Companies That Can Change The World

AssureConsulting.com’s pick of companies with world-changing potential

1. Netvibes was started by Tariq Krim in September 2005, offering customers highly customizable Web start pages. Since then the company has gone on to attract millions of users from more than 100 countries -- and has also taken on major portal players like My Yahoo, MSN, and Google. The real threat to established portals, however, comes from the impressive speed and the simplicity of the site's customization tools. With Netvibes, users can rapidly change the look of their start page, select content, add RSS feeds and custom-build features from other Netvibes users. Unlike Yahoo, any e-mail feed can be put on Netvibes. But Krim thinks Netvibes's ease of use will make it disruptive. "The simpler it is, the more people will use it," he says. "If it's easy and fun, you'll use it again."

2. BlueLithium has been profitable since its third month of operation and is on track to hit $100 million in revenue by the end of next year The company offers highly targeted ads on the Web by monitoring clickstreams and already serves up 8 billion ad impressions a month to 100 million users of the Web's top sites. Each of those ads drops a cookie on your browser, and when you show up on another site that serves BlueLithium ads or on one of its advertisers' Web sites, it adds that history of clicks to its database. Using this "clickstream" data, it determines within 10 milliseconds which ad to serve up the next time you come to any of the 1,000 handpicked sites where it buys ad inventory. Launched in 2004, founder Gurbaksh Chahal hopes BL will take on Google and other CPM ad networks like ValueClick and 24/7 Real Media.

3. Marc Benioff, has already built Salesforce.com into the world's most successful Web-based customer-relationship management software, which currently boasts 25,000 customers and more than half a million individual subscribers. His approach, selling industrial-strength corporate apps as a service over the Web, helped to drive his biggest rival, Siebel Systems, to sell itself to Oracle last year. To top that, Benioff launched a service called App Exchange as a way to attract software developers to build their own Web-based enterprise applications atop Salesforce.com's infrastructure. AppExchange, he explains, will be the database and the tools all rolled into one; it also, he says, will go a long way toward becoming a fully formed Web operating system. We are going to show you why you don't need to buy a database," Benioff vows. Oracle, Microsoft, SAP – Beware.

4. Coghead is an online tool that helps you build customized business applications with drag-and-drop simplicity. The company says using Coghead requires only basic computer literacy and anyone who can code a simple Excel macro should have little trouble creating even sophisticated enterprise apps like logistics trackers, CRM programs, or project management systems. Coghead could undermine much bigger markets and much bigger names, including the likes of Microsoft and Sun and could completely upend the balance of power in the software game -- putting users, and not coders, in ascendancy. According to Chief executive Paul McNamara “Coghead will enable nonprogrammers to rapidly create their own custom business software, allowing the people closest to the need to create the solution."

5. Clearwire the Wi-Max wireless network founded by cellular pioneer Craig McCaw, will shake up the wireless broadband sector. Because Wi-Max infrastructure is much cheaper to build and maintain than traditional networks, some analysts think Clearwire will be able to seriously undercut the broadband prices of Comcast, Verizon and their ilk. Clearwire's approach could put in jeopardy the billions of dollars that telecoms and cable operators are pouring into upgrading their existing broadband networks. Clearwire will eventually offer the cutting-edge services that telecoms and cable companies are angling for -- Web-based TV, movies on phones, VOIP calls, and the like. The company is already offering VOIP phone service to 13 markets, and some expect the startup to partner with mobile-phone, IPTV, or satellite-TV companies to further expand its range of services. In July, Intel and Motorola pumped $900 million into the company, a measure of their faith in McCaw's approach.

6. Jajah has hit the market with a new level of simplicity likely to encourage mass adoption of VOIP, disrupting revenue models for telecoms and VOIP startups alike. Jajah offers free phone calls over the Web with no downloads, headsets, or adapters and Jajah's method also avoids the firewall troubles that many other VOIP systems encounter as their calls come in solely over the Web. "We see Jajah as Voice 2.0, the next generation of VOIP," says co-founder Roman Scharf. He and partner Daniel Mattes formed Jajah late in 2004 and got $3 million in funding from Sequoia Capital. Jajah now has nearly a million paying customers. Ultimately, the company expects to take the computer completely out of the call equation; increasingly, people can access the Web by phone, so Jajah customers won't even need a computer to input the initial call.

