You know what I'd like to see is a movie review site based on the perspective of the fictional characters in those movies. I could see it as a comedy. For example, you could write a review titled, "You Can't Go Home Again, by Spock" for Star Trek

Or it could be like a webcomic. Or maybe a combination webcomic and maybe 3 paragraphs of review writing.

If you're a writer, it wouldn't require any graphical talent really, except in laying out comic book bubbles, text, and cropping images.

You know Zero Punctuation? It's "yet another review site" that applied a single gimmick to its logical extreme, and it's been a hit. Instant subscribeable content.

You could call it "reviews by the reviewed."

I don't know why I'm on a kick of coming up with Reality Show Ideas. This is now the fourth one I've come up with. Previous ones include: a reality show for infomercial pitchmen (How do you measure charisma?), a competition for the next Susan Boyle (Makeover + Talent Competition), and a cooking show for stoners (starring Xzibit, Montel, and Seth Rogen).

A massage therapist show could be interesting for a couple reasons. For one, there is such high variation among therapists in terms of quality and personality. A client could get anything from an injury to heaven depending on the service. Imagine the scene of some guy coming out from one feeling completely sore.

Another aspect is that a lot of massage therapists have strange personalities. I confirmed this when I suggested the idea to a massage therapist, so I know it's not just a cliche. On the Sopranos, for example, an ex-convict played by Steve Buscemi, had been training in jail to become a massage therapist.

I got it! Make a reality show where infomercial pitchmen and pitchwomen compete to give the ultimate pitch.

Here's a sample of who the judges could be:

And to show I did my homework, here's a teaser for Billy Mays & Anthony Sullivan's new reality show "Pitchmen:"

Since Twitter's all the rage this week, I'll suggest a game idea (It may already exist, but anyway).

Post a challenge on Twitter. Whoever responds first, reply "@SoAndSo got it!"

And make the trivia questions be related to a specific profession. For example, for programmers, tweet a sample bit of code every 6 hours, and see who can guess what the code does.

The incentive for the players is that if they get it right, the world knows they've got skills in that field. Others may then follow winners on Twitter, and ultimately it may help land gigs.

And every so often, you can charge money for recruiters to post programmer questions. Or you can post ads (since your audience is highly targeted and very focused on your feed).

via @philosophistry (the link on that is broken, try this)

I frequently Google around when I think to myself, "hmm, I haven't heard so-and-so in the media lately, I wonder what he's up to."

A lot of celebrities eventually fade into obscurity, and you want to know if they're cooking up something new. My current method is to check out the wikipedia entry for that person. Today I checked up on Jay-Z, yesterday I checked up on Eminem, and the other day I checked up on Jeb Bush.

Often the "what are they up to lately" aspect of wikipedia is thin, partly because of the fact that said celebrity has faded lately.

So, what I'm trying to say is, there is room for a service to aggregate all the minor blips on the radar that famous people are making, even when they're not dominating the headlines.

Maybe an urban-wikipedia like urbandictionary. Or a gossip-pedia meant for the paparazzi to organize all their "research" together.

Leave it to me to turn complaining into a business...

Instead of an interior decorator or a feng shui consultant, why not offer people the service of making their living spaces more user-friendly. People all too often pick furniture that is uncomfortable, but simply looks good. Or they make the pathways between rooms and objects too unpleasant. Every experience in the household should be ergonomic, and easy to slip into and out of.

I can better explain this idea by bitching about my parent's place:

• All the tables that become ad-hoc desks for laptops are not ergonomic.
  
• Actually, all tables are too high, so sitting at them makes you feel like a child.
  
• All the chairs in this house, when dragged around, make noises like scratching a chalk board.
  
• The corners of the furniture are too sharp.
  
• Ad-hoc pathways between pieces of furniture are too narrow.
  
• The bed I sleep in has no headboard of any kind, so that pillows just fly off of it.
  
• The way sound travels, nobody has any privacy.
  
• The bathrooms have one too few towel racks.
  
• The light switches are in inappropriate locations. (one is behind a towel rack, for example)

This could also be handy for restaurants and commercial establishments. Again, here's a similar list, based on a handful of dining experiences:

• Don't you hate how the tables seem to always wobble?
  
• The tables aren't large enough to handle the typical serving size of a family of four. (partly because the plates are too large)
  
• The spaces between tables are too narrow, such that getting to your seat is a complete chore.
  
• That fan is in the wrong place, and blows air too directly at about 7% of the guests.
  
• The lighting is way too harsh in this part of the establishment.
  
• The sound of the staff opening and closing the kitchen door is grating.

On a more serious side, for the elderly or disabled, the consultant would help keep members of the household safe. For example, that person would really make sure there are no sharp edges, that chairs are easy to manipulate, that all floorspace, bathtubs, and showers are impossible to slip on, etc.

