Are you local?

Remember the days when business plans written on the back of beer mats secured multi-million pound multi-round funding from venture capitalists. OK, so I entered the creative industries just as the bubble was ready to burst, so I didn't really see , or benefit from it. I did have a few ideas of my own. Perhaps if they had been two or three years earlier, I may have secured VC funding to take them past prototype (or plans in most cases).

VCs have not forgotten Internet development, but they are more canny than before. This time they are looking for decent business plans with page numbers and everything!

I found this on Business 2.0 and thought about it for a bit:

"A kind of souped-up Craigslist for every neighborhood, everywhere. Just
type in a zip code, and this website will present not just garage sale
listings and classified ads, but headlines and photos from dozens of
local news sites run by busybodies willing to provide free content and
keep it constantly updated. If all goes as planned, Lussier (the VC) says, paid ads could bring in as much as $100 million a year."

The idea is that within six months, a team of two or three produce a template on a budget of $0.5 million, supplied by the VC. Then after that, an investment of $2.5 million to get the thing off the ground.

I think this concept would prove to be very successfuly in Scotland, pulling together all the town, village, church, community groups, local newspapers, and all the other small website owners together under one easy to use portal. Sure, you could argue that Yahoo! and Google already provides this service through their huge engines and listings, but you can't beat good home grown products if you're looking for local support.