In a really wonderful op-ed piece for VentureBeat, David Shen addressed the issue of me-too startups.  Specifically, how the current marketplace of ideas seems to be flooded with products that provide similar services and employ similar models.  To read the full article click here.

What I wanted to address was Shen's opening paragraph.  Shen opens with:

"I believe the universe of internet businesses has become extremely crowded in the last few years. In the early days, you could easily come out with something new because there weren’t that many competitors out there. Now, it’s hard to find somebody who isn’t working on something similar to what you’re thinking about. So competition is fierce and many times you’ll find entrenched competitors with a lot of product inertia and a great head start."

There is just something about the idea that, "it's hard to find somebody who isn't working on something similar to what you're thinking about."  And this makes me mad.  Because Shen is right.  How many times do you see multiple products launched in the same week that perform the same tasks.  Twitter is unbelievably notorious for this.  I mean seriously, how many twitter picture apps are there at this point?!? (over 20 apps that service twitter pictures).  And I get it.  Twitter is the new hotness and the API isn't rocket science.  But, what happened to genuine innovation.  Instead of another app that lets you take pictures with your phone and shoots a >140 character URL, why not an app that converts images into characters, and consequently allows a person to post a picture in their tweet stream.  That would "disrupt" current technologies, no?

I apologize for the tone of this post (not really), but it seems to me that businesses--especially online businesses--stem from problems.  It has been like this forever.  Can't light that wet match? Here's a waterproof lighter.  Don't want to physically visit 10 different blogs a day?  Here's an RSS feed.  The point is, truly groundbreaking ideas solve problems. 

Which begs the question, where are all of the problem solvers these days?