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Digg for Girls
This is SUCH a good idea that I feel depressed that I can’t follow it up. I sure as hell hope the one idea that I’m not telling you about, that the one idea that I’m actively pursuing is as good as this one.
So here’s the idea…
“Digg For Girls”
There you go. That’s the idea. Want proof that there is a market need? Just google “digg for girls“
If you decide to get into this please give me a shout, I have a lot of strategic ideas about how to get this to market.
All Channels – Human Moderated Search Engine
This is an idea I had back in 1999. I don’t post it here because I think it’s something NEW that you could use today. I post it here for posterity to show you what I was thinking about in 1999.
Note: You will need to download the word doc at the bottom of this post to see it.
Myself & my buddy put the plan together and formed a 6 man team to bring it to market. We presented it to the UK VC’s in 2000 – just after the internet 1.0 bubble burst.
Apart from the fact that the bubble burst, we were pitching in the UK where the VC’s just didn’t “get it”. I think if we were pitching in Silicon Valley it might have been a different story.
If you carefully go through this plan I hope you’ll agree that it was the right time to be thinking about something like this. I think Mahalo validates that the idea was an interesting one.
One large mistake in this plan is that it talks about using flash to build it. I actually started building the core technology and quickly realised that HTML would be a better technology to use – but I never got round to updating the business plan to reflect the fact.
All Channels – Human Moderated Search Engine – Idea from 1999
Twitter Streams By Keyword Analysis
I would like a way to follow twitter streams by keyword analysis.
No, I don’t mean… give me all tweets with the keyword php.
I mean… give me all tweets by the top 5% of people who talk about php the most. i.e. I want to see ALL the tweets by the top 5% of php tweeters.
Here’s how it could be done!
- Tokenize the twitter dataset and dump it into a table with two columns
- Put the tokenised word in column A put the tweeter in column B
- Group by column A,B and order by count desc
- Now show a twitter stream of the top 5% of tweeters in the results.
Simple as that!
If you make this, please give me a shout because I want to use it.
Over & out.
Data Point Snapshot Thingymajig
You know the way that some pages you see on the web are more important than others?
Those are the pages that change your thinking or take you in a new direction.
For the sake of this idea I’m going to call those pages “data-points”.
I want a way to be able to instantly record those data-points in such a way that it is very easy for me to scroll back through them and get to them in the order that I looked at them.
Now you may say, well why not just use the browser history?
I do, but I HATE it. I’ll tell you why!
I look at hundreds of pages a day, when I want to get back to data-points from last week it takes ages to search through the pages – half the time I can’t remember what the title was, or a good keyword to search on, so I just have to manually sift through 500 or so pages in the history sidebar to see which is the exact “influential” page I’m looking for.
Ok, so now you say just bookmark it!
No. It’s too time consuming.
I can’t be bothered to find a folder, categorize, and store it and I don’t want to mess up my nicely organized bookmarks. Anyway, even if I did just randomly add the 20 or so data-points I saw every day my bookmarks would get way to long. And bookmark browsing isn’t the right paradigm to be browsing those type of articles.
So put it in delicious you say? No. I don’t want the world to see what I’m thinking about.
What I want is a quick way to be able to add data-points (ie bookmarks) to a data-point stream (stored locally) as I discover “infulential” pages that change my thinking. So, for example, lets say I hit the key combination of CTRL+SHIFT+D, it would pop-it onto my personal data-point stack.
Then to make it perfect I would want a nice interface to browse my data-points by day, week, month, year etc.
It would be cool if they were displayed in a way similar to google search results, with a title and an abstract in the listing.
It would also be cool if I could search them.
I wouldn’t want them on an external site. The perfect scenario would be if my data-point tracker was a firefox plug-in. This would make everything zingy and snappy and would be local and private.
So, come on Firefox Plugin developers!
Make me a data-point snapshot thingymajig dammit!
