A Startup A Day

Picture this. You pull into the office at 8am. You spend three hours working on a PowerPoint presentation, four hours crunching a quarterly budget report in Excel, and two more hours answering Email before heading home. A week later you get a paycheck automatically deposited to your bank account. But overall, pretty boring, right?

Now picture this scenario. You complete a PowerPoint presentation, your boss comes into your office and hands you $40 in cash. After the budget report? $55 bucks! Then another $20 or so just for sending some Emails!! And that trip to the bathroom with your copy of USA Today tucked discreetly under your arm?  $5.  Cash is a great motivator for those of us who love immediate gratification.

Here’s the idea. A widget that monitors the work that you do and presents a running total of exactly how much you are earning for doing that task. You type in your yearly salary and the widget automatically calculates how much cash you earn per minute. It would be a fun (or maybe depressing) way to track what you are earning for completing your tasks.

What do you guys think?  Anyone else on the widget bandwagon?  Shhhh…I just got paid $3 for this blog post…

Each day I’m forced to remember little things like a sucker. Where did I park? What time is my restaurant reservation? What’s my flight number?  When’s my next dentist appointment?  Why should I have to remember all this crap, can’t I make the Internet do this work for me?

My idea is a service that keeps track of all those little life details and feeds them back to you wherever you are. To save a reminder, you simply call a phone number, say the catagory, and then provide the details. Later, when you want to retrieve the details, you call a different number, say the catagory, and the system plays back your message.

Example: You are shopping with your wife in November and she says “I love this necklace! This would make a perfect gift (hint, hint).” As soon as she’s out of earshot, you could call 555-1000, say “wife gift”, then “silver necklace at Macy’s”. A month later when you are at the store trying to buy her Christmas present, you’d call 555-1001, say “wift gift”, and the system would playback your message. You’d also be able to log into my2ndbrain.com and see a list of all reminders you’ve recorded.

Any astute Web 2.0 junkies would know that this is pretty much the idea behind jott.com.  If anything, this is a tribute post to the amazing work they have done and a recognition that this is the beginning of what may be a pretty big market that needs some competitors (check out the interview below – 206!).  The differentiator here is the ability to save the reminder under a specific keyword. This is a much more structured approach that focuses more on finding and retrieving specific data as opposed to storing and sharing free-form data.

The big question here – is it a good idea to build out this idea when Jott could easily add this feature and eliminate your competitive advantage?  Are there some other differentiators that could be added to this basic concept?  Has anyone seen my keys?

Mortgage sites are a dime a dozen.  They all ask for the exact same information and share the same crappy text-based format, like they were B+ projects from a Comp Sci 100-level final course project.

My idea is a mortgage calculator on steroids.  You’d be taken to a well-designed site where, instead of entering an estimated total payment, you’d be asked for a street address.  The site would take advantage of the Zillow API to pull the “Zestimated” home value along with the property tax info and other available information.  The user would then be presented with the estimated monthly payments for that property, along with a few visual levers you could use to adjust rates/credit rating, term length, loan type, etc…  Additional information such as a map showing surrounding property values (again, thanks Zillow!), amortization schedule, potential discounted purchasing options from an online real-estate agent like Redfin, along with other data pulled from real estate web services.

I actually think this is a great opportunity, especially considering how competitive the CPC rates are for mortgage/real estate ads (Scoble puts it at $60 a click, not sure how accurate that is).  Plus, with the advent of the new real estate web service APIs that are maturing, it makes for an easy mashup site that could pull in a decent monthly AdSense income without much effort or maintenance. 

 If I had the time, I might actually code this one up myself.  Between work, house hunting, and the time I spend on the one idea I don’t want the Internet to steal, I’m a little maxed out. 

Holy crap.  Seems like every blogger I follow has caught Twitter fever.  Symptoms include drooling, brain thrashing, and vision problems.  My all-time favorite blogger Mr. Scoble coined an interesting phrase that was the inspiration for today’s idea.  The concept is “microblogging” – blogging that is stripped down to it’s simplest elements.  It’s like if you take a blog, distill it into a liquid form, and shoot it directly into your veins.

So, if microblogging is the next big thing, I’m going to predict the next next big thing: macroblogging!  Instead encouraging people to make a million little posts about their everyday thoughts, this site allows people to think very carefully about a single post that they want to share with the world.  These posts would then be filtered (see options below) and the top posts would be broadcast via simultaneous displays on roadside electronic billboards, displays at retail stores, widgets, flash banners, etc…  Basically any electronic surface where you could purchase ad space is fair game. 

Each post would get approximately 5 minutes of airtime across all of the displays.  The posts that air the following day are decided on 24 hours in advance, and the featured users would be notified of the exact time slot that their post would be displayed.  This would give them plenty of time to notify their friends and family and get the camera ready to capture their 5 minutes of fame.

There are a few options to determine which posts to feature.  First, you could do a simple Digg-like voting scheme.  You could also use one of my favorite filtering techniques: money.  Users would choose their desired time slot and agree to pay a minimum amount for that time.  If another user wanted that slot, they would need to bid a slightly higher amount, basically an auction to purchase desired time slots.

