Top Ten Startups

Industry Growth Projections

PC numbers passed the 820 million mark in 2004 with projections topping the one billion mark in 2007. The U.S. now has more than 220M PCs or 27% of the worldwide market share. PC usage is growing rapidly in China, Brazil, India and Russia. The Bureau of Labor Statistics research indicates strong job growth in tech-related services by 27.8% through 2012. The leisure and hospitality sector will grow by 17.8%, accommodation and food services by 16%, transportation 14% , finance 10% percent, and the service sector by 15.7%.

Software in the Top Ten Startups

Information technology will be fueling growth through the 21st century. Demand for software innovations by individuals, businesses, organizations and governments will never stop, fueling growth rates at an astonishing 68%.

Computers

As the software innovations increase, hardware makers will provide newer, faster and better machines to do the job. Networking hardware, communications, wireless technologies and security are the best areas with overall growth rates projected at 55%.

Management, Science and Technical Consulting

Business is definitely more complex now then just five years ago and will continue to be increasingly complex. Demand for consultants will continue to increase, providing solid growth opportunities for both sole proprietorships and small business owners employing less than 50 employees.

Consultants will not only help business deal with tech issues to make it all work, but with business plans, budgets, and global strategies as markets continue to expand. Advancing tech will level the playing field somewhat, providing smaller companies virtual presences throughout the world.

Childcare in the Top Ten Startups

As more moms remain in the workforce, two-income families working 40-60-hour weeks will require more day care services, making childcare one of the fastest-growing business sectors at 43%. As long as people continue to have families, childcare will continue to be a strong top ten startups.

Music and Video Entertainment

Movies come and go and the industry is changing providing bigger, and better viewing experiences to offset a growing trend toward home theater. Cable programming will expand as will narrowcasting, offering the home viewer an increasing selecttion of programming options that will number into the thousands on screens of 65 inches or bigger. Both the movie and television industries will require continued increasing technical support and innovation not only from engineers, software designers and data processing but from production studios, distributors, advertisers and IHPs as competition for the market share tightens.

The music industry will continue to grow as more and more people discover that using online services frees them from the chain of endless CD purchases and allows them the freedom of customized music.

Employment Services

Jobs today are increasing competitive and more demanding leading to overworked employees hard-pressed for time to do all the tasks they are increasingly assigned. Outsourcing and temps will remain the norm as companies struggle to stay competitive and deal with bloated benefit programs not designed to compensate for longer-lived American workers. Growth rates in the employment sectors are expected to move past 50%.

Home Health Care

As baby boomers age and medical advancements continue extending life spans, healthcare will continue to grow at a steady rate of 5% a year. Hospitals, hard hit by budget cuts and rapidly spiraling costs, will turn increasingly to the use of temporary employees or the use of experienced personnel part-time in order to control benefit and wage costs. Moe affluent retirees will option for health care at home which could boost the growth rate for the industry to more than 50%.

Financial

Should Social Security be privatized, the workforce need for financial advisors should exceed the 45.7% growth rate predicted by the administration. Projections of $54 billion a year to be invested, means that the personal financial advisor field is wide open to innovation and growth.

Leisure and Recreation

Baby boomers and succeeding generations are going to continue to spend heavily on entertainment and recreation. Retiring baby boomers will have plenty of disposable cash for sports, recreation and other retirement-related activities. Succeeding generations who have little thought for the morrow could well continue to spend at increasing rates, rationalizing that they won’t have anything to retire on anyway. Both attitudes will push the growth rate for this sector to more than 30%.

Space, The Final Frontier

Now that Dick Rutan and his group has broken the privatization of space barrier, expect to see more and more companies competing for space tourism, commercial freight hauling services, space-based science technology and eventually space exploration. While NASA has been the spark to keep imaginations alive of science fiction fans worldwide, the dream may soon become the reality. It is simply too expensive for governments to explore space with countless millions of dollars spent on redundant systems and R&D. There have been a great number of benefits. But these have been developed by earthbound entrepreneurs. While the initial costs for tourism will be high, expect decreasing costs as more and more innovations take hold.