoming a mobile application company is that there are no clear marketing channels.  Both the Apple iTunes Store and the Android Market are primitive ways to distribute products.  There does not yet exist an ecosystem (simple or complex) by which I could market my products more effectively or quickly than the competition.

Whereas in traditional online marketing, I DO know how to use ad networks.  I DO know when and where to use SEO and SEM, and I have found the correct partners to execute local market internet stuff.

However, when I consider mobile phone market, there really is nothing I can do.  Besides just putting up a website, the best I can do is offer fremium versions of my application (or offer 0.99 prices) and hope that enough people pick it up so I can be promoted as a “Top application,” and then rake in the big dollars.  One of the first steps in the mobile application marketing ecosystems is Papayamobile, which helps market Android applications.  I imagine more websites/systems are on their way.

I imagine that if I was brought into a mobile company in my traditional role as Mr. “Fix-It,” I would figure out how to market mobile apps.  But from the outside, it just doesn’t seem worth it yet.

What makes mobile applications successful seems a combination of having a good product, and being lucky.  I would rather start a company where I understood how to market, and how to sell.

I have been thinking a lot about why Internet startups in Vietnam have such a low rate of success.  Before you ask, no there are no real statistics on this.  It is my gut feeling, but supported by:

• There being only about a dozen major online publishers in Vietnam.
• There being only about five major gaming companies.
• There being a huge glut of skilled technology workers and entrepreneurs.

In my former role as head of Admax Network Vietnam, a lot of small publishers came to me for help monetizing.  The mindset here is very similar to that of the dotcom boom.  We build it big enough to get decent traffic, and then with that traffic we will discover a business model.

And very often, the monetization of that traffic becomes advertising.  The same silver bullet that many many startups strove for in the late 90s.  And those startups quickly run out of cash while waiting for someone to acquire them.  To wit, no internet publisher been acquired by any company looking to enter the market.

But what about the internet startups that provide services to the local market.  In this basket I would lump:

• Software as a Service companies (i.e. Flickr, webmail, etc)
• eCommerce
• Auction websitesrep
• HR websites

It doesn’t take much to start any of the above companies, and you do find dozens of teams of young, smart and hungry engineers and entrepreneurs starting businesses every week.  For example, I just discovered Pha Gia, a Vietnamese clone of GroupOn.

It is no surprise that many Vietnamese startups are ‘inspired’ by successful startups in America.

—

So why do so many startups fail?

My fervent belief is that many startups fail here because of a lack of good marketing.  I was listening to this interview with Sean Ellis (marketer for Dropbox.com, among other startups) on Mixergy and realized something key.

The startups here have a lot of talented and smart engineers and entrepreneurs, offering both smart and technical solutions to everyday challenges.  However, they all fail in that they do not know how to market their offering to their target offering.  They all suffer from the illness:

If we build it, they will come.

The Field of Dreams strategy of marketing rarely works, and marketing is where almost all  internet startup fails. Without good marketing, they are unable to:

• Bring customers to their website.
• Educate people on their product offering and their value proposition.
• Most importantly, defend themselves against clones and competitors.

Without the protection that brand equity affords (and yes, good brand equity is good defense), new internet startups when they get successful, face dozens upon dozens of clones, splitting up the growing marketplace and destroying any hope a startup has of getting a good viral or network effect (Metzcalfe’s Law).

This post is getting long, and I am tending to ramble, so to sum up in a couple sentences.

• Business need : Internet Startups need good marketing
• Challenge: Internet Startups have no money
• Solution: Marketers (or agencies) take on business for a stake of the business and cost of marketing.

Not everyone can do it, but I think this can be an attractive proposition for VCs and angel investors, frustrated by the lack of progress in their companies.

I remember my first attempt at professional blogging.  I decided to jump into the deep end of the pool with the highly competitive term “make money on-line.”  I named it “Wallet Rehab,” as I wanted to have something that was catchy (sort of successful), brandable, yet still related to my field.

I ended up having about 100 RSS subscribers, and making about 100 USD per month from it.  Not a lot, but it was enough of a success for me to see that there was potential there.

However, 100 US

D a month for the effort I was putting in was not enough potential, so I soon quit. I think someone else has picked up WalletRehab since then.

The problem

that I was trying to help people with was “people always need more money.”  That is a very broad problem to try and solve.

This brings me to an article I read this morning from Industry Pace, which is a list of “impressive resumes.”  I looked at these resumes, and I s

aw that the experience contained within was good.  However, the resumes themselves were laid out in poor, unprofessional ways.  The

y were confusing, and did not tend to inspire confidence.

That is not to say these people are not professionals.  Nor that these resumes are not the resumes of professionals.

I am saying that these r

esumes do not look professional, and could use the service of a professional resume company.  I wonder how quickly someone could solve that problem with a combination of Free, Paid and Custom solutions?

So, it’s 6pm, I’m sitting in my office, and I’m waiting for my team to finish up some work.

So I might as well write up a free business idea.

One of the hottest sectors online for companies is iPhone and iPad applications.  Steve Jobs, in his infinite wisdom (and why not, he’s way more successful than me) has decided that applications need to be done in Apple’s proprietary Cocoa language, and that Flash will not work on Apple’s devices.

Last year, the iPhone was the only touch screen device out there.  Now there are a plethora of Android phones, and a smattering of Palm OS phones.  For every Palm OS app, there are 100 Android apps, and for every Android App, there’s 1,000 iPhone apps.

The business need?  The people who have built or own successful iPhone apps probably want versions for the Android.  Android is rapidly catching up to the iPhone in device usage, and it has fragmented into three or four different kinds of versions (2.1, 2.2 Froyo and HTC Sense, for instance).  iPhone app businesses will pay people to translate their app to Android, and also adapt it for the various screen sizes and resolutions that Android is churning out.

Should HP and Palm get their acts together, there will be a further market for porting iPhone applications to PalmOS.  Or whatever Symbian evolves into from Nokia.  A small, smart group of developers could do pretty well doing this.

To my knowledge, no one has done this yet.

I have a bunch of business ideas that I am always floating around.  I enjoy talking about them, researching them and batting them around like a kitten bats around a ball of yarn.  I think I end up wasting a lot of time with my endeavors, and unfortunately a lot of the precious time of those around me.  Yet, people still are supportive of me, which leads me to believe that a. I have some good ideas or potential, or b. I’m mildly entertaining.

For the most part, I think I’m going to lump myself in with category b, mildly entertaining.  I’ve done some Adsense arbitrage, affiliate marketing and various blackhat content scraping schemes in the past.  For my personal stuff, I will do some private, whitehat projects.

But there are only 24 hours in a day, and there will always be time for whiskey to be drunk and time for me to spend with a good book  I hate to see good ideas wasted, so expect to see some show up in this space from time to time.  If anyone wants to sit down and discuss them with me, I am more than happy to!