Twitter?  Twitter twitter twitter twitter?  Twitter twitter?  Twitter twitter twitter..aww, crap, I caught it…

One reason the XBox platform is so popular is because of an incentive program called “Achievements”. Each game has 20-30 different challenges of varying difficulty – once you complete the challenge you unlock an achievement and earn some points. The achievements become a permanent part of your profile and the points you earn across games get added up into a single score that represents how good of a gamer you are.

My idea is a real-life version of achievements. There would be a set of several hundred achievements to unlock. Users would log into the site, choose the achievements they have already completed, and get a list of new achievements to work towards. Widgets could be added to user’s Facebook (or MySpace) pages displaying their lastest achievements and total score.

Examples:

Attended the Super Bowl (or Stanley Cup finals) – 20 points

Went on separate dates with two guys/girls on the same night – 10 points

Won three consecutive games of beer pong – 15 points

I was thinking back to when I was in college in the dorm and we’d be sitting around playing video games and bored out of our skulls.  This would be a great way to get the kids out into the world with a list of new and interesting things go do.

This idea was inspired by a post on Jeff Sandquist’s blog, one of my co-workers and the brains behind the fantastic work being done over on Channel 9 and 10.  Also, this is similar to the project Daniel and team are doing over at 43 Things.  That site rocks, definitely check it out.

Thoughts on this one?  Am I the only one who thinks that widgets are the new black?  Or is that Twitter?

In honor of yesterday’s post, today’s startup is very simple.  A dating site with a single member: Glenn.  Ha, just kidding, buddy (I just couldn’t think of a good name for this idea).  However, I was thinking more about dating sites and thought I’d throw out one more idea.

Let’s look at dating sites from two points of view.  First, the ladies.  I’ve discussed online dating with several female friends and there are a few major issues they currently have.  One, they get lots of dating requests, but the vast majority are from people they are not interested in.  Either they are too old or boring or just plain sketchy.  Which leads to number two, which is when they do find someone who looks good on (e)paper, they don’t have any way to tell if the guy is safe or if he’s going to show up in one of those big vans with no windows.

All right, now for the guys.  First, you have to go through a ton of effort to find someone who looks like someone you’d like to date.  Then, chances are the girl has so many other messages that she never responds to yours.  Finally, if she does decide to take a chance on you, it takes several days or weeks of writing back and forth online before she trusts you enough to meet up for some coffee.

Here’s an idea that gets around many of those issues and (unlike most ideas on this site!) actually has a chance to make some decent money.  The site would be a “premium” dating site, where the female members would be invited to join by searching social networking sites and hand-selecting the best looking and most interesting people.  Note that the site would not be open to the general public.  You would need to be personally invited to join.  

So now you have a site full of only the most eligible bachelorettes, time to open the floodgates for the men, right?  No.  Anyone can browse the profiles, but to make contact you’d have to become a member.  Easy?  No, it is very difficult, along with going through an extensive screen process (background check, etc..) you’d have to pay a steep fee, probably around $1,000 right up front. 

OK, now let’s look at the advantages from both sides.  The women get a little ego boost right up front by being selected in the first place.  Once they are in the site, they won’t get nearly the same number of dating requests, but the ones they do get are from guys who have been pre-screened and fairly financially stable.  The advantages for the guys are pretty obvious, a hand-picked list of attractive and interesting girls who have time to read your messages and won’t be as scared of you as a standard dating site.  Yes, the money hurts, but dating is expensive!  Plus, if two members agree to go on a date, the site could “foot the bill” AKA refund $50 back to the guy for the first 5 dates.

Quick note for anyone who is calling me a chauvenistic pig right now – this could 100% be turned around where the guys are hand-selected and the girls would have to pay.

Anyone know of any premium dating sites already out there?  Think this could work?  Can you picture the lucky student who finds the want ad: “Male/Female needed to search MySpace for attractive Female/Males.  $X/hr + commission”

My idea is an online community where people are able to grow and maintain a garden. Users could log onto the site and sign up for a small plot of land. You pick the seeds, plant them, water them, and watch them grow. You could also chat with the neighboring “farmers” to discuss strategies. Once the vegetables grow big enough, you can enter the county fair, where the biggest and best pumpkins and cukes win blue ribbon prizes.

Sounds lame, right? Here’s the catch: instead of this being a fake virtual garden, it would be a REAL garden! Real life gardeners would sign up to host a patch (say a 5×5 meter plot of land) and online users would each get a square meter to work with. Whatever the users chose for the gardener to plant, they would do it. If the online gardener didn’t click the water button, the real gardener would skip the real H20 for the day.  At the end of the season, there would be the grand finale event – the County Fair!  After the winners are annouched, the gardener would harvest the veggies and ship them to the online user (for a small fee, of course).

One reason I like this idea is because it appeals to two distinct groups within a specific genre – people who garden and people who wish they had a garden but don’t have the resources (land, time, etc..).  It’s also got that Tamagatchi-like addictive side to it, and you get that oh-so-trendy social networking effect to boot.  There’s also something cool about dedicating yourself to something online for a long period of time and having something tangible as a reward for your efforts.

Know of any sites that take this “online users controling offline users” approach?  Does a social network for gardeners make you throw up in your mouth just a little?  Anyone else ridiculously excited about this?