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The new start-up- $50 and an internet cafe

April 13, 2006

In today’s version of the internet boom, there seem to be even more opportunities for entrepreneurs to take full advantage of more mature technologies ready to be put to good use for personal and corporate capital gain.

All you need now is a local internet cafe and four eager beavers and you are off and running.

The perfect example is Delicious Monster. A recent article from seattlepi.com profiles this creative bunch, “headquartered literally inside a cafe, the Zoka coffeehouse near University Village in Seattle. Under a special arrangement with the manager, programmer Wil Shipley and his small crew work there each day.”

The article went on to disclose Shipley’s views on the added benefits of their business model – “You can’t be a tyrant when you’re just another guy in a coffee shop.”

With the low overhead and small work force enabled by better more efficient technologies, the Seattle-based software company’s biggest seller, Delicious Library continues to generate huge profits.

Fledgling companies can save even more money with viable and extremely affordable outsource opportunities for their back-up storage and infrastructure needs. Amazon’s new Amazon S3 data-storage service for example, is very cheap – 15 cents a month for each gig of storage and 20 cents per gig bandwidth.

Developing is also getting more affordable and efficient. For example, the folks over at Ruby on Rails have developed an open source application development framework.

Or, in their words, “Rails is a full-stack framework for developing database-backed web applications… To go live, all you need to add is a database and a web server.”

It seems the big boys are also recognizing the value inherent in their framework, evidenced by the following quote (also found on the Rails site) from Tim O’Reilly, Founder of O’Reilly Media – “Ruby on Rails is a breakthrough in lowering the barriers of entry to programming. Powerful web applications that formerly might have taken weeks or months to develop can be produced in a matter of days.”

I guess the only question that remains is, what’s the overhead cost for a bouncer outside the local cafe to prevent all the laptop thefts of recent (see engadget)

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Influx Insights is the blog of BSSP's Influx Strategic Consulting Division. Up and running since 2004, the blog covers branding and the related areas of trends and technology.

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