Making Money from Mashups

In recent news, Vincent Cheung, a PhD student/entrepreneur has received some attention on the Globe and Mail. Why, you ask? Well for producing and selling a nifty program called Shape Collage that can arrange photos into any shape of your choosing. What I find interesting about this article is how Vincent has tapped into the concept of mashups as a way of creating new value out of old ideas. By mashups I mean the combination of two or more existing products or concepts into something new. He's taken the old school idea of creating collages out of photographs and digitized it to work with pictures on your computer. Sometimes innovation doesn't just come from finding new ways to do things, but from finding the synergies between two existing ideas. The value of Vincent's new program lies in the fact that over time consumer behavior has shifted from old film fed cameras to all digital cameras. The result of this are massive photo albums onto a person's computer waiting for a creative way to be presented.

Continuing on the theme of mashups, another nifty product is SMARTPics. It takes the old concept of a photobooth and gives it a new spin. Added on to the photo taking feature is the ability to automatically upload the photo on to social networks like Facebook and Twitter. The value? It's making consumer's lives easier, skipping the step between the consumer manually uploading these files. I can see potential for this technology being extended to camera format. Already this type technology is taking hold with name companies. I have a Kodak camera that allows you to upload videos taken to YouTube. What could these types of mashups mean in the long run? It could mean that more and more people will be able to stay connected to social networks without need to sit in front of a computer.