Facebook just launched Deals for places near your checkins:
http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=446183422130

Their next move should be to become *the* ad network for third party mobile location apps.

Can someone spend the next 11 months building a company that analyzes my social graph, tweets, likes, checkins, things my friends like and then tells me who I should vote for in the 2011 elections? Thanks.

There are thousands of open-source software projects that are maintained by one person, including software used by lots of companies. Take Dovecot IMAP server for example. Timo Sirainen wrote it and actively develops new features for it. Several companies pay him to develop one-off features that we care about. But Timo gets pulled in different directions depending upon who’s asking the loudest or waving the biggest check. What if Timo could use a Digg-style site to let people submit and vote on feature requests, but you vote with
dollars instead of clicks.

Benefits:
(1) Multiple companies share cost of paying for features.
(2) More companies that rely on free software start paying something
(even if its small) to those that develop it.
(3) Timo makes more money than he makes today because he can always
choose to work the features that are worth the most.
(4) Other developers might start hacking on the code if anyone can get paid to develop the features. Requires some governance.
(5) Most important features *might* rise to the top.

I heard that someone tried this and it failed, but I can’t recall the name of the company. It would be worth a look into why because this seems needed.

It seems like every few days I have a new startup idea. The ideas usually come to me from living life, questioning things that are stupid, respecting things that are awesome, and visualizing what could be. Sometimes I jot my ideas down on my iphone. Since my iphone isn’t doing a good job at creating startups on its own and coming to me for investment, I’ve decided to give my ideas away here.

Warning: Most of these ideas are bad ideas. However, if you decide take one of these ideas and work hard enough at it, you may be able to iterate from bad idea… to good idea… to great company. If you do try, please let me know. I want to be your customer and I may even be interested in investing in you.