| | | If you can dedicate the time, I highly recommend participating in a Startup Weekend. The concept is simple... people gather from all disciplines of business to create a company and product within 56 hours. No one knows at 0 hour Friday what the idea is, yet everyone that participates gets equal ownership in the result. There is a palpable energy in the room when deadlines are tight and there is no room for posturing or lobbying, and the social aspect of the event can't be beat. I expect Andrew and team to kick lots of butt - there are tons of people that have the startup bug and this is a great way to play in the space. Sixty-eight people generating a company over the course of a weekend.
So why should "user generated" be limited to content? What else are users willing to generate? Prosper.com allows people to generate loans (or buy debt) for people that think they need more debt to clear up other debt (yes, this is a crappy concept in my eyes, but that isn't the subject of this post). Users generate answers for people with burning questions at Amazon's Mechanical Turk. Comments on blogs across the globe contribute to the quality of the original blog entry. There is a great company helping to aggregate that process too, have a look at Intense Debate
Imagine a blog post where the author seeks opinions on ideas for photos in a brochure. Users might generate some very useful ideas for the author to use, as well as post links directly to photos at iStockPhoto. I'm sure this happens all of the time... the readers help define the product.
Companies could use this system to solicit input from users of their products to perfect advertising materials. Users could be intimately involved in creating the feature set for the next version of that product. But companies still rely on R&D teams and hired guns rather than soliciting such input.
Imagine what would happen if Real hosted a weekend event where any user could come by and offer their opinion on what the next version of the platform should provide? Or maybe if Gap, Inc. took clothing designs from the public and allowed visitors to vote on which designs should be made. They could offer the designer a cash reward (I.E, purchase the design outright).
The possibilities are endless. If you have examples of user generated anything, let me know. I'd love to have a look.
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| | | Posted in: Ideas by Michael. | While trying to come up with a usable solution for a friend of mine's mobile lifestyle requirements, it occurred to me that there is an untapped network of temporary living spaces around the world. It is just that the owners, the hotel chains, don't know it yet.
If you're untethered (single, no kids, can work anywhere there is wifi, and can travel) this idea might be interesting to you. Instead of paying rent to an apartment community or landlord, why not pay a flat package price for your living space... to a service? With the monthly price, you get total location flexibility with only a few days advance notice. You get housekeeping, coffee, laundry facilities, continental breakfasts, location independence, and all of the other benefits of staying at a hotel.
The inventory you're buying would be vacant hotel rooms in cities around the world. Imagine, one day you're in Denver, a few days later Colorado Springs. From there you may go to New Mexico, or Texas. The idea is that you're not at all tied to a city. Your home is the next place you decide to visit. You could use this plan with air travel of course to make it more interesting. If you find yourself in Seattle, but want to go to San Diego for a week, just choose the room you want and go.
I envision the interface as a Google Maps mashup of locations with availability. We already know that hotel inventory is accessible on the fly... just take it a step further and map it out.
There could be packages, from platinum down to silver, that determine what kind of rooms you'll get. You can always upgrade a stay so if you're a silver member, and want to upgrade for a week to platinum, you can do that.
If you open this idea to apartments and even individual home owners, add a ranking system for the accommodations and the hosts it could get really interesting. Want to stay a week in Ft. Lauderdale? Hit the map and look for the green thumbtacks.
What do you think? Does this idea work? | | |
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| | | Posted in: Ideas by Michael. | Everyone has heard the term "micro-payment." It has been associated with monetizing websites for nearly as long as the internet has been commercialized. Here's an outline for a simple way to monetize a site, using modern web technology and micro-payments.
The key here is to think in terms of cents, rather than dollars. If you do, then $5 or $10 can go a long ways toward rewarding your favorite bloggers.
