This has been talked about, hyped, debunked, debated over and over in the last year or two and quite frankly I am not sure where I land on the subject matter. A lot has been written to support both sides of the debate, and I tend to fall on the side of no we are not, but then I read about yet another web site/service that has launched and it makes me think, hummm.

In the heyday of the dot com explosion of the late 90’s and early 2000’s it was not uncommon to hear or read about some off the wall, hair brained idea that has turned into a company who has raised millions (I mean several here) of dollars and never delivered a product or turned a profit. Now a lot has changed since then, the cost of launching a startup has come down considerably, but I am starting to sense that we are not in a shortage of what I would consider not exactly necessary, nice to have (at best) companies being launched.

For example, there is a quick write up on TechCrunch about a new mobile service/web interface launched called MizPee. It assists you in finding the closet public restroom to your current location, at any time. I mean come on, really? In all fairness, this is just one of many services that are being launched by Yojo Mobile, the parent company. I would imagine their business model is to launch several of these services and monetize each one and collectively they will provide a decent ROI.

To me, this service falls into the nice to have category, which leads me to believe that we are starting to see more and more of these nice to haves and that at the very least leads to market saturation with so so products. With so many of these so so products being funded, what does that do to the value add products that are out their waiting to be funded? Do they just have to do double time to get funding? The next Google could be around the corner, but it will have to fight with the “nice to haves” to make it a go. Time will tell how this all plays out, I just hope we strike a good balance between the value adds and the nice to haves.