Business Ideas in Romania

How about a free version of everything?

• Posted by Anca Dragusin on February 26th, 2008 filed in Services

Opportunity: Offering customers advertiser sponsored free services

Browsing the web for new cool business ideas I found out, via Springwise, about Tadacopy - a Japanese company offering free photocopies for students. Well, they are not exactly free, as on the back of each copy paper they print ads that pay for the freely offered service.

The idea reached Europe, and a group of students in the Netherlands started StudyPrint . Students must register with their university email address and then they can either upload the desired documents, bring them on a USB flash drive or email them to a dedicated email address. The free printed copies have horizontal banners placed at the top and bottom of several pages and a few full page ads.

Romanian students are probably printing and photocopying more than any other students in the world - according to my personal subjective statistics. And knowing that once the exams have passed all that printed or photocopied material wonn’t be of much use, most of them would definitely prefer a few ads, here and there, to clean, but expensive copies.

Moreover, an automatic system would reduce the current costs of employing personnel to handle the equipments.

Would you find such a service useful? What other products or services do you think could be offerend in a similar free version?