I have some experience is this particular field, but what I've found is that while visual search engines do exist—and some of them get funding—none of them have really taken off. I'm not sure if they ever will any time soon. One possible application for them could be in the book search world. There are some visual search engine's for books, like Big Book Search, yet none of them have taken off.

What I would like to do is replicate the same experience I get browsing through a bookstore. I realized today that, even with all the years of creative engineering at Amazon, they still haven't matched the pleasure and usefulness of just walking through the stacks of a bookstore or library.

What if you took a snapshot of the inventory of books in a particular bookstore, and figured out a way to arrange them such that browsing through them online was similar to wandering through the bookstore. Or you can make an inventory snapshot, but do one for every Borders or Barnes & Nobles. That way you can browse your favorite bookstore's inventory without going there, find a book, then go pick it up. I imagine something like a Minority Report UI, or something like CoverFlow. Maybe, better yet, avoid any full-screen takeover UIs, yet, somehow capture the sense of a long zoom. Maybe some sort of Google Maps zooming UI would be good. I actually don't know off the top of my head, how I'd conceive of one, but I think it wouldn't take long to imagine and develop one.

Amazon's great when you know what you want. But the brick-and-mortar Borders and Barnes & Noble are great when you don't know what you want. Bridge the divide and maybe profit.

You know those Entertainment coupon books you can buy for $15-$30 that provide you about a thousand or so sweet coupons? That should really be made into an iPhone app. My friend and I have been milking the coupon book he bought with their "buy one, get one free" deals, but often we forget to bring the book or the coupons. Or we don't know that a particular establishment even has coupons. You could make this app use your location, like Urban Spoon does, and provides you deals in your area. The app could, also, have a feature for the vendor to cross off, or delete the coupon once it's used. There are a couple of coupon apps on the iPhone, but they look lame.

This is yet another one of those things that make you think, "this would be perfect for the iPhone."

The Pace car concept already exists, where people pledge to drive the speed limit. The idea is if enough people in a community do this, then it could have a calming effect on the speed of all cars, and therefore reduce accidents.

What if I could install a device on my back bumper that said the word "PACE" and what it would do is track the speed of cars around me, and then send that information to Google or law enforcement over WhisperNet or cell towers. Google could use that information to provide accurate traffic speed maps. Or Law enforcement could use it to target areas that are ballooning with high speed traffic. Either way, the "PACE" led lights could scare other drivers into driving slower around these cars. Even though a pace car can't target you like a cop could, it could maybe increase the likelihood that speeders get a ticket by 5x and therefore, incentivize them to slow down.

And then you get car insurance companies to cut your fees in half if you agree to drive with a pace car bumper sign, simply because driving the speed limit would probably reduce the likelihood of an accident by 90% (I don't know what the exact number is, but speeding is very very often an accomplice in car accidents).

This idea came to me ever since I took driving school and the instructor said a couple quotes that sunk in: "The number one thing you can do to improve the safety of your driving is to control your speed." "I haven't gotten a ticket in the last 23 years. You know how? I always drive the speed limit." Ever since those classes (in the summer), I've obeyed the speed limit 95% of the time, and yeah, it feels really safe. Sometimes I don't want to do it. For example there's a turn where the speed limit is dropped to 25mph, and I used to cringe when I had to slow down. But now I realize that if you are going any faster on that turn, and a car was stopped in your lane, you wouldn't see it fast enough to slow down. In other words, speed limits are set for our own safety.

I know this has already been at least imagined a bunch of times, and maybe implemented crudely, but I wonder if I could open my wireless router, but then insert codes into all web traffic so that I get a percentage of ad revenue from people's Google Searches. Better yet, I wonder if I can get a percentage revenue from all iTunes, Amazon purchases, etc. There are maybe 1,000 to 10,000 services I could sign up for with affiliate codes, such that I could potentially make a decent chunk of change from people using my Wi-Fi. If I was getting a cut from a single or double-digit % of my neighbor's e-Commerce transactions, then that could make it worth it to open up my wireless router for free.

Obviously, there's some legal questions with that. Some affiliate providers may not like the idea, some don't care. But you, as a new company, could manage those relationships and provide a one-click solution for anybody with a wireless router to make some extra change from it.

This occurred to me when I thought about how Firefox made $66 million from skimming off Google Ad Revenue from searches on the default home page. And then I remembered logging into free wireless at the grocery store. I could imagine them, instead of a "please click here to begin surfing," it just shows a generic Google home page with embedded affiliate codes.

Here's an opportunity that would be good for library science graduates, new media graduates, professors, entrepreneurs, and innovation-minded technology or media companies.

Executive Summary:

Create a standard for mixing large quantities of text (let's say, 100-300 full pages) with large quantities of video clips (let's say, 20-100 clips). The goal is to make it easy to create, archive, reference, and transmit these packages.