Bayesian include engine for Twitter
Ahh, I wish I had the time to make this simple service. But I don’t so here’s a gem for you to make! When you make it please let me know because I need to use it.
The Idea
Create an iPhone or desktop client or website that allows users to view twitter messages and post to twitter.
When users see a message they like they click the “More like this” button.
When they see messages they don’t like they click the “Less like this” button.
Over time they train the client (via Bayesian filtering) to show more of what they like and less of what they don’t.
So, in essence this little app would be exactly the same as an email spam filter – and filtering out the stuff you were less interested in.
If you want to have a go at making this here’s a good starting point:
http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html
If you want to brainstorm it give me a ping: jv AT vip dot ie
6 Degrees Of Separation Game
This is an idea that I had in 2004. I still really like this idea. I think it would be a fantastic product to bring to market.
You know. For kids!
In today’s youth culture, kids are obsessed with fame and celebrity. It’s not what you know. It’s who you know. The next best thing to knowing someone famous… is knowing someone who knows someone famous. In this way, we are ALL connected (by degrees of separation). Imagine if it were possible to know exactly who you were connected to… and to “collect” degrees of separation by using a portable device.
Introducing:
Oojano — (Who d’ya know?)
For the full idea please click this link here:
http://www.jvmultimedia.com/startup-ideas/oojano.htm
The above link is to the original .doc about this idea written in 2004.
This is an idea for a hand-held game (as described in the link above) for kids aged 11-19.
Originally posted here:
Fixed World 3D Engine
We all know how important 3D gaming engines have become with the advent of games like quake etc.
One thing that these 3D gaming engines have in common is that they play from the viewers perspective. IE The 3D centre of axis is just behind the screen. As we move through the 3D world we stay in the same place and the world moves around us.
With the advent of motion sensors in iPhones and other devices it opens up the posibility to create a 3D world that is fixed and does not move in relation to the real world.
So, WE would have move around IT. A bit like tonchidot, but an entirely fictional 3D world that you can peek into via the screen of your mobile device.
IE The only way to move around it is to actually move the iPhone. Imagine that the iPhone is a window into an alternative world, much like a flashlight reveals the world in the dark.
Take for example the scenario of peeking around a wall in game play.
With a traditional 3D gaming engine you need to press arrows and move your current centre of axis past the wall and then use arrows to move back again.
If the 3D world was fixed, you could move the iPhone to the edge of the wall and then back again. In other words it would behave exactly the same as the real world – except you could only see a piece of the alternate world that was the size of the iPhone screen.
Fixed world 3D wireless networked games could be very cool. There could be 5 players in the same room all looking at the same fixed 3D world and moving their iPhones around it in real space time.
The position of the fixed world could be maintained by the very fact that the 5 iPhones were connected together – or it could use GPS or wireless triangulation.
The 3d fixed world engine itself could be non-specific to a platform or device and could therefore be ported to work on any mobile device that had motion sensors and other ways of “locking down” the position of the 3D world.
The phone acts like a window into a parallel universe that you can look into as you walk around.
Tonchidot is close
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgTwSXK_5dg
But I’m talking about a fully immersiv 3D world like Quake (3D immersiv shoot em up game)
So that you can create an entirely different world, but walk through it with a 1:1 space/distance ratio as you looked in via your “window”
This would be for mobile devices.
Just another idea was thinking about when I was messing with my iPhone.
http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?biz.5.754271.12
Feedback Mark-up SaaS
A SaaS service to help customers, help you, make your website better.
Imagine crossing getsatisfaction.com with the mark-up controls on Balsemiq mockup software.
When using “FeedbackMarkup.com” Users of your site could leave sticky notes and arrows “directly on your site” pointing to areas that they would like to comment on about your site.
In other words, users could leave “feedback mark-up” and scrawled notes on your site that you could view at your convenience.
The revenue model — In order to have the service on your site you would pay a small monthly cost.
It would also be a useful way for business owners to feedback about a product during the agile development process. For example it could be installed on staging but not live.
Originally posted here:
