Tag Archives: ideas

Brain dump of startup ideas #5

– Etsy for indie tech gadgets

– travel site for group bookings. Booking for group trips sucks.

– Metrics driven CRM for Startups (mixpanel + pipeline deals + intercom.io + drip campains)

– gimmicky virtual currency kids toy. Its a key fob that comes with 1000 “coins”. You can give coins to others via RFID plus a pin number. Website for digital transfers and purchasing more “coins”.

– Aftermarket Dvorak keyed apple laptops

Brain dump of startup ideas #4

– travel/restaurant/event to do list. Scrape friends feeds on social networks to tell me who has gone to those places in the past. Pull up friends’ yelp/google reviews if any. If other friends use the app, show me others who have similar things on their to do list. Inherently viral when users use the app to reach out to their friends for advice on these things.

– wifi enabled power outlets, light switches, extension cords. App to control it and program it. RfId for quick tagging from phone

– wifi connected home doorbell, peephole camera, mic, speaker that lets you interact from anywhere using your iPhone

– daily labor site to find yard workers/handyman/etc, aimed at getting unemployed Americans some of the jobs that go undocumented today.

– free tshirts w/ marketing messages for homeless people, paid for by brand advertisers

– ebay for Bitcoin. (putting peer to peer goods into the market should reduce the need for currency swap services)

– indie rock band made up of internet entrepreneurs. Call the band “Internet Famous”

– mobile event tickets… save or upload to your phone, let venues use them for free, and later monetize by letting people swap tickets at the last min

– hardware device to enable peer to peer live streaming of TV/cable channels

Brain dump of startup ideas #3

– front end routing for all web traffic for a site, which lets you do things like route /blog to WP Engine, /store to Shopify, and everything else to your main server. Lets you also have redundancy so if one host goes down those URLs can redirect to a second host.

– tool to anonymously solicit commercial public comments to your Facebook posts. Advertisers bid to respond and the user gets a cut. Show rest of comment thread anonymously to vendor to get them to see the value and pay to continue posting.

– photo site that takes your entire photo collection and logically determines which are good ones and creates you an album

– Windows and Mac utility that puts your laptop in “presentation mode”. Turns off screen saver, power saver, turns off all popups such as IM and reminders, and has a timeout to switch back to normal mode in an hour (customizable). Still displays low battery alert though.

– mechanical turk worker complexes to give jobs to homeless people

– better email. Blah… boring

– private Likes for Facebook to “bookmark” posts for yourself

– timemachine. By pulling together all puclic geo/compass/time tagged images, video and audio and creating a virtual representation of the past that you can navigate thru. Sell cheap camera with wifi & solar power for people to mount in car or yard for security or other reasons (API to trigger alerts/actions, public/private option), let people search to trace an object through time (bike, person, car/licenseplate), merge photos by location and time for smooth, free use if contributing content, paid if not contributing, iPhone app to snap & tag interesting things to contribute

I’ll test yours if you test mine

While working with several startups I’ve realized it would be useful to have a community of alpha testers who are eager to secretly test your new app and give you feedback before anyone else lays eyes on it… even before you stealthily launch your private beta.  This would also be useful in cases where you think you’ve fixed that annoying bug and you push to the Apple app store, only to realize a a week later when the app is approved that the bug is not fixed.

But what would motivate people to join this community?  How about only allow people to join if they also are building an app that they needed someone to test?  It would be an alpha tester “dating” site… “I’ll test yours if you test mine”  This would also ensure that all members are savvy enough to be able to navigate tools like TestFlight.

I don’t want another Rate My Startup site.  I want a community of hard core alpha testers.  Please email me the URL when you are ready for me to secretly alpha test it.

Brain dump of startup ideas #2

– twitter based speedtrap reporting/discovery app

– twitter based service to let people meet up on short notice to buy/sell, such as for tickets at concerts or sport events

– Speech messaging. I’m driving mode for native SMS.

– Craislist type site but which let’s you accept up to 3 offers before selling

– iPad app to learn popular tunes on the piano

– iPhone app that captures a persons voice and uses that to let another person make phone calls using the other persona voice. Plus a marketplace of celebrity voices.

– music site that charges $10/mo and let’s me pick which artists my money goes to. The $10 can go towards band merchandise purchases too. His models the real world better.

Brain dump of startup ideas #1

– car mirrors controlled by computer that adjusts them based on where the driver’s eyes are

– “should I sell?” site that let’s people post stuff and accept bids so they know what their item is worth if they choose to sell.

– website to remove the balance of political power from millionaires. Reduce cost of running for office. Let people “write in” candidates (people they know) and let people vote up one candidate per ballot. Heavy viral social stuff. Tie to Facebook for identities.

– social network that models your neighborhood and let’s you meet neighbors better than in real life

– social music streaming exclusively between fb friends, music is a social experience, ppl want to share their playlists and help friends discover new music

– wikileaks for food companies or all companies, where insiders can post how shit made, foodstuff.com, thatsdisqusting.com

– I want my music videos back. IPod option to buy/steam/play videos w your songs

– pay friends via CC by letting them take a photo of your CC. Then sends you an approval notice.

– group fundraising to make political lobbyists irrelevant. Replace that income with money from the people, but people only pay if the politician vows off all lobby money. Essentially a site for collective buying power for anything.

– social network with scarcity to the membership. Different levels: 10 members, 100, 1000, 10000, etc. Allow people to trade/sell membership.

Legally sell copies of your mp3s to your friends

People often discover new music from their friends. I tell people about new bands all the time, so I want to publish my iTunes library to the web and let my friends buy songs from me, rather than from Apple. And I don’t want any of the money… I want it all to go to the artist.

I imagine there is a creative legal way to do this. There is definitely a technical way…

– install a light weight agent that monitors my itunes folder and pushes the following data to the server: list of songs, playlists and meta data like number of Plays and Last Played.

– I’d be given a friendly URL like “http://mymusic.com/billboebel” and people can “Friend” me, just like on Facebook.

– my page would let people sort by “recently added”, “most played”, “recently played”, etc.

– people can buy any of the songs I own and the website would securely handle their payment and then would act as a middle man to let the buyer download the song directly from my computer (or queue it for download later if I’m currently offline). If the song’s file is DRM protected, a non-DRM version of the file would be created by the agent on my computer using my credentials that are stored in itunes.

– the website would need to take a cut of the proceeds to handle operating cost, but the rest of the money would go to the artist.

– the website could even let artists set their own price for songs.

– the sound quality would vary from seller to seller, but since the sale takes place between friends, I’m sure the friends can work it out if the buyer is unhappy with the quality.