Home pages were once the most important battlegrounds of the web. Considered the desktop of the Internet age, home pages built companies such as Yahoo, MSN and AOL. Overtime the enthusiasm of these gateway pages faded away. Although many businesses still depend on the home page idea to deliver a ton of revenue and traffic it seems the audience has become more sophicated and moved on to making their most important information or applications their default destination.

Google made a name for themselves by brining simplicity and speed to the home page idea. Organically, millions of people made them their home page. Over time Google created the iGoogle homepage where you can append all sorts of widgerty and information. It sort of defeats the purpose of what people we’re selecting as their home page, but hey whatever.

Since the advent of social networking and the rise of real-time information people have made sites such as Twitter and Facebook their new homes. That is pretty much where we are. The homepage has pretty much stopped at what your friends are doing or new stuff the people you follow share. These services has a good cross section of utility. From communication and content creation to information consumtion and entertainment. Their simple but the stream contains an awful lot of valuable information.

That seems to be where we are at in the world home pages these days. DashReady isn’t attempting to get people to forego their valuable social content streams or redirect their web browsers. Instead we are looking for a way to complement their lives with a wide array of useful real-time information that can help deliver a bigger picture. To even shape that point of view and change it by just switching to a different dashboard.

Home pages have been notorious for being all-in-one launch pads. A place for everything and linking off to some precious page or service. We believe the dashboard can provide this ability yet that isn’t the only purpose. Having a seriers of dedicated dashboards that aggregate content and allow you to organize them by context allows you to process a ton of information very quickly. Being uniformed allows the user to depend on the placement of that information. Where home pages are usually only provide a snapshot of a single point of view, dashboard can multiple points of view and combine information in new and unique ways.

I have thinking a lot about how DashReady could make money. I am looking for a way the product can pay for itself on an ongoing basis, invest in new opportunities and support customers. This post allows me to investigate and gather feedback on what customers expectations are. New Leaders will help at first with resources until it can stand on its own. We’ll seek outside capital if necessary to make some of these larger ideas a reality.

We have a couple of less obvious ways to make money with dashboards. Your feedback is welcomed. If you have a good idea on how DashReady could make money please tweet us and we’ll follow up with you.

1. Software
At initial glance everyone can imagine paying for a client for the desktop, your phone and that weird tablet device we all seem to love so much. That is a given. I am thankful for the few people that offered to buy a copy at merely a glance of a screenshot. So we’re thinking $2.99 and you’ll get both an iPhone and iPad client. That price is subject to change. The web service to configure it will be free and to use it in a web browser in a limited way will also be free. So software client sales make sense initially. After all, a lot of small businesses have succeeded by selling iPhone and iPad apps lately.

2. Web Search
Like both Firefox and Safari earn revenue for the traffic their browsers push to Google by incorporating a search box in the upper right corner. DashReady could incorporate a search box directly into your dashboard, even return results before linking you off to the site. If those results contain pay-per-click link and you click it we make a little money. Since initially sharing our concept with a few people they have mentioned the need for search as a way to quickly find and validate the information on their dashboard. Search is also the most widely specified home page on the web. Since we’re offering a better alternative to the home page concept it seems to make sense to incorporate web search.

3. Ad Supported Dashboards
Let’s say you’re an Iron Man fan and you are excited about the upcoming film. You would like to get updates on new information but passively. By passively I mean, you don’t have to get alerted or visit a website. Instead you would add this preconfigured dashboard to your gallery and you can switch to it when you want an update about the film. The Iron Man dashboard has countdown clocks to the release date, links to webpages with updates, trailer videos, tweets from Tony Stark and upcoming events. After your done with it simply remove it from your gallery and it’s gone. This would require both a way to install dashboards by browsing an online library and tools and procedures to provide advertisers to easily maintain and track results analytically. Frankly, this sounds bad ass but it will require a lot of effort and we’ll require a sizable audience to justify it. 

4. Standard Advertising
iAds looks very promising and we could consider pay-per-click advertising in either text or display formats. It may work on the free web version or a lite version of the client. This would hinder the user experience and take away from the usefulness of our application. It would require A very large audience to generate any revenue. (Thanks for nothing AdMob) I wouldn’t count on this model. At least not before all others have failed to produce revenue.  

5. Custom Dashboard Consulting
Let’s pretend you have an enterprise and you would like customized dashboards of information on a number of different platforms. Maybe you have a number of software systems you would like to have integrated into meaningful business informational dashboards. We could offer these services right away. At New Leaders we created a framework called Thincloud that we’ve had a lot of success with that works the same way. Enterprise customers could purchase our applications and services to have them tailored to their businesses needs. This could easily produce millions of dollars of gross revenue provided the opportunities through investors and partners.

