Saturday morning turning afternoon, Carmel Valley. I’m working on “Create Something” alternatives, against the possibility that none of the several “Run Something” opportunities I’m now pursuing mature into a good fit.

The old saw about necessity and invention is prominent in my thinking. I have the former in abundance. I’m trying to summon up the later.

In an earlier post, I commented on how the boundary area between the realms of atoms and bits is an interesting place to do business. I still very much believe that. But I also see opportunity all across the flow of digital content, by adding value as bits are captured, stored, shared, aggregated, transformed, searched, output and acted upon. I’m thinking about those in particular that are software centric (and therefor likely the basis for a business that’s not too capital-intensive) and enhance the value of data streams through re-combination and presentation in new contextual frameworks designed to provide new insights.

The developments of the past decade or so present what I believe to be unprecedented opportunities for new business formation:

The ecosystem for creation, marketing and deployment of applications is incredibly rich, across environments and platforms. Think App Store and cloud-based computing paradigms. In addition, digital content is being created, shared and consumed in prodigious volume. Recent evolution in popular culture, worldwide, has paralleled and complemented enabling technology trends. Facebook’s rise depended as much on us deciding, en mass, that we wanted to share thoughts, photos, movies, location and online discoveries with extended networks of our friends as it did on any of its technology building blocks.

Throw in a global recession and its resulting liberation of talent from previous bindings, and the picture is complete: a rich brew of components for a new enterprise.

I’m thinking about how those elements might be combined to create the basis for something interesting and valuable. Stay tuned.