Anyone looking for a partner? My email: amichail@gmail.com. If you like, we can discuss startup ideas here. In fact, this social news forum might be a good way to throw ideas around to see which ones generate more interest.
I'm interested in ways to make people scale. For example, one might imagine a service that allows people to construct a chatbot for themselves that they could unleash onto the net to spread their views. Yet another possibility is to have such a chatbot constructed in a collaborative way by many people. The interaction between such chatbots is also interesting. For example, you could have an online dating site where you can go on thousands of dates per day by having your chatbot interact with other chatbots. Promising interactions can then be brought to your attention and you may then decide to go on a real date.
Done this recently with good success. Great fun. Many conversations have gone on for over 1k and even 10k messages. It's still seeing a good amount of action. Anyone interested in developing this idea or the framework further? Let me know.
This is my current startup attempt: http://forwardingtree.com.
Also see: http://groups.google.com/group/forwarding-tree. Note that personalization is just another way to control spam. One might imagine an extension of the social network approach used that would apply to discussion forums for example, even at the level of individual threads/posters. How would you personalize a discussion and yet still retain something that is coherent?
I am interested in getting free labor out of users in the style of the espgame.org. For more on this, see: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8246463980976635143 An obvious step would be to extend the ESP Game to video. Of course, the service need not be a game. For example, consider two groups of people: those who wish to grammar check their documents and those who wish to learn English. To grammar check, one would submit the document and users trying to learn English can try to find errors in it and provide corrections. General agreement about certain sorts of errors might be viewed as making it more likely that those in fact are errors. Moreover, one can also look for agreement among corrections. People learning English would benefit by getting back feedback about how well their errors and corrections correlate with those from others. One could of course do something similar with code design say.
I'm interested in novel uses of prediction markets. For example, one can create an online dating service where people bet on whom they believe would make good couples. People might then take this as a suggestion as to whom to consider for a date. A similar thing can be done with business relationships, academic collaborations, etc.
I put a lot of thought (and some actual code) into this exact idea! I put up a fast demo of it and it is rather popular.. I'm interested in developing this idea further.
I'm interested in a service for creating or inventing things in a collaborative way. For example, consider using human-based genetic algorithms to create daily news shows, perhaps in the style of this site: http://www.newsatseven.com (but using people rather than computers). As another example, one might build a service where users invent board games. Again, this could be done using human-based genetic algorithms. Users of the service would be able to modify rules to try to make a game more fun. A fitness function would take into account how popular various game variants are among players. Note that users of such a service need not be programmers: the domain is sufficiently restricted so as to make visual point-and-click rule creation/modification possible.
I think it would be interesting to provide a way to give people advice in real-time via the web. For example, you might watch a sports game on the web and give advice to individual players about what they might do next in real-time. So the spectators replace the coaches here.
I am interested in collective intelligence: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_intelligence. How would you build a service where thousands of people collaborative to solve a problem, create a work of art, or play a game (e.g., chess)?
I'm interested in ways to make more novel startups succeed. The problem here is that the average web surfer has a very short attention span. And so it is hard for anything novel to get much traffic. One possible solution is to try to extend the attention span of the average web surfer much as you would with young children. Namely, present an idea in a cute and funny way. See for example: http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/research/recording_head/pr/PerpendicularAnimation.html . By extending their attention span in this way, you might be able to get them to understand and appreciate your novel service.
I am interested in seeing what happens when you apply intentional programming to web search:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=tSnnfUj1XCQ
http://youtube.com/watch?v=ZZDwB4-DPXE
The idea is to open up your search engine so that anyone can submit code for domain specific query entry, search, ranking, and presentation of results. Moreover, such code submissions would compete with each other, with more effective ones rising in popularity in their respective domains.
Unlike APIs that are currently available, the submissions made by users here would make up the core feature set of the service.
I am interested in giving people ways to track their influence on others. Forwarding Tree's URL tracking is all about that: http://groups.google.com/group/forwarding-tree/browse_thread/thread/ad998b99b9e3b7a8
URL tracking allows you to see what happens to those URLs that you forward to others, post on your blog, submit to a social news site, etc. You can see how the URL propagates around the net in real-time.
In other contexts, one might show people their influence on wikipedia articles, search engine rankings, open source code, etc.
What about advertising using smart mobs? A web service would allow a company to specify the logistics of the event and how much it is willing to pay. The company could also track the event in real-time and make changes as required. Advertising could be subtle such as in the form of a mob that forms in a shopping center carrying several products from that company. And advertising could be more blatant: a mob might form to create the logo of the company say.
I'm interested in understanding people more deeply and learning from them by watching what they do and how they think. One idea that I tried is a service for broadcasting your computer screen, just as if it were a TV show. See my work on VNCCasts: http://www.mobuzztv.com/uk/shows/vnccast_my_scrap_beckett_sculpture/. (The report is a bit misleading though as they apparently mistook the sample channels I created as ones actually used by others.)
Interesting idea and in research we do it when we have authorization from users to do so. There are tools out there to do this (glance, ethnio, etc), but nothing as classy as what goggle is coming up with..
"We showed how to sample the ambient sound emitted from a TV and automatically determine what is being watched from a small signature of the sound -- all with complete privacy and minuscule effort."
A little ambient evesdropping eh? Now thats tasty!
I'm interested in showing people data that they don't normally see. I mentioned VNCCasts in another post. Another example would be to show the web traffic at a web site to everyone in real-time. This might be done using something like http://www.visitorville.com/. Or maybe you would show actual sessions in progress. But whatever you do, the point is to make the site look more active and interesting. It's a way to promote the site.
I am interested in more intelligent ads. Make the ad so intelligent and interactive that people would want to play with it, just to test its boundaries. Building a better ad now reduces to coming up with the better AI. Taking this further, you might allow people to combine two ads to see how they will interact with each other. For example, you might combine an Apple ad with a Microsoft one to see which AI will win out.
re-invent the ad and toss that word out, Alot of what you are saying is basically creating more engaging experiences for the user while benefiting a brand agenda. That could be just as simple as delivering on the promise.
Web wise people are wickedly in tune when someone is selling to them or preaching to them. Just like in real life, ya know a car salesmen when ya meet'm.
What would a completely transparent company be like? All resources, records, and processes available for comment (maybe modification?) by anyone. People that have run or are currently running startups could make suggestions on the business processes, the things going on in the company, and the products or services. Maybe the more eyes/fewer bugs idea applies to business?
What would a completely transparent company be like? All resources, records, and processes available for comment (maybe modification?) by anyone. People that have run or are currently running startups could make suggestions on the business processes, the things going on in the company, and the products or services. Maybe the more eyes/fewer bugs idea applies to business?
I am looking for a partner too. However, I already have a product that is close to beta. Looking for investors, partners, customers.
See my thread. "Have you experienced the customer-investor-team conundrum?"
http://juwo.com
I'm interested in solving the contact management problem. My mac/mobile address book isn't flexible enough and wont tell me how I know these people but CRM is too heavy a solution.
I really like the photosynth idea: http://labs.live.com/photosynth.
But can we take this idea further? For example, what can we do with video? Maybe we could put together many people's videos to produce a dynamic 3d world? One could imagine allowing people to watch and explore events in 3d such as concerts and sports games.
Another idea is to identify dense areas in 3d where people tend to take a lot of photographs. One could then use these dense areas to guide people to interesting places. For example, when visiting a museum, one might look at the dense areas first.
