Thursday, November 4, 2010

The Phoenix and Projectors

Two business ideas in this post.  Actually one is a business model, the other is an idea.

The Phoenix
The business model that I ran across I'd like to call 'The Phoenix'.  Basically the idea is to take a dead business or business idea, and resurrect it.  The tale of the Twin Otter, a Canadian built Short Takeoff and Landing Utility plane is a classic example of this business model.  Details of it's life, death, and resurrection can be read on Wikipedia here.


In its first life, production ended on the Twin Otter in 1988.  The aircraft's versatility made it a bush pilot favorite and demand for the planes have increased.  Viking Air of Victoria, BC, picked up on this and bought the rights to build the plane again.  After nearly 20 years of being out of production, new Twin Otters are now being built in Calgary and the company has over 50 orders from all over the world.

Nov 14 update - I just ran into an article in The Globe and Mail about another brand that did something similar.  In fact, some work colleagues and I had been musing about this turn-around in the summer as we found some Pop-Shoppe bottles in a nearby convenience store.  Here's the link to the article in the Globe and Mail.


Projectors
The second idea isn't nearly as sexy.  Watching my project manager try juggle between a spreadsheet of software development stories and another of schedules and tasks, I got to thinking why can't there be a single projector with the ability to support and display like two monitors?  Or even right a button into the software/firmware of the projector so it can flip between screen instances.  For that matter, why hasn't windows come up with the ability to manage screen instances like Linux has? Maybe that functionality is there and I just haven't been paying attention...

2 comments:

Joe said...

I happened to stumble on ATI Hydravision when updating my driver last night. Seems that Hydravision provides multi-monitor and multi-desktop support. Haven't tried it yet...

Joe said...

More virtual desktop software from SysInternals: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/cc817881.aspx