I personally think that ideas are more than a dime, unless it's an outright clone. And I am not saying it because of the fear of being cloned or copied; I am rather saying it because discovering/inventing a useful idea is so rare. So it's the scarcity which makes it valuable and not the fact that someone might steal it.
EDIT: Important point missed. The discussion applies more to the people who can implement their ideas on their own.
2/ Offer free salary calculations. Charge employers for sending paper salary slips (PDF versions are for free) and employment related and legal counseling. Also offer free self-service portal for employers and employees. Barrier: requires a lot of knowledge of local employment, fiscal and social security regulations. Reward: if you can break the barrier you'll probably be the first and make a killing.
3/ Offer a service like square with the distinction that once a cent is converted to a online cent the entire history of that cent's online usage is freely accessible (radical transparency.) As soon as the cent is withdrawn that history will be lost of at least will be frozen for ever. This way when I want to accept a payment from you I - or my application - can scrutinize the history of the cents you offer me. If there's something in the history of a certain cent that I don't like - example: it's been used to buy X, Y or Z - I'll reject that cent. Other people can step in and tag transactions or even a party in a transaction in a certain way so that I can configure my application to reject those tags. This simple mechanism introduces a new negative feedback loop in our economy that we don't have but need in our economic system.
You would have to do the tracking independent of the owners of the penny, of course.
And there is more value to this than providing a new negative feedback loop. If someone believes that the source of the money is just as important, if not more important, than the amount of money, then such a history is very valuable to them. For example, I'm sure there are some religiously organized charities that don't want mafia money for donations, especially if such money was going to fund construction for a house of worship, etc.
I see this as being potential very valuable in the oil-rich Gulf countries.
On 2, how is this different from salary.com. Maybe one of its competitors have an API you could use.
We never ended up doing this, however, and most of their tariff discussions continued being back-of-cigarette-packet calculations.
The idea and technology would actually be applicable to all sorts of domains - utility bills, for example.
Is there a way to do that? From what you are saying it is like tracking the number of incoming and outgoing calls and keeping track of the bill. Wouldn't that be a privacy issue, and also do the service providers agree to provide such data ?
>>Offer a service like square with the distinction that once a cent is converted to a online cent
I like the idea, but what do you mean by online cent? Square takes the payment by credit card, so it goes directly to merchant account. Isn't it? So where does it get converted to online cent? Correct me if I am wrong! This can be compared better to paypal; that is where the money gets converted to online cent.
There are a number of popular services which ask that you give them your passwords. Failing that, you could ask them to install an Android app or to have the user manually upload the data. Invoices were mentioned in devijvers's comment.
I worked there for a summer a few years back. They do exactly what you described.
You sign up with the company. You give them a bunch of different categories of budget, and whether or not its a hard budget that you can't go over or a soft budget that can.
They send you a pack of credit/debit cards highlighting the category. Say a big red "Eating out" card, or a light blue "Groceries" card, etc.
All of these debit your bank account you've linked to the service (a la paypal). On the service you setup "sub accounts" (which I'll hereafter call accounts). These are debited when you use a card, but only up to the amount you've authorized for the month on hard accounts. If you have say "33.49" in luxuries, and you try to charge 36 bucks, it denies it and sends you a text, "You only have 33.49 left in luxuries". If you try to make a charge in a soft account (aka one you're okay going over, but that it takes out of a different budgets, say Groceries will take out of dinning out), the charge will go through, and take any of the excess amount out of the account specified as the overflow.
There would be a webapp and smartphone app that would show all these balances on all these accounts you set up so you could see up to the minute how much was left on the cards.
Basically, 21st century envelope budgeting with no book-keeping once you set the budgets, with cards that work on the web or in restaurants or at any store.
It would be useful to everyone who's bad at balancing checkbooks, or money management in general, from teens to just people who are too busy to really worry about it.
Please oh please make this system :OD
http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2009/04/have-you-ever-legali...
This is called commerce, and it doesn't have to be the cutthroat fixed sum game that corporate culture has made it.
The goal of business should be quality of life and prioritizing problem solving, not getting richer than the next guy.
So there should totally be an idea exchange!
(The [marked-for-deletion] part is a joke, by the way. It makes sense if you know the site.)
2- a tool to conduct online interviews. Right now when recruiting companies use a phone screening before flying the candidate in. By conducting an interview online, you can (for example) have him code the solution to a problem in real-time, how he thinks about it etc. So much more efficient than phone interviews, and a much better predictor for candidate quality.
3- a service to outsource video making for webapps. people making webapps often need demos of their products, but would rather not spend valuable time learning how to make a video, voiceover etc.
There would be a lot more. Ideas are a dime a dozen :-)
For #1, I can upvote you only once. I've been having this idea for a while now. Customized accounting app for a niche audience. That's going to be my next app once I finish my current one.
1. invoice - freshbooks, curdbee 2. online interviews - interviewstreet 3. video for webapps - can't recall the names, but I got more than 5 proposals for creating a demo for my site theaterex.com
I understand that everything has a room for improvement, but the ground breaking ideas have far more value than we see
In this case, I don't think it can really be effectively copied/stolen. I have spent the last 10+ years getting myself well when doctor's claim it cannot be done. My oldest son has the same diagnosis and he is healthier than I am, so it is clearly replicable. The real reason I think the idea is important: I have spent at least five years trying to talk to people and put what I know into words on a website. And, for the most part, people just don't get it. I have concluded that I need a more information-dense delivery mode. I think writing a simulation (aka "game") will do the trick, or at least be far more effective than what I am doing currently.
Like with so many things, "the idea" may be just one piece of the tapestry of things which breathes life into a viable business or project. I was excited to hit upon this idea but remain frustrated at failing to execute (in part because getting myself healthier is still a big part of my life and I also have a full-time job). So I like this idea -- and it's so far not gotten me anywhere.