7. Founded by former venture capitalist Hamett Watt, NextMedium arose in response to a problem bedeviling entertainment companies. The roughly $50 billion spent last year on TV ads is at risk because of the advent of commercial-skipping digital video recorders, as well as the lure of the Internet and videogames. However, NextMedium automates and standardizes the process of product placement in TV shows, movies, and videogames. On the NextMedium Web site, movie studios, TV networks, and videogame producers can upload excerpts of scripts or specific product placement requests, Advertisers can search through the requests to evaluate and bid on the available placement opportunities. Before a deal is done, NextMedium's site also allows for the director or other creative professional to approve and sign off on each placement. Then, in collaboration with Nielsen Media Research, NextMedium will measure the exposure of that placement by determining how many people saw it and how a brand's total exposure compares with that of competitors. Estimated at $2 billion, product placement today is a relatively small, ad hoc segment of advertising, but Watt says "Product placement can erupt as the most powerful medium in the world."

8. Texas-based EEStor is working on a ceramic power source for electric cars that could blow away that could finally give the internal combustion engine a run for its money -- and begin saving us from our oil addiction. EEStor's "energy storage" device is not technically a battery because no chemicals are involved, yet it acts like a battery in that it stores electricity. If it works as it's supposed to, it will charge up in five minutes and provide enough energy to drive 500 miles on about $9 worth of electricity. At today's gas prices, covering that distance can cost $60 or more; the EEStor device would power a car for the equivalent of about 45 cents a gallon. The company's founders are engineers Richard Weir and Carl Nelson and their engine technology could easily replace the 300-horsepower brutes in today's SUVs. That would make it appealing to automakers like GM and Ford who are seeing sales of their SUVs and pickup trucks drop because of exorbitant fuel prices.

9. Zopa was the first company to introduce peer-to-peer lending in the United Kingdom 18 months ago and is about to launch in America. They use the Web to allow personal lending on a massive scale. So far, about 90,000 people have signed up, and more than $100,000 is lent every day (totaling more than $10 million so far). And only 0.05 percent of Zopa's loans have turned into uncollectible debts. People join Zopa online as either borrowers or lenders. The lenders proffer money not to individuals but to a pool of people grouped together because of similar credit worthiness. Zopa assesses the credit risk of the borrowers, pools the capital, and matches consumers who need money with consumers who want to lend it. The average interest rate on a Zopa loan is 7 percent. Zopa takes a 1 percent fee, split between the borrower and the lender. Just as in a social network, lenders can read the online profiles of the people borrowing their money. Zopa CEO Richard Duvall says, "If I borrow from real people, I'm more likely to pay back than if I borrow from a faceless bank."

10. Conventional cancer treatments such as radiation and chemotherapy could take a back seat with potentially revolutionary cancer treatment under development by NanoLife, a startup based in Newport Beach, California. NanoLife's approach builds on the cutting-edge technology of using protons rather than X-rays to attack cancerous masses. Unlike X-rays, protons have weight and mass. This means that a proton beam generated by a proton accelerator can stop inside a tumor and deliver its lethal force without destroying healthy tissue by exiting the body, as X-ray beams do. If NanoLife's science pans out, it could transform what is now a five-week course of radiation therapy into a few afternoons' work. NanoLife currently plans to open proton treatment centers around the world. The first may open by 2010. NanoLife president Ray Winn, a veteran of the nuclear and semiconductor industries, envisions someday converting his company's proton treatment centers into antiproton centers and treating thousands of patients throughout the world. It's a big dream, but if anything like it ever comes to pass, think of the implications: antiprotons disrupting death itself.

11. Traffic congestion sucks an estimated $63 billion a year out of the U.S. economy in the form of wasted fuel and time stuck in traffic. But that all might come to end. Applied Location, a Toronto-based company, has developed a satellite-based system, called Skymeter which can be used for toll collection, traffic congestion management, and pay-as-you-drive insurance. Founder Bern Grush says he's created an algorithm that corrects for the noise and missed signals to which GPS is prone, especially in urban canyons, so Skymeter can reliably pinpoint a car's location to within 1.5 meters. Once that becomes possible, cities can start to manage traffic better by charging more for driving during peak times. Skymeter could also be used to charge for parking anywhere in a city, even where there are no meters. The technology could enable insurance companies to offer better rates to safer drivers, since it records speed, time of day, and driving route. Grush thinks his product could ultimately help to supplement or even replace the fuel tax now used to pay for the upkeep of our roads. "The need to fix road financing and congestion is so acute," he argues, "that a dramatic shift will necessarily occur."

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