The first time you use the widget, you'll be asked to create and fund an account at the provider's website (a slick modern site, by the way). From then on you can move money – pennies at a time – to the "accounts" of others using nothing more than a simple secure widget. The widget might have a slider from $.05 to $1, or may have an text field for a value. After you choose the amount, enter your pin, then simply click send. To avoid the 1-Click patent from Amazon, you may have to confirm the payment. Even if you were to allow a single click transfer, you may be safe because it isn't a checkout process on the provider's website. Either way, this is really simple.
Sure there's Paypal, but Paypal has the whole interstitial popup page with the the login and confirmation process. This process is simple enough for anyone to use... you never leave the site, or the page for that matter. The trick here is to be logged in on the provider's site, and subsequently in the widget.
Where do you make money? Here are some ideas: commissions, ad sales on the widget, a one-time setup fee, monthly service fee to the blogger over $x in sales, pro features (lose the ads, stats, etc.)
If you decide to implement the idea, let me know so I can set it up on my blog. | | |
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| | | | If you want to see the path to a cool company that could provide valuable services to prosumers and executives around the globe, follow this puzzle.
Read this then watch this. If you take this combine it with this and this you too can have your knowledge navigator service provider. Today. Anyone interested?
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| | | Posted in: Ideas by Michael. | There are several places that let you define a URL and tag it with interests. Is there a service that lets you tag all or part of a web page? Maybe just an image? Why do we trust a Google with that when humans can do it better?
Imagine reading an article at BusinessWeek where a quote is given by Bill Gates. Wouldn't it be nice if you could select the quote, then tag the quote itself as a quote from Bill Gates? Then later, people looking for quotes from Bill Gates would see that quote.
Chris added that you could give the users of the site the ability to label the trust of the tags in a +/- format. A + indicates that the tags are correct, a minus that they're not. Obviously items with higher levels of integrity would float to the top.
Anyway, just a morning idea. More to come I'm sure. | | |
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| | | | Chris and I came up with a really cool idea for distraction project. We decided to try and build it within 24 man hours... and we did it.
http://grillm.com is a simple social networking site... with a twist. You don't know anyone and the way you get friends is to earn their friendship by asking questions. You click their picture and ask a question. They answer the question and if you like the answer, you ask another and so on.
Eventually you'll decide to add them as a friend, and when you do they'll have access to your full profile. That access grants them the ability to see your myspace, facebook, vox, etc. accounts and to see your grillm.com friends as well. If they like you, then they'll probably like your friends, too.
Remember, you know nothing about these people before you ask them a question... you've only see their icon.
This thing is cool, and if the first private beta day was any indication, we're going to be busy guys keeping up with the requests... and traffic. It is a good thing we have H5's app servers to power it ;-)
Thanks to everyone that signed up, you guys ROCK! See it for yourself here: http://grillm.com | | |
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| | | | This idea is pretty simple and involves website authentication and your mobile phone. It is a two factor authentication scheme that relies on the EIMI number embedded in your phone and the traditional user name/password combination, common on websites.
Put on your user hat. You go to the login page of a website, enter your user name and password, and once authenticated a new element appears with a token in it. This token is then entered in to an application on your mobile phone (phones are ubiquitous right?). That application contacts a trusted server and verifies the token and your EIMI/service credentials. You're given a token that is entered into the form, and upon submit, the destination site queries the trusted server for another layer of verification. The last transaction passes nothing other than the token received on the phone to verify that it was just issued and is still alive.
All of this sounds much harder that it actually is. Anyone want to put it together? Contact me for more ideas. | | |
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| | | | As my friend David says, good ideas are a dime a dozen. Well David, here's another one I had, then found. I hate when that happens.
"Data de-duplication, also called data de-dupe, removes duplicate information as data is backed up or archived. It can be done on the file level, where duplicate files are replaced with a marker pointing to one copy of the file, or at the sub-file level, or byte level, where duplicate bytes of data are removed, resulting in a decrease in storage capacity requirements of several magnitudes."
OK, so the idea isn't unique, but if someone wants to bring that tech the desktop and you're interested in my UI ideas for it, I've got plenty. | | |
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