Need Friends? Try This

The internet is a fountain of creativity for new businesses and new business ideas like this one:

Tired of seeing all the beautiful people on other peoples' pages in MySpace? For 99 cents a month you can get models to post their pictures and comments on your page, too. It's "FakeYourSpace", which probably started as a joke, but it's apparently becoming a serious business.

This highlights on the key factors in innovation: it often comes from people who are both insiders and outsiders. They're inside enough to see the problem, and outside enough to see a solution.

It's the same story with a new airline serving the Hawaiian islands, Go. (Note the simplification - now we're down to two-letter business names.) Go was established in June this year by Mesa Airlines, the US's largest operator of regional jets, to compete with the two established players. Why the opening for Go? The established insiders, Aloha and Hawaiian, have been keeping fares high; the outsider, Go, has a low-cost business model that should work very well in the short-hop Hawaiian setting.