6. Commercial Widgets and Dashboard
Borrowing from Apple, Twitter and Facebook we could open our platform to third party developers to create free or commercial integrations. Say you want to incorporate Salesforce information. Salesforce could charge a couple of bucks for a widget you could add to  your dashboards or a complete more elaborate dashboard. I am not trying to compete with the App Store but this is another opportunity. We could do a 70/30% revenue split with the developer and we will provide all of the infrastructure required to make money. Again, I think this idea will work if their is an enthusiastic audience in place to justify it. It would be cool, we will keep it on the table and see if we can grow the platform in order to create a dashboard library.

These are all the different ways DashReady could generate revenue. I have seen much less reputable ideas receive investment and become commercially successful. These ideas are merely assumptions. Until we validate them and identify our initial customers we’re merely grasping for straws. That’s okay. The successful strategy maybe combining some or all of these in order to create a big win for everyone involved. We may have overlooked the big idea all together. Being the initial investor and creator of the idea I feel pretty confident that provided time and resources we could make this platform viable for consumers and businesses alike.    

Every morning we wake up in a hazy fog and try to recall what we are supposed to do today and what new will come. Come to think of it, you may need to get an idea of what is going on and what needs to happen next a few times a day. To get a simple a clear understanding of this we’re have to visit websites, check our email, and take a look at our todo lists and calendars. It could take hours before you have a clear indication of everything happening and what we need to do about it. What if it wasn’t like that at all? What if you had your own personalized dashboard that would give you the most up to date information right now? A stock ticker for your life. Well, now you do. Introducing DashReady Software. Your personal information dashboard. Always ready when you are. Connected to all of your services, DashReady allows you to automatically aggregate all of your most important information into beautiful dashboards. You can make them for business or personal use. From countdown calendars and clocks to email notifications and rss feeds, you’ll truly have all of your information at your finger tips on a single screen.

DashReady’s initial service is free and allows our customers to set up and aggregate all their information and web services on our website. They can view their dashboard as a web page or purchase one of our premium clients for a number of devices and platforms. Whether you wake up and turn on your Tivo, grab your iPad or start your BMW we’ll have a DashReady dashboard prepared to provide up to date information in real-time that is important to you.

At DashReady we believe that the world has so many was to get different types of information that people are overloaded. We are here to make the process of aggregation simple and consuming information up to date and easy to understand. Life is complicated enough, we’ll do our part to make sense of everything you need to do now and what is going on so you never have to again.

So go on, enjoy your day. DashReady will make sense of it for you.

The other day I had an idea. It was more of a problem actually. Everyday I would wake up and have to spend some time getting reacquainted with everything that was going on. This would involve checking my email, viewing my calendar, checking my todo list, reviewing my RSS feeds and visiting Twitter or Facebook. Just to feel like I knew what going on in the world, my business and in my personal life it could take and hour of two.

That was when it hit me.

I need a Dashboard for my life. Actually I need a few contextually relevant dashboards for different type of information I need to stay on top of. So I put together a Balsamiq wireframe of my idea. 

In its simplest form. The app I needed was one that would allow me to aggregate all of my most important information into a single screen. It would need to be available on my desktop, iPad and iPhone. I would need it to update several times a day when I need to receive a real-time update of what is going and and what I need to do next. I would need it to merely access my services but link off to the appropriate web service or article when relevant.

This lead me into thinking about multiple dashboard that I could configure differently. For example I could have one that all business related. One that tracked the world of Golf. One that would be for my personal life. And so on…

After create an early design concept and sharing it with some colleagues on of them turned me on to a home screen concept that Teehan+Lax created for the iPhone. It actually blew me away how closely it resemble my vision. It seemed the the project was merely conceptual and had never really progressed much further. I suppose Teehan+Lax felt that only Apple could integrate these services into the phone for it to be useful. I felt that you could get almost the same experience by allowing the users to simply enter in their credentials for a number of services using a web based interface.

Standing on the shoulders of giants I created a design example of what this dashboard could be like. For me the iPad is the perfect device to create a panel of information. If I kept to a two column concept I could ultimately scale the same widgets down in-line to fit on the screen of the iPhone.

After being inspired by Teehan+Lax’s iPhone home screen design that was black and sleek I spent more time developing a design concept that captured those amazing details. I wanted it to feel like it was an Apple designed product so I think in the case of myself and Teehan+Lax we would want the experience to feel seamless and authentic.

Robert is my partner at New Leaders. Once he saw the concepts he felt there wasn’t any need to start screwing around with objective-c to create a prototype. After all the iPad client would need to connect to these web services any way. We mind as well build a working HTML5 and CSS prototype. By doing so we could quickly build and test a light weight version that would work on all platforms prior to locking it only on iPhone OS.

Our next trick to to put in all the interface elements allowing you to create and configure a number of different dashboards and ultimately share those with a group of people. The prototype is completely rendered in HTML5 and CSS3. This will allow us to to change the color of of the dashboard when relevant.

While it is nowhere near prefect, we believe this is a good first step at solving the information overload and re-syncing you must do several times a day with real-time information. Once we have the application to a suitable state we can invite our friends to test it out prior to creating the iPhone OS based version.

If you are interested in helping to test DashReady just tweet us at @DashReady and we’ll shoot you an invite when we’re ready.