The Contrarian, Innovation Disrupter Paradigm & Automobile Remarketing - An Unconventional Approach

Uber did it. They tried to kill conventional taxis. Airbnb did it. They tried to kill Expedia, travel sites and conventional bricks and mortar hotels. Expedia, in turn, tried to kill conventional travel agents.  Dating sites did it by killing personal ads in print media.  Photo sharing apps destroyed the need for carrying pictures of your kids in wallets built with special snapshot compartments. Everybody is doing it.  The next big idea is to destroy, upset and disrupt bricks and mortar business.

BUT ..........................  what if it doesn't make sense to disrupt and kill the bricks and mortar business, but rather empower them with new technologies?  That is our story at Selectbidder.com

We knew that the social side of business was important. Car dealers, and indeed any business people want to do business with people they know and trust.  That's why we invented the Exclusive Zone and the Trusted Buyers Network.  We put the social media side to automobile remarketing. And we put in some real nifty tech so that new and used car dealers could run their own auctions with their own networks and cut out the bricks and mortar auction.  It was received with a subdued acknowledgement.   There was something that we were missing.

The "something" was both a technology problem and a more intrinsic human problem.  At the heart of our value proposition, we want to move trade-in vehicles quickly.  When you take your wheels to a new car dealer, he has to take your trade-in so that you can buy a new vehicle.  He really doesn't want your car.  Over 90% of trade-in vehicles do not end up on the dealers lot. They are either too old, the wrong condition, non-sellers, or not of kind vehicle that his clientele buys.

To ameliorate this, the new car dealer has developed several strategies.  It is assumed in the industry that unwanted trade-ins end up at the auto auctions.  Our research showed that this was not true.  Only 20% or so, of trade-ins ended up there.  The rest of the cars were disposed of through private networks.  The dealer always has a bunch of go-to guys who are wholesalers, used car dealers or other dealers.  The used car manager goes through the Rolodex, and using the phone, disposes of the unwanted iron on his lot. What he doesn't get rid of, goes to auto auctions.  This was a staggering piece of information for us, and it should be for the industry, because almost all of the used car valuators (Black Book, Blue Book, etc etc) use auction prices as the basis of their valuations.

The second problem with private networks, is that the networks are small, and the range of traded-in autos is very large. Thus the small network doesn't have the will or the ability to absorb all trade-ins.  Technology had one of the answers.  At Selectbidder.com we have foundation patent-pending in computer escalation of various buying groups until the car is sold.  Our technology is unique.

The way that it works, is that if the private network doesn't buy the car (using instantaneous mobile technology -- smartphones and tablets as well as computer) after a certain period of time, then the platform does some data mining and machine learning to offer to a group of dealers created on the fly who are known to buy these kinds of cars.  If that didn't work after a period of time, the platform moves the autos to a classified type of listing or consigns them to a bricks and mortar auction.  This technology is fabulous, but it didn't solve two problems.

The first unsolved problem was that the private networks were too small to adequately absorb the wide variety of trade-ins.  The second unsolved problem was a more generic one for the new car dealer.  If the dealer put too much into the trade-in, and then the trade-in didn't sell for what he thought it was worth, he lost money on both the trade-in and on the new car sale.  Cars rarely bring in what the published prices show in the various valuation providers.

The solution to both of those problems lay in leveraging the existing auto auctions.  They have almost the entire local network of dealers so that the buying network is large.  And those dealers in the auctions network have intense local knowledge of what a vehicle is worth.  For example, in rural areas, a king cab pickup truck may bring in a higher price than it would fetch in a gentrified urban setting.  A rural dealer could get more money for it.  That is just one example.

So we had to get this intense localized knowledge to the new car dealer, right when he was making the deal with the customer.  The only way to do this, was to involve the bricks and mortar auction.
This involved mobile technology of scanning the VIN number, taking a few pics with a smartphone, filling in a condition report and getting real time appraisals while the customer was looking over the new car.

The auction also has intense market knowledge of who buys whatever is offered. They flip the car to a group of buyers for real time appraisal.  The best part of this, was that the appraisals could be accompanied by an offer to buy at the appraisal price.  If there were no offers to buy, the dealer has a customer facing screen on our platform, showing the customer what his trade-in is really worth.  The dealer is no longer the bad guy when an appraisal is on the low side.  It is the marketplace that doesn't value the customer's car, and it absolves the dealer of trying to low-ball the trade-in.  Most all customers have an inflated idea of what their car is worth, and the Selectbidder platform takes the dealer's "bad" intentions out of play.

So, once we implemented this paradigm, the interest in our platform skyrocketed, as did the customer engagement and sign-ups.  Everyone makes money on this deal.  The auction get a cut for flipping the cars, the dealer is happy because the trade-in is disposed of instantly and he can make a profitable deal for himself without waiting for the trade-in to sell.

Sometimes it really pays to be contrarian and leverage the bricks-and-mortar business, instead of trying to kill it with technology.


You can read about Selectbidder.com here:
http://www.autoremarketing.com/arcanada/selectbidder-announces-real-time-trade-bid-solution

Looking For A Crowd-funding Project of Your Own, But Can't Think of One?

Your job sucks. You want to start a business but can't think of anything worthwhile. You want a surefire way to start a company, get rich and have an exit event where one of the big boys buys you. You see crowdfunding successes and wrack your brains for an idea, a spark, an inspiration of innovation for what the world will want in large quantities.  Well you have come to the right place. Here are some ideas for crowdfunding projects that will go big.  You snooze, you lose, so act fast. First to market wins.

