A Startup A Day

You’re planning a trip.  Somewhere warm.  Like Vegas.  Or Panama.  What’s the first thing you do?  If you’re anything like me, you start making a list.  Airline tickets?  Check.  Passport?  Check.  Leopard print thong swimsuit?  Check.

There are plenty of online sites where you can make simple lists (tada rocks!), but I’m proposing a different approach.  Instead of starting with a blank page and trying to think up everything you need on the spot, you could come to a site, enter your destination (or activity), and you’d be presented with a premade list all ready for you to fill out.  Besides just having access to a canned list, you could add additional details to make a custom list specific to your situation. 

What’s interesting is that the site could evolve over time.  Imagine that 10 people used a list for a trip to Las Vegas.  8 of those people added a list item for “blackjack cheat sheet”, so the next time someone pulled the list for Las Vegas, it would already have an entry for blackjack.  Consequently, if an item wasn’t used by the majority of people, it would automatically be removed.  Eventually you could start to pull filtered lists, such as “Give me a list for Las Vegas from people with the following tags: male, geek, 28″ and you’d get a very targeted list to start planning your vacation.

Hmmmmm…I like it!  What do you guys think?  Any naming ideas (Check Mate sounds like a shady payday loan place)?  Got a good Vegas list you could send me before next Sunday?

Big news today, I’m far enough along on my semi-top-secret to give out a few details and let you have a sneak peek at what’s coming.   Basically, it’s the same concept as the “Twitter Is Weird” project that I pushed out two weeks ago, which takes two Twitter posts (tweets) from the live public timeline and displays them as a conversation between two cartoon characters.  This milestone includes a brand new look and some fun features, such as:

• The ability to save pairs of tweets (TweeTweeTs)
• View popular TweeTweeTs (and who discovered them)
• View your friends timeline
• Post messages to your Twitter account

It’s definitely a tough project to troubleshoot because the Twitter services are getting slammed and will shut down on occasion, so I don’t know what issues are caused by my code and what are happening on the Twitter side of the house.  I’d definitely appreciate it if you could check out the site and provide any feedback, issues, etc…  Bonus points if you’re on Safari or FireFox!  Also, now that I have the basic structure up I’ll be creating a project through Cambrian House – anyone who wants to help out, meet me over there and let’s blow this thing up! 

So, out of all my ideas, why am I choosing this one to actually develop?  For one, it was pretty easy, something I could work on during the evening or on the weekend between work and house buying and time spent with my amazing fiance.  “The Golden Rule of Startups – Start” (thanks, Steve!) rule applies here, as does my Sanook theory.  It was fun, it was easy, so I went for it.

Also, as with life, sometimes you have to make some big bets.  Twitter is blowing up right now, but only time will tell if it’s a stupid fad or the next big thing.  If it’s a fad and dies out quickly, it was at least a fun project and good learning experience.  However, if it takes root in the 13-23 demographic and becomes the next My Space, I want to be one of the first to realize a simple truth about Twitter:  Twitter is not a web site.  It is a decentralized communication platform and the race is on to become the primary conduit of this information.  And being the gatekeeper for information to an audience is valuable.  The bigger the audience, the higher the value.

Hmmm…can anyone tell I was a consultant in a former life? 

<- Disturbing

Anyway, today’s idea is a take on the old Karaoke-over-the-Internet startup.  Instead of just singing along to your favorite songs, what if you could act along with your favorite movie/TV scene?  You could sign onto the site and choose a scene you’d like to act out, or join a scene that someone else picked out.  Your friends (or strangers) would choose their roles, and then you’d all jump in front of your webcams and act out the scene. 

It would be run very similar to karaoke, with a clip showing the muted scene and the words along the bottom (ala closed captioning).  When you are finished with the scene, you could choose to save it to the main site, where other members could then watch your rendition and vote for their favorites.  Part of the fun would be the flexibility of the format.  For example, I would expect to see a lot of MST3K-types of spoofs coming out of this.

I’ve got a spot of bad news to share.  My bid to become the next IdeaWarz winner fell just short today, but I’d like to sincerely thank everyone who helped me out by casting a vote.  It was fun while it lasted, hopefully I’ll be eligible for another tourney in the future!

