Seedcamp, a London group that holds a selective week-long boot camp for start-ups, has produced an interesting zeitgeist study of the companies applying to be part of the program.
It looked at the hundreds of applications and created tag clouds to show the most common answers to three of the application’s questions: What are you creating? How will you make money? What tools will you use?
Here's the blog post about it.
No real surprise about the appearance of "social," "online" and "information" as the dominant offerings that new young companies are providing, with advertising as their main business model. Companies may begin to look alike because entrepreneurs attending these sorts of camps are prone to be self selective (you apply to participate in such programs because you want to make sure you rub shoulders with companies with similar challenges).
Also note the solid showing of "mobile" in the top cloud.
If you're starting a company now, you may want to be contrarian and stay away from the buzz words in the top two clouds. However, if you're considering what tools you want to use, the bottom cloud is a good one to check out, because it may suggest where sensible standardization is occurring.
Seedcamp Week starts Sept 15.