Overview
The overall goal for the LittleShoot/MIT Innovation Labs business planning team should be to give the LittleShoot team its best recommendations for business plans to pursue going forward. This leaves the work of the team largely open ended, but it's likely the team's work will emphasize or expand upon existing strategies LittleShoot is considering for building the business. The team can touch on things like competitive analysis, market size, and pricing models, but the focus should be on the core business model itself while taking those factors into account.
Potential Strategies
LittleShoot's core technical advantage lies in the ability to seamlessly integrate peer-to-peer technology into the browser. This can potentially save a lot of money for any site, particularly larger video sites like Hulu and YouTube. This core advantage can also be used to simply share files amongst friends or within a business, however, or as a platform for publishing ones own files to the world. These strategies might be more focused on LittleShoot as a destination site. For example, you could imagine the LittleShoot site turning into more of a P2P YouTube/Hulu for any type of file. This would be interesting in that LittleShoot's costs would be far lower than YouTube/Hulu while offering any type of file with similar or better performance (less restrictions on file size and such).
The LittleShoot 1.0 release is focusing on adding tools for publishers to use LittleShoot to publish their content while charging for centralized backup and adding some advertising to the LittleShoot site to start earning revenue as a destination site.
There may also be business strategies surrounding Mr. Gorbachev. For example, several applications have recently found themselves blocked by the Great Firewall in China - see Mitch Kapor's blog post, for example. Mr. Gorbachev could get around this type of thing, and there may be a business there.
Deliverables
The group should produce a simple midterm progress report sometime in the first 2 weeks of November before a final presentation at the end of the semester. The group can determine the form it takes, but the initial progress report should be roughly equivalent to 3-5 written pages, and the final report should be equivalent to 10-15 written pages. The group can also determine the exact dates these will be due to accommodate everyone's busy schedules as much as possible.
The final report in particular could be a more typical mini business plan or extended executive summary, or it could be slides or even a video - whatever the team feels will be the best and most fun format for presenting its ideas.
Interesting Links
I'll keep posting any interesting links here, as I come across them. Just read this piece, though:
http://www.techuser.net/hits.html
The beginning is not so interesting, but the comparison of Slashdot to Joel Spolsky, Fog Creek towards the end is compelling.