Browser Wars
There is currently an interesting development in the wondrous world of browsers - after the dark ages of an Internet Explorer dominated world, the rising of phoenix from the ashes (I’m talking about Firefox here - in case you missed that), Apples foray into the market with their beautifully handcrafted Safari browser and not to forget our long, long active friends from Scandinavia (Opera that is), browsers finally became sexy again. And I’m not talking about the upcoming feature fights between Firefox 3, Internet Explorer 8, Safari 3.1 or Opera 9.5 - I’m talking about browsers developed specifically for niche markets.
There is Flock for the Social Web addict - that is, somehow, a pretty obvious niche. The even more interesting stuff is currently happening in the children’s market - in one corner of the ring we have Glubble, in the other corner we have KidZui. Both take a similar approach (and have received solid financing from the VC community): Take an Open Source browser, modify the browser to make it look more ‘kid-friendly’, create a content portal and hard-code into the browser that users of the browser can only access this portal and pretty much nothing else. This in itself is a pretty smart approach - you create a closed community (much in the way AOL was in its early years) where you control the content. This means that you don’t need to bother on how to filter that search on Google for “Britney Spears naked”. The moment you have the kid on your portal (and she won’t be able to go anywhere else anyway) you can start monetizing them - show them ads, analyze their surfing behavior, have them fill out some questionnaires…
So far so good - I just wonder how much marketing it takes to get to critical mass. As you first need to convince the parents that it’s a good idea that kids should access the web through your browser and then need to entertain a fickle community so that they won’t go screaming to their parents and request a ‘proper’ browser as they can’t access their preferred kiddie TV show’s site.
The interesting niche where I believe this strategy would work, you don’t have tremendous marketing costs (as the users are much less fickle) and there is real money to be made is senior citizens. Why not build a browser which is easy to use for older people (less functionality; large, easy to read buttons, text size increased by default to 150%, etc.), combine it with a useful portal as the default homepage, create a vibrant community around it and off you go.
Think about it - if you go ahead and do it, give me a call. 