There are some really amazing ideas in this article -- Direct public offering being the most intriguing. I imagine a local, kickstarter platform that would enable local businesses to raise funds and issue DPO shares. The main challenge seems to be that local businesses fall into the high-risk, low-return part of the risk-return graph. But then every WalMart, Microsoft and Google did start out as a local story. This is indeed revolutionary.
This startup out of NYC is doing something similar: www.smallknot.com (I saw a rep give a talk at a TechStars-hosted local business event).
This is the kind of thing that's hard to do on a nationwide basis so there's plenty of opportunity to do something similar in other markets, I'm sure!
Local business tech is hard: inherently more human sales required per dollar of revenue generally. But clearly it's the way to create lots of small-medium sized businesses with local specialties.
