Are you a “trend tracker”? Part of being an innovative entrepreneur is learning to take advantage of the change that creates market trends and capitalizing on the resulting business opportunities that come from them. In the apps market for example, Xtreme Labs has got the process of spotting trends down to an art or as they put it: a science.

An excerpt from The Globe and Mail article:

“Located in the heart of downtown Toronto, the smart-phone applications maker isn’t very high profile, but its products are. The 45-person operation, part of the venture capital firm Extreme Venture Partners, has designed apps ranging from the restaurant-finder UrbanSpoon to Dictionary.com.

Xtreme Labs also functions as a sort of testing ground – a place where programmers and designers can throw ideas at the wall and see what sticks.

“It’s an incubation chamber for [intellectual property],” says Farhan Thawar, Xtreme Labs’ vice-president of engineering. “We’re doing things that have not been done before.”

…Xtreme, which also designs apps for other smart phones, often supplements its staff with co-op students from Waterloo, Ont., arguably Canada’s technology capital.”

To read the full article click here.

Want to join in on the trend tracking race and create opportunities for yourself? Follow these six major environmental categories to spot the hottest entrepreneurial ventures that are currently awaiting your attention:

1. social/cultural- immigration, single parents, religion, ethnic shifts, and aging population
2. economic- recessions, inflation, changing income levels, cost of housing, food and energy
3. people (demographics)- the boomers, the echo boomers and changing ethnic and multicultural patterns
4. technology- biotechnology, the Internet, nanotechnology, personal genomics and universal translation
5. international (legal/political)- who is in power changing rules locally, provincially and nationally, tax laws and where the growing export markets are
6. competition- deregulation, the impact of the so-called big-box stores, foreign companies. (Spotting Trends and Opportunities, pp. 37-39)