A Startup A Day

I just bought this shirt on the awesome website threadless.com.  Today I had a meeting with the technical VP for a new project at work, and guess what he was wearing..?  Yep, the “Well, this just really sucks” Scrabble shirt!  Which led me to today’s idea.  A little website I like to call wellthisjustreallysucks.com.

 The premise is ridiculously simple.  People post something that really sucks.  It might be a picture, a short video, or a short story (500 characters or less).  Users can flip through the various submissions, read about things that really suck, and vote on the suckiness of each situation.

For example, here’s a potential story that could be submitted (taken from the Darwin awards):

“The feet of Jason and Sara, both 21, were found protruding from a deflated, huge helium advertising balloon. Jason was a college student, and Sara attended community college, but apparently their education had glossed over the importance of oxygen.

The pair pulled down the 8′ balloon, and climbed inside. Their last words consisted of high-pitched, incoherent giggling as they slowly passed out and passed into the hereafter.“

Another example (from IMDB):

 Now that just really sucks.

Something happened today that didn’t suck, stay tuned for more details!

There are a lot of sites out there that are focused on getting senior citizens using the the internet.  Most of them are pretty much like any other site, except with much bigger font.

 This site is different.  It’s focused on the fact that for most non-computer users, their account is set up by a more computer savvy family member in the first place.  For instance, I could set up an account for my grandmother.  Once she’s set up, I would set myself up as one of her family members, and I’d be able to share things with her.  I could have access to her Email account and post the non-spam Emails to her account.  I could pull in pictures or paste in links of web pages I think that she’d like.  The interface would be a very simple inbox-like structure for everything, something like this:

Picture – <thumbnail – single click to show full size> - From Kevin

Email – How are you? – From Kevin

Email – Re: Prunes – From Kevin

Website – Twitter – From Andrew

Any thoughts?  No time for witty remarks, Lost is almost on! 

 Any of you idea geeks might be able to relate to this.  You’re walking along a busy street and you think “I have a great idea for a new service!  It’s a location-based dating/meeting/chat service based on your GPS location on your cell phone!  Screw you, Best Buy/trendy coffee shop/tech repair shop, I’m going to be a millionaire!!”

 …

 OK, so maybe I’m the only one.  It sucks because it seems like such a cool idea at first, and then gets messy really fast.  First you need to get a mass audience that is using your service (Zune track sharing, anyone?).  Then you need to work out deals with TelCos or hope users will install your software on thier phones.  THEN you need to get past all the privacy and security issues that come with random people being able to track/find you whereever you are.

Still, here’s my idea.  You’re walking in a crowded area when suddenly you get a text message on your cell phone.  It reads “An enemy spy has been spotted.  Locate them before they locate you.”  Your mission is then to search the crowd for the other “Spy vs Spy” player.  They may be the person who is discreetly trying to check their cell phone, or maybe the one who is walking quickly to higher ground while glancing around suspiciously. 

Once you think you have identified the spy, you reply with a text message giving some basic personal details (i.e. sex: male hair: brown).  If you are correct on the initial details, the system will text back a message showing six images of brown-haired males.  You choose the pic that matches your suspected spy, and if you are correct, the game is over and you accumlate a certain number of points based on how quickly you were able to find the spy. 

Any other idea geeks out there with their pet “location-based-cell-phone-tracking-million-dollar-idea” stories?  Are social GPS apps going to take off?  Any Zune owners in my vicinity willing to squirt me the new Modest Mouse album?

Remember that TV show on VH1 where they would overlay little bubbles with fun facts over old-school music videos? I envision a Web 2.0 version of that concept.

Here’s how this would work. You could download a plug-in for your music player that would detect the song that is being played. The app would download any relevant pop-ups for that song and display them in cute little bubbles, just like the TV show. As the bubbles appear you have the option to give them a quick ‘thumbs-up / thumbs-down’ vote, which would increase/decrease the likelyhood of those pop-ups being shown. Also, if you think of a clever fact or witty remark, you’d have an option to submit it to the site through the plug-in. You could add a social aspect to this by showing a little pic of the submitter with the bubble, which you could click on and check out other bubbles they’ve created.

Instead of my usual stupid joke, I have big news: I bought my first house today!  Timothy helped by sending some good karmic thoughts my way this afternoon – thanks, man!

So.  Last night I was brainstorming a few ideas for the upcoming week and came up with a dumb little idea for a Twitter visualization.  I thought it might be fun to put two recent Twitter posts side by side and see if, by chance, there might be a connection.  For instance, someone asking a question like “Where is a good place to get a burrito at 2am in Nashville?” and someone else posting a random Twitter (tweet?) like “in the women’s room at the Aerosmith concert”.   And then, what if instead of using the picture from the user’s account, why not do it in a cartoonish style, just to make it a little more fun?  I actually had a few free hours, so I sat down with my laptop and a few beers to do some late night coding.

Here’s the result: http://www.twitterisweird.com

I’d love it if you guys would check it out and let me know if it’s working for you or not.  There are future plans for this as well, I may set this up as a project under Cambrian House, but definitely let me know if you have any ideas or are interested in helping out.  The code is very simple, and the ASP.NET AJAX stuff I used was awesome – highly recommended for you .NET devs out there. (I know, shameless plug – come on, I’m an evangelist!)

 Oh yeah, I almost forgot to annouce the winner of the contest!  Congrats to Timothy Chen from the Idea Is Queen blog.  I’ve been following his posts for a while now, really great stuff over there.    I’ll be getting in touch with you shortly to discuss your my Ringside Startup contribution.  Thanks to the rest of you who entered, I’ll be doing something similar in the future so no worries if you missed out on this one.

Also, greetings to anyone who wandered over here from TIW…but come on, you should have clicked the other link!