Joost and Boost

As an aspiring serial entrepreneur, I am interested in what successful serials have done or continue to do. This morning an article in today’s Journal caught my eye.

Remember Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom? You know these guys -- they came up with KaZaa, the file sharing program that helped to rock the music industry while Napster was shut down and in court. They followed this success by forming a company called Skype which earned a modest $2.6 billion in a sale to eBay in ’05.

Recently the Swedish duo announced plans to launch a video content provider (formerly titled “The Venice Project”) to compete with the ever popular You-Tube. The catch, however, is that their site (Joost) is looking to offer higher quality content, up to and including commercialized network TV shows and movies. Keep your eye on this company; if past success is an indicator of future projections, Joost should bode well in this space.

Another venture (not-related) that caught my eye this morning was an initiative called Boost from Sprint Nextel. Boost is a subscription service that enables users to monitor their network contacts via GPS through their cell-phone. This has been used by service B2B companies for some time through the Nextel arm of Sprint Nextel, but is now being marketed to social networking “twenty-somethings” and families concerned about their children’s whereabouts.

The $9.99-a-month service called “Family Locator” is an interesting tool in line with family plans by Sprint’s competitor AT&T’s Cingular Wireless. Talk about knowing where your child is, this service allows parents to turn on their phone and look directly at a GPS map with an indicator of the child (or at least the child's phone). I guess the parent will have to actually call to ensure he or she didn’t simply hide the phone inside a copy of War and Peace at the school library.