Perhaps the best place to start is at the intersection of Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, and the engineering school at Stanford University. Well, I have exactly that vantage point; specifically the masters Management Science and Engineering course on Global Entrepreneurial Marketing (GEM) at Stanford.

I’ve had the opportunity to be an Entrepreneur in Residence and work as part of the teaching team for the last 3 years.* Each Winter and Spring Quarter, 20-30 ambitious, visionary, and often well-funded start-ups from Silicon Valley to Beijing pitch their projects to our 100+ students in hopes of attracting a team to address their real-world marketing challenges. These pitches and the ensuing projects provide a heady snapshot of the current “it” technologies.

This year, you won’t be surprised to learn that innovations in cloud computing and mobile top the list. As marketers, we are very aware of the tidal wave of interest and activity fueling mobile-mania, given the rapid proliferation of smartphones and tablets. However, having seen similar enthusiasm ignite several years ago only to peter out for lack of end-user adoption, our question is this: What are the meaningful business opportunities where energy is coalescing?

Using our current GEM projects as a crude sampling technique, we’d suggest the following:

  1. Local-Geo Applications | In this category we have three active projects. Two of the cool ones are Blink (a real-time mobile traffic app) and WiFiSlam (an indoor positioning service that will run on existing smartphones and WiFi). Hello, Proctor & Gamble! How would you like to send a store-specific coupon to the shopper in front of your end cap? Or, direct shoppers to a new holiday display?

  2. Mobile Commerce | This is far more than a coming trend. A recent global study by InMobi (of 15,000 mobile users in 14 countries) revealed that mobile shopping is already accepted by a sizable number of Americans, with 74 million (or almost 25%) of US consumers currently using their mobile phones to shop. InMobi further predicts mobile sales to reach $9 billion in 2011. Thus, our friends at Clinkle (who are developing a mobile payment platform) have a big and receptive market for their Mobile Money service.

  3. Mobile Collaboration | If you consider LinkedIn or Facebook as collaboration sites, this is a foregone conclusion. But, we are talking about products and services explicitly designed to enable team collaboration, such as SugarSync (which is also a hot cloud-based service providing back-up, real-time synching and a platform for collaboration from anywhere) and YouNoodle (which is targeted specifically at entrepreneurs).

Cool stuff, and very consistent with widespread buzz.

If you have a start-up and would be interested in exploring the possibility of working with us in the future, let me know. Our typical student is a Master’s candidate in Engineering (everything from Electrical to Earth Sciences to Computers) with either start-up or high-tech work experience in one or more countries. And, believe me, they keep you young.

* The Global Entrepreneurial Marketing teaching team is led by Fenwick and West Consulting Professor Tom Kosnik and a team of real-world marketers, including Lynda Smith, CMO of Jive; Donna Novitsky, former CEO of BigTent; Lena Ramfelt a serial entrepreneur and angel investor from Sweden; Laina Greene, founder and CEO of GetIT; Jonas Kjellberg, serial entrepreneur from Sweden; and AnnaMaria Konya, Director of global Marketing at IBM.