[PLUG] HUD/RD Software

Rich Shepard rshepard at appl-ecosys.com
Wed Aug 18 09:24:01 UTC 2004


On Wed, 18 Aug 2004, Rich Shepard wrote:

> On Wed, 18 Aug 2004, Aaron Burt wrote:
>
> > It was actually pretty good. Ya wanna full requirements analysis, ya pays
> > for one. That said, it sounds like a piece of small-market specialty
> > software with regulatory requirements. Kinda like a tax and accounting
> > package, but with a minuscule market. Typically something that'd be
> > written by a tiny company in some RAD or DB language.

  Reading this again makes me realize that your assmption is probably
incorrect, Aaron. Take a look at the federal budget and I'll bet there are
billions of dollars for public housing and housing assistance. I suspect
that such software would have a rather large market.

  Last week at the OEF Pub Talk we heard a presentation by a principal in a
company that developed and is selling practice managment/insurance billing
systems (all under winduhs, unfortunately) _only_ to phyical and
occupational therapy clinics. This small segment of the medical industry is
estimated by them to be worth about $10 billion. Because the patients aren't
covered by the normal medical billing systems this has been rather chaotic
for both practitioner and patient. I forget the exact numbers but they have
a continuous base of about $1.5 million per month -- in their first half-year
of being in business.

  I suspect that the market for quality linux-hosted HUD/RD managment
software is at least as large. As a matter of fact, it is exactly these
smaller (i.e., less than $1 billion) markets that the major players ignore
but the smart smaller company could exploit for great profit.

  Want another niche market looking for a low-cost solution with a huge
potential client base? Take a look at precision farming. In my discussions
with wheat farmers I've learned that they would love to have such a system
if they could equip each tractor and combine with a high-precision GPS
receiver, hardened notebook computer and GIS software at a very low cost.
GRASS would do for the latter. Someone could probably build an integrated,
single-board GPS receiver/single-purpose computer that is shock- and
dust-proof and sell the hardware to someone(s) developing the precision-
farming application using linux, GRASS and PostgreSQL. Huge market.
International.

  Think small to think big.

Rich

-- 
Dr. Richard B. Shepard, President
Applied Ecosystem Services, Inc. (TM)
<http://www.appl-ecosys.com>




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