Good news as well: I have a little time to work on my TwitterIsWeird site this week and should be coming out with a pretty interesting update on Friday.  Stay tuned…

OK, I don’t like to admit this, but I was one of those losers who rode the bus all through high school, until I was like 17 or something.  It really sucked.  One of the worst parts of the whole bus thing was waiting at the bottom of our driveway in the freezing cold Michigan winters pathetically waiting for stupid Ms. Geckenkiemer to pick my ass up.  You had to play the odds every morning – either you go out early and stand in the cold for 15 minutes or you wait by the door and try to sprint to the end of the driveway by the time the bus reaches your driveway.

Now that THE FUTURE is here, I’ve got an idea that could resolve this issue (and others like it).  I could log into the local bus route website and sign up to recieve alerts for my specific route.  Using GPS, the system could detect if the bus was more than 5 mintues off the regular schedule and send a text message directly to my cell phone to notify me of any delays.  This could be applied to other types of transportation as well: city buses, taxis, planes, etc..

Anyone got any ideas for a catchy name?  Edit: Great suggestion, JK, the name is officially updated.  Only one day left in this round of the IdeaWarz contest, please help me receive funding to turn one of my ideas into reality!

Anyone remember that old episode of The Simpsons where the teachers at Springfield Elementary go on strike?  Bart loves it (until Marge becomes his substitute), but Lisa starts freaking out.  She walks around the house crying “Look at me! Grade me! Evaluate and rank me! I’m good, good, good and oh so smart!”

My idea is a universal platform that would allow people to easily insert a 1-5 ranking onto a blog post, MySpace page, online picture or video, etc…  Many sites already have this in place on their own site, but Rate Me would be a centralized platform that would allow content creators to easily insert a little javascript into any piece of web content to get an instant rating mechanism.

Here’s a quick example:

This works on two levels.  First, for people who create content, they get good feedback on what their users like and dislike.  For instance, I could tag the ideas on my blog and get a sense as to which ideas people liked (hi mom!) versus those they didn’t like (jerks).

Second, for people who consume content, you’d be able to have a history of the types of content that you liked/disliked.  You could pull up a list of any content you tagged as 5 star, for example, and be able to go back to those sites (similar to del.li.c.io.u.s – I can never figure out the .’s).  Even better, over time the system could start to make links between content tags and your likes/dislikes and begin to suggest other content that you might like as well.  You could even start to add in some Web 2.0-ish features like “Show me other people who have similar likes/dislikes”(shout out to Steve P’s new venture – can’t wait to see how that progresses!)

What do you guys think?  1 star?  Why are my bones are so brittle, I always drink plenty of…”Malk”?

For those of you who don’t remember the Magic 8 Ball, it’s a pretty simple concept.  You ask it a question, shake the little black ball, and an answer appears through a window.  This site would start off in a similar fashion.  You ask it a simple question, hit a button, and the answer appears.  Boring, right?  Well, here’s the catch.  Instead of the answer being something generic like “Yes”, “No”, “Ask Again Later”, you would get the answer in the form of lyrics from a randomly chosen song!

Here’s a quick example:

Question – “Is my boyfriend cheating on me?”

Answer – Cold Hearted Snake by Paula Abdul (1989)

He’s a cold-hearted snake
Look into his eyes
Oh oh oh
He’s been tellin’ lies
He’s a lover boy at play
He don’t play by rules
Oh oh oh
Girl don’t play the fool

Granted, the answer wouldn’t always match the question, but in general song lyrics are vague enough to be interpreted in many different ways.  Part of the fun of the site would be provided by users subsequently rating the result (1 = way off, 10 = spot on) and providing their own interpretations of the lyrics as it relates to their situation.  Other users can then offer their own interpretations on the question/answer as well.

Pretty easy monetization on this one, by providing affiliate links to purchase the song and providing relavant ads alongside the song lyrics.

This isn’t my original idea, it’s based off the live show “Pop Oracle” and has been done on various radio stations in the past.  Just think it would translate well to the quickly-clogging tubes of the Internets.

What do all you gorgeous, brilliant, thin-but-not-too-thin readers out there think about this idea?  Anyone see the TC dead pool in my future?  Thanks for the votes – only a few days left!!