Peace.
As CF is a genetic disease, how does a game help ?
To teach lifestyle changes more effectively than the written word can.
Genes don't determine outcome by themselves. Environmental factors play a role, a more significant role than most people seem to realize. Ants and bees know this and use this information to create queens from normal larvae -- ie ants and bees are adept at taking the same genes and getting a vastly different outcome. So it can be done.
(EDIT: There's a website listed in my profile which might give you some idea of what I do for my health. It doesn't convey enough though, so that's where a game would come in, assuming I can ever get there from here.)
Have everyone make a profile with their "open hours" where they're free to have lunch or meet up with someone who wants to discuss things of interest with. Don't make it formal, just make it so that people can see what times you're free that week, and shoot an email if they want to talk about stuff. Leave it vague and general because you never know what utility this could serve - hell people might just want some companionship, not startup advice.
That being said, the idea is worthless if you don't actually start running. Building a team that can run much faster might eventually swamp any gains you get from having a good starting idea. That team might also discover a new path that leads to a new and much better goal, therefore leading you to choose to abandon your original idea.
A bad idea can ruin a good team by having them run in the wrong direction for too long.
You seem to believe that people don't value ideas enough and therefore are testing them. You will often get free ideas from people who can't or have no intention to run with them. This does nothing to prove they have no value, they simply have little value to that particular person.
I think the idea vs. execution argument is the hacker version of the nature/nurture question. For most things that matter, both contribute to varying degrees.
Kind of. While I am a programmer myself and agree with the fact that ideas might have little value compared to execution; this is more of a case where the person with idea does not know how to execute it. If the person is executioner himself, then I think that ideas are equally important.
First one is along the lines of a tower defence but instead of attackers you have a crowd wanting to protest. The 'people' are quite good sim's in that they should behave according to research - lots of people crammed in are more violent than a widely spaced crowd. You, the player, will get different scenarios - protecting a visiting dignitary, policing a conference centre, a town square etc. etc. an obviously your level ups will be increasingly heavy duty riot control equipment: vans, water hoses, helicopters etc.
Second one was a sandbox type game like minecraft or dwarf fortress with the addition of seriously mega threats. For example a dragon living in an area that cannot be defeated without either building and planning serious defences (over a period of days or weeks) or massive co-operation. Games are either too formulaic or immediate - but there are lots of people prepared to work on long term construction projects in these kind of games, would be interesting to tap into that.
I still think execution is 90% of the battle with an idea and I am going to have a crack at both of these given half a chance. Don't think either of them are million sellers but far too many games are clones of one another and it's good to introduce new concepts
But seriously, my real idea is that expressing quality with monetary terms is silly.
I also had said a number of times to my girlfriend that i want a robot that could fold laundry. She would always look at me funny. Then I felt vindicated when colin angle (iRobot) said in an interview that the next task he would like solved with robots is folding laundry.
Personally, I believe that good ideas that result in successful businesses are worth keeping to yourself, as long as you plan on making something out of them.
Like http://www.onvia.com/products but for each country.
It's something I've been working some time, because I think the NLP involved in analyzing and extracting some structured metadata of the mandated docs is really interesting.
Upon purchase of the phone and 3G plan, SkyPe log in details will be saved into the phone, eliminating the need to log in. Contacts from SkyPe will be shown on the address book and it can proceed to act as a normal phone.
2) 30 second Music sharing/sampling. Most of the time, it is only a certain section of a music that plays over and over in our head. The idea I have is to select 30 seconds (I believe this is the maximum to avoid infringement of copyright) of the part of the music I like and share it with my friends and say "Check out this song, it is great. This is the part I love".
It can also be used for song samples where the wisdom of the crowd determines which portion of the song is the one that people likes instead of the current way it is done, which is the music store determines the sample
Alright, just this two for now and see how it goes, unless anyone is interested in others that I have
* Cut 1/4 off the left hand side of the first bill.
* Cut a rectangle out of the next bill using these coordinates: Top: 1px, Height: 100%-2px, Left: 25%, Width: 25% ... where 1px is about 1/8 inch.
* Cut a rectangle out of the third bill using these coordinates: Top: 1px, Height: 100%-2px, Left: 50%, Width: 25%
* One bill with the left quadrant cut off.
* One bill with a big rectangle cut out... but is still barely in tact.
* Another bill with a big rectangle cut out.
* Three 1/4 pieces that you tape together to create a 4th mutilated $100 bill.
Source: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Will_a_bank_replace_a_half_ten_dol...
So far we've seen the trust model: http://sonar.me lets you know when your FB or Twitter friends of friends are in the room. Then there's the recommendations model, like okcupid.com recommends people to each other to date, but take the dating out of it and add foursquare checkins for location down to the venue level. Not sure if anyone is doing this model.
There's Agora (http://agoraapp.com), but I'm not really sure what they do to tell you whom to meet.
http://grubwith.us is doing an excellent job in the dining niche.
I would love to talk with friends or even strangers to do certain missions/scenarios.
OK guys, we need to rescue these hostages. There are between 20-30 terrorists holding them in the building. You can enter via doors, roof, sewers, vents, whatever. You come up with a strategy and chat in real time as you all execute. You can be together bursting into a giant gun fight or coordinate really well separately.
However, no matter how bad that idea is- as long as a person tries and implements it- that idea becomes priceless. I say priceless because every idea that you can turn into reality means that you've gained experience, and more in-depth knowledge about that particular idea. As cheesy as it sounds, knowledge is priceless.
It's such a blindingly obvious idea that I assumed for three years that somebody had already come up with it and I just hadn't found it, and I think that it's not worth a dime because it's obvious and also the kind of thing that the open-source movement would have jumped onto immediately.