Thanks to Digital Business Academy for this .. What are the best startup ideas for digital businesses? If you’re looking for ideas to start an online business, it pays to explore how technology is disrupting the way we work, play, live and interact at pace.
Smart startups – armed with ideas, tech and a grasp of shifting consumer and business behaviours – are coming out of nowhere to shake-up industries and secure billion dollar valuations in a matter of months.
We’ve identified five boom areas for anyone starting an online business:
Fintech:
The financial technology sector is rich with startup business ideas. Fintech is hot property with over $3bn invested in fintech startups in 2014 alone. Distrust, regulation and complacency within the financial sector have seen a band of fintech startups embrace digital to deliver superior experiences for the public and businesses alike.
From crowdfunding and peer-to-peer lending pioneers such as Crowdcube, Seedrs and Funding Circle to personal finance sites such as Netmeg, online payment apps TransferWise, Zapp and Square and B2B tools such as MarketInvoice and Receipt Bank, FinTech may only be in its infancy but it’s already big business.
Video streaming / mobile:
If video is no longer the future, it’s because it’s the present. Video creation and consumption across the web, social and mobile continues to explode and demand constant innovation.
Live video streaming app Meerkat raised $12m at a valuation of over $50m within weeks of launching earlier this year and, along with Twitter-owned rival Periscope, is receiving unprecedented adoption from consumers and brands alike.
Google has increased the prominence of video in organic search results; Facebook’s prioritised video over other content and launched video ads; while video conferencing, webinars and online learning are all growth areas.
Data
As our lives move online, we leave an online footprint providing invaluable insights for brands – if they can fathom out how to use it. Big data is a buzzword in every corporate trying to figure out how to use the information it accumulates to shape its future strategy.
It’s not just about transactional data but emotional data, too. Facebook recently licensed UK SME Datasift’s groundbreaking Pylon technology to enrich its insights into user activity.
Data collection, segmentation, analysis, visualisation and management of privacy rights are all opportunity rich.
Wearables
Apple Watch might be grabbing the headlines but wearable tech has been growing fast for a while. Fitbit, Jawbone and Nike’s FuelBand have taken wearable fitness tracking devices mainstream and there’s a whole host of other lifestyle / fitness and health related products set to follow.
Internet of Things
When Google bought remote thermostat and smoke detector startup Nest for $3.2bn last year, ‘the Internet of Things’ (IoT) truly arrived. Last month, IBM launched a £3bn IoT fund and according to Gartner there will be 26 billion IoT devices in use by 2020.
So the IoT has serious exit potential for digital startups that can use technology to innovate and improve everyday objects.