Five Startup Ideas That Fail Frequently

You want to start your own venture, which will provide full control to you. You have great ideas, which you are sure will make you a successful entrepreneur. But at the same time there are some ideas which have constantly failed; ideas which burnt many a entrepreneurs' hands. Here is a list of startup ideas which persistently fail.

Search engines

Google has become synonymous with search engine; so much that we now say "Just Google the required information", rather than "just look up for the required information on the internet". Many companies like Yahoo (Open Text), CNET (Snap), Magellan, and Infoseek tried the search engine domain, but failed miserably. Many startups till spring up with a hope to de-throne Google, but Google, and to a lesser extent Bing, own the search market

Hyper-local Journalism

If you think that by covering the local news, events, businesses around the town; think twice. Many companies have tried to foray but failed. Many efforts to automate the process in an attempt to keep the costs down have led to the content being homogenized and stale. Patch.com which claims to cover all the local news, businesses, videos, pictures from all around the neighborhood. It was recently acquired by AOL (another company trying to find success in hyper-journalism where many have failed).

Alternatives to email

Emails have changed the way we communicate, and any startup trying to eliminate it is doomed to fail. Google burnt its hand with the Google Wave, a real time messaging platform, but maybe it was ahead of its time or had too many features to ever allow it to be defined properly. The inbox can be copied, improved, but that again is not much of a business.

Music

The music industry was crucified by the advent of the internet. There are no successful web music startups (which might be due to the free availability of the songs on the internet). iTunes might be the odd one out, but sparing it eMusic, Amazon all have tiny businesses.

WebTV

Boxee, Roku, Google, and Apple are all trying their hand into marrying the web and the TV, but if even they are not able to get it right, the message is clear, that it is a tough nut to crack.

People just don't want another box in their homes, since there seems to be some disconnect between the web and the TV.

Thus, year after year some entrepreneur attempts variations if these ideas, despite anybody getting critical success in this space.