A Startup A Day

I figure this is an appropriate idea considering I’m exactly three hours away from catching a flight to Las Vegas.  It’s a pretty simple one, really.  There are lots of last minute travel sites that will send out Emails a few days before a flight if the airline hasn’t booked all the seats.  My idea takes that one step farther further.  For airlines that still have standby seats available 3-4 hours before the flight, they have the option of posting them to an ultra last minute travel site.  The tickets would be heavily discounted, but users would only have a one-hour timeframe in which to buy them.  In many ways it would be like a woot.com for travel - definitely not something you could use if you wanted to guarentee you’d reach a specific destination, but fun if you wanted to take a spur-of-the-moment adventure.

Vegas, baby, yeah!  I’ll be gone tomorrow, y’all be sure to enjoy your weekend.  I know I will. 

<- Love me some Flickr. 

Anywho, today I’m taking a departure from my usual consumer-focused startup ideas and going straight at the heart of one of the biggest issues in the business world.  A little backstory - I’m working on a redesign of one of our systems at work and I’ve got the fun task of generating the business requirements.  I’d like to come up with a simple story with three parts: what’s important for the users, what’s important for management, and how do we align the two.

My idea is a site where a business can examine an existing process, define the tradeoffs between the various features (the levers), and get a snapshot of what changes will make the biggest impact.  Wow, that sounds boring and vague, but here’s how it would work.  I’ll use the example process of “Subway determining if they should add an option to grill their sandwiches” to help explain.

1. The project manager enters the various options into the system and the impact they have on each other.  For instance, ”grilling the sandwich” will increase the amount of time the customer has to wait, will increase customer satisfaction, and will add an additional equipment cost.
2. The system generates a survey that users can take to express how valuable each component is to them.  Example: “Would you be willing to wait an additional 2 minutes to have a grilled sub?”
3. The system would also generate a survey for store managers to indicate what they are trying to achieve (i.e. “Rank the following in order of importance: Customer Satisfaction, Customer Turnover Time, Expenses”)
4. Based on the input from the customers and the executives, the system could then generate a graph aligning the feedback from the customers with the management priorities, along with some levers that can be used for modeling various scenarios.  This graph will give an indication if this change is really best for their business (based on customer feedback and management priorities) or is it being done just because other competitors are doing it.

Don’t worry, I’m confused, too.  I’m leaving for Vegas tomorrow!  Woot. 

Back in the day, if someone wanted to get a hold of you, there were only a few options. Telephone (land line), snail mail, or the good ol’ fashion doorbell. Nowadays I have at least 20 ways for people to contact me. Home phone, cell phone, work Email, hotmail, gmail, blog comments, Twitter, MySpace message…the list goes on and on.

My idea is a service that can send you a text message or Email when you receive a communication from any of your online contact points. You would log into a site, tell it about the services you use, and set up the level of interruption you’d like (i.e. Text message for blog comments, Email for MySpace messages). It sounds complicated to implement, but it might actually be fairly straightforward considering how many sites have RSS feeds for comments and messages.

Click this link now: http://stream.qtv.apple.com/qtv/v2music/08122005/doorbell_ref.mov

You’ll thank me later.

Back in the day I did a stint at a big consulting firm.  It was a blast!  My co-workers were young, fun, and definitely subscribed to the “work hard, play hard” philosophy.  In general, I tend to stay away from the overhyped Social Network for Fill-in-the-Blank ideas, but I couldn’t think of anything better I think this particular group is unique enough for this to make sense.

The site would be restricted to users who are currently employed at a consulting company (i.e. must register with a @<consulting company>.com address).  Why?  Along with the typical social networking stuff, there would be a few unique features that sets this apart from the MySpace of the Month Club.

1. A salary comparison feature.  Consulting companies are notoriously secretive about their compensation packages and consultants are equally notorious for salary snooping.  See PayScale to see how this might work.  Which leads us to…
2. A recruitment bonus feature.  I won’t give out specifics about the cash my company was willing to pay out for qualified leads, but it was enough to make it worth my while to seek out good candidates.  SNFC would be great for finding consultants who are frustrated with (or underpaid by) their current firm.
3.  A travel meetup feature.  Lots of consultants travel during the week and spend their weeknights couped up in a hotel room.  This feature could connect a couple of lonely consultants who are looking to explore the city.  The beauty of the closed system comes into play here – you know that the person on the site really is a fellow consultant and not some random weirdo.

Come on all you comment junkies, you know you want to comment on this idea.  Sucks?  Rocks?  Tell me what you think!

Editor’s note: This site is probably already out there, please let me know in the comments if this exists…

This is a ridiculously simple idea.  I listen to podcasts at work and would like a website that consolidates my podcasts into a single page.  Ideally, it would also allow me to listen to the podcasts online (ala the “Listen” link on Digg). 

I know, I know – I should just install iTunes, but I’m on Vista and for some reason it’s not quite working.  It’s my fault, though, I really should just follow Apple’s advice and switch my OS.    I do have podcasts on my feed reader, but the experience is tailored to reading feeds, not listening to podcasts.  It works, but there’s got to be a better way.

As I said, this *has* to be out there somewhere…anyone willing to provide a link?

Last Silverlight idea for a while, I promise. 

So, raise your hand if you actually watch the local news.  Yeah, that’s what I thought.  Between blogs and podcasts and Google News Microsoft Windows Live Local News System 2007 Professional Edition and the good ol’ Seattle PI, I don’t need to watch the news anymore.  However, the nice thing about TV news is that it sets a quality bar – you only have 30 minutes, so you better pack it full of only the most important local news stories.  There’s good content there, how can it be packaged up better for my consumption?

Here’s one way to do it.  Take the nightly news, chop it up into individual stories, and geo-code each clip.  Then display each story on a map so users can view the top news stories that have taken place in your neighborhood over the past day, week or even the past month.  Another option would be to sign up for an RSS feed or daily Email showing all the stories that took place within 10 miles of their address.

Along with geo-coding, you could tag each story with additional info, such as crime, community event, sports, etc..  You could then get an interesting aggregation of data, i.e. show me a map highlighting the location of all crimes that have taken place over the past month that are serious enough to land on the evening news.  This could give an interesting local perspective on a city that you are not familiar with, to ensure that you don’t book accidentally book a hotel in a sketchy part of town.

Any thoughts on this one?  Could this be done with newspaper articles as well?  Got a new contest coming soon, stay tuned…

Yet another Silverlight idea.  This one doesn’t *need* Silverlight, but would make the code base 100x’s cleaner.  The basic idea here is a website where you could create a short video explaining why you stand for something.  For example, you could create a video on “Why I am a Vegetarian“, “Why I am voting for Hillary Clinton“, or “Why I am OK dressing my kid up like a dinosaur and giving him a handgun” (thanks, Flickr).

The content could come from a number of sources.  You could record a webcam testimonial yourself or mashup other related clips such as YouTube videos of campaign speeches or an Al Gore cameo from a South Park episode.  Once you’ve spliced together your masterpiece, you can post it on your blog or Facebook site to share your thoughts with the world.

This could actually be pretty easy to implement, just check out the “Top Banana” demo that was created in a few weeks.  Very cool stuff.