Idea #1 Fixing The Chewing Gum Market With New Product Introductions

The chewing gum market has been flat for years. It is in decline. It really took off post-World War II and during the 1950's and 1960's, it was quite hip to chew gum. From the 1970's to the 1990's, chewing gum was seen as anti-social.

The last big hurrah for chewing gum was the sugarless kind that contained xylitol and proven to prevent cavities.  The way that chewing gum innovates now, is producing some more exotic chemical flavor, like Raspberry Melon Dream.

So I think that the time is right for a disruptive paradigm shift in the chewing gum market that will make you the Mogul of Mastication. And you can crowd fund it.

Let's revitalize the business in a couple of ways.  First of all, all gum now is made from synthetic rubber. In the early days, it was made naturally from chicle. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicle ) In the Bahamas, and other Caribbean islands, there are dilly trees that produce a delicious sapodilla fruit that tastes like apple pie. These trees produce chicle as well, and NOBODY taps them. The Bahamas in particular is looking for economic diversification and growing chicle would be one way to do plus.  Plus, chicle is all natural, and not like the gum base today made from coal tar. While once stealing picking dilly fruit that was hanging over a fence on the sidewalk, the branch of the dilly tree broke and the chicle got all over my hand.  I licked it off and chewed it, and it was pleasant even without flavoring. AND IT IS ORGANIC! How about an organic gum. That is innovation number one. It would sell like hotcakes to the organic food crowd.

The second disruption in the chewing gum industry is flavor. I don't want chemical fruit flavors. Suppose you infused the gum with stuff that was good for you, like Acai berries, gingseng and herb and botanicals that were healthy. Suppose you made a gum that energized you like Red Bull. Red Bull came out of nowhere and mades its founder gazillionaires. So you would have an energy gum. You would have a St. John's Wort gum that is anti-depression and anxiety. Great for chewing during an exam. And speaking of exams, you would have a gum with ginko biloba to increase your brain power.

There are all sorts of things that you could do with chewing gum, and carve an empire to make you a Mandarin of Manducation.

Idea #2, The Virtual Window

I was driving in the downtown core a big city, and saw four luxury condo towers going up. The condos were thickly crammed into each of the twenty or so stories of the building, and since the towers were close to each other, some of the condos had a beautiful view of a brick wall, and another building.  Who would want to pay half-a-million dollars for a condo whose window look out on a brick wall, and yet many folks do.

So I had an idea to fix this. The Eureka moment is a virtual window. You make an LED display the size of window. As a matter of fact, you could enlarge one of those electronic photo frames, and enhance the display. The Light Emitting Diodes in the display would be the ultra-bright type, and the white ones would have sunlight spectrum built in.  Then images are loaded into memory, and the processor keeps the time to give you a diurnally-appropriate image. What this means is that you would see a sunrise, and a sunset, and the window would get darker in the evening and you would see a beautifully lighted cityscape at nights.

You could change your view to look out over Diamond Head in Waikiki. Or you could have a crystal blue lagoon view of French Polynesia. You could pick the view out of your window, according to your mood. Or the window would be part of the Internet of Everything, so you could link to a webcam in Paris for you window view.  Or you could link to art gallery images for something completely different. You never need to look at a brick wall again.

The goodies that you would offer the crowd funders for this one, would be a free static view of their choice.

Idea #3 The Private Internet Retreat Platform for Self-Forming Social Groups

Attention all tekkie geeks, this idea can be done by cobbling together existing technology.  What it is, is a private Internet Retreat platform for self-forming social groups.  Let me explain.

I got off LinkedIn because when 3 million accounts were hacked, my password was among them. My password was chosen with care so that it be very hard to break even with a rainbow table. I got off Facebook when I saw where it was going with my privacy violations (even though I managed to sneak with a pseudonym. However any decent data mining could have garnered my correct identity in 5 minutes by daughter calling me "Dad" in a post).   I don't like a lot of my information to be public.

My classmates are all huge successes in academia, industry and commerce, and I don't particularly want them looking me up. I don't want ex-girlfriends stalking me. I don't want my likes to be tracked and recorded.

What I do want, is a safe place to interact with my chosen contacts, where there is no chance of anything being public knowledge. I don't want to be a lab rat for a data miner like myself.

So, suppose I log into a platform that is like an intranet. I could VPN or SSH/SSL to the network, and it is a private little domain with no public access. I can have a Facebook-like app, because Facebook is the lazy man's way of keeping in touch, and it is damn handy for that. Forgot a birthday card? Send a Facebook-like message etc.

So the idea could grow. You have an area of the internet solely for a self-forming group. They can trade messages, ideas, shopping wants, product reviews, personal opinions, photos etc that would ensure their privacy.

Now the platform provider would have to provide some content safeguards, but that could be done with technology. If you had complete privacy, then you would attract child pornographers, money launderers, terrorists and criminals. I found that out the hard way. I have an ultra-secure app for High Networth Individuals to store their data in a secure bunker in the Bahamas, and we have to sell it by invitation only, because I like to travel to the US and don't want to be put on their "list".  I was caddying at the Michael Jordan Invitational in the Bahamas, and Bill Clinton was playing with Samuel L. Jackson and James Caan. One of President Clinton's caddies was the FBI director stationed in the embassy, and when I handed him my business card, he put in a section of his wallet and told me that he would keep it, because one day he might have to serve me with a subpoena. So, you have to be careful that you don't create a criminal garden like Silk Road did.  But the take-up for this idea would be fantastic, especially now that more and more people are becoming aware of intrusions in their privacy.

So there you have it. Three crowdfunding ideas that you can run with.  I have lots more of them.  You can get them by signing up for my very occasional, non-annoying email about tech ideas, futuristic things, artificial intelligence, machine learning and app ideas.