Giants - high-effort and high-value ebusiness ideas

Google

Google has been the epitome of an internet success story. It has revolutionized the way the Internet operates. Remarkably, its principle was quite simple - to make sense of the growing number of internet resources, a problem every librarian is familiar with. Of course, the difficult part was to implement this idea. There had been many previous attempts at achieving this goal but it was Messers Grin and Brin who came up with the best solution - the Google algorithm. Naturally, not everyone can think of such an effective yet simple solution. After all, Google's founders are Stanford alumni. Nevertheless this example shows how important it is to understand the basic needs of internet users which in principle are analogous to the needs of all other users.

Facebook

Another example of a great internet success story. In contrast to Google, Facebook did not address any fundamental limitation of the Internet such as how to find useful resources. Facebook is merely an extension of the existing tools such as MSN Messenger. It does not provide anything revolutionary. Internet communicators had been in use long before Facebook was invented. Likewise photo sharing, blogging or various networking sites. The new thing about Facebook is that it brings all these things together to one site. As such it is a perfect example of how to create great business ideas based on improving or extending existing solutions.

See also this BBC article discussing reasons why Facebook may be worth $15bn.

One-off success stories

Million Dollar Homepage

The Million Dollar Homepage is a website conceived by Alex Tew, a then 21-year-old student from Cricklade, Wiltshire, England to help raise money for his university education. Launched on August 26, 2005, the website is said to have generated a gross income of $1,037,100 USD and has a current Google PageRank of 4. The site's Alexa ranking as of 2008-05-08 is 50,101, having peaked at around 127. The index page of the site consists of a 1000×1000 pixel grid (one million pixels), on which image-based links were sold for US $1 per pixel, in minimum ten by ten blocks. The purchasers of these pixel blocks provided tiny images to be displayed on them, a URL to which they were linked, and a slogan displayed when hovering the cursor over the link. The aim of the site was to sell all of the pixels in the image, thus generating one million dollars of income for the creator (Source: Wikipedia)

Simple ideas success stories

Sonia's Portuguese teaching

All you need to get 5 in Google's PR is good knowledge of your own language. By building a website for learners of Portuguese, Sonia managed to get a PR higher than many large commercial websites. See Sonia's website and learn how a simple-idea-website can be a real online success story