Why this is opportune:

The "clip" has emerged as the dominant way of viewing video, which has overtaken the "reel" or "stream." In the "reel" or "stream" model, users sit down, tune down other distractions, and watch TV or a movie. Whereas with "clips," users watch them on-demand, often quitting them mid-way through, all while distractions are going all around.

Just like text has the book (or it's digitial equivalent, the PDF), and reels have the DVD, what do clips have?

Continue reading...

Maybe pogs have aged enough in memories to become retro-cool or kitsch. Pogs could become a novel up-sell in the tchotchke business. Someone could make a site, like cafepress, where people could make their own pogs.

This came to me when I thought of making pogs out of the Obama Cabinet picks. If I saw these in a fellow convention-attendee's bag, I would filch them, no doubt.

How come there isn't a popular application distribution platform on Windows or Mac similar to the iPhone App Store or Steam for games?

I think now is the perfect time to make a Software Distribution Platform (SDP, my own acronym). Both Steam and the App Store have proven that the model is viable, highly profitable, and a much better user experience. This is also very timely given that consumers typically cycle through multiple machines, have always-on broadband connections, and are weary of the state of malware. Both RIM and Google are jumping onto the SDP bandwagon, and it's just a matter of time before you see an explosion (and subsequent consolidation) of an SDP market.

Continue reading...

This is for anybody who is working on creating a Twitter app and maybe wants an extra feature to set it apart. However, there's a good chance this feature already exists given that Twitter has spawned an incredible number of mash-ups and apps.

The idea is that I want to know what the Twitter home page looks like for my friends. I get the feeling that for a good handful of my friends, their home pages are 50% my posts, and then 50% their friends'. This is because I'm following 33 users, and a lot of my friends are maybe following 10-15. As a result, I usually post enough to match the volume of posts I see on my Twitter home page. This means maybe only 5-10% of the posts on my home page are from me. To me, it doesn't appear that I'm spamming anybody. But to my friends, I may be the most active user, and so I might be dominating their home pages.

I suspect this is happening because a third of the posts on my Twitter home page are from peterc. To him, I'm sure he feels fine since he is following 310 users. For him, his posting volume doesn't look like spam either. (<3 peterc, btw.)

In any event, I want to verify how the experience is for other users when they see my posts.

There's got to be an app that already does this, so if you know of one, add it to the comments. Either way, I think Twitter should make a plug-in architecture or app system like facebook (only private-facing, though), so that you can enable experimental features, just like you can choose from ~20 extra features in Gmail Labs (which are great, btw. As a side note, this is a much better alternative to feature bloat).

Basically, on both MySpace and Facebook, I list the movies I'm interested in, and yet the ads I receive are poorly targeted. I just saw a huge ad for Twilight on the front-page of MySpace, but I'm thinking to myself, I have no interest seeing that movie. Based on my tastes—The Royal Tenenbaums, Syriana, I <3 Huckabees, Adaptation—they should feed me an ad for Synecdoche, New York or Milk. MySpace would benefit by having some sort of Netflix-style recommendation engine that feeds me ads for movies that I'm likely to care about.

This may already exist, but if it does, then I'm curious why it's not being used. I remember the big hoopla about MySpace, from the business perspective, was that because users put in so much information in their profiles, they would be able to get more highly targeted ads. This isn't happening yet. Why? Is it maybe its because ad-targeting systems are too general? I honestly don't know.

Your business would approach 20th Century Fox and say, "okay, I can get your movie in front of anybody who likes these movies: insert list of 1,000 films. And based on our research, we can get you 100x higher click-thru rates than your other advertising."

I'm sure this is valuable because otherwise there wouldn't be a million dollar Netflix Prize to improve their recommendation engine.

I really agree that all the little breadcrumbs of forum posts, blog comments, tweets, Google Reader stars, etc. are truly an untapped resource on the Internet. For every post I've written on Philosophistry, I've probably created 10-20 random little bits of content on other sites, ranging from delicious bookmarks, to flamewars on political sites. I now do this without thinking. You do this without thinking.

There is still an opportunity out there for someone to make a business out of this. One recurring theme I see in Internet start-ups, is unifying your entire Internet presence. Take every Twitter, Myspace comment, blog post, facebook entry, forum post, YouTube, etc., and combine it into one gigantic RSS feed. That's the Holy Grail. I don't know if the Internet will produce a start-up that does that effectively. But then again, the Internet has produced some amazing holy grails in the past.

What prompted this was my surprise when a glimmer of this "vast, sprawling, unifying RSS feed" was mirrored accidentally back to me. I posted a comment on Download Squad and somehow they dredged up four other comments from three other sites over the last three years. Here's a link to the comments. They include comments that range from technology rants to Paris Hilton. My first response when I saw this was, "There's no way I've posted on this site before." Which quickly turned into, "Holy crap, I guess all the scribbles I've made on the Internet over the years, eventually add up."

I have no idea how a service could ever truly fulfill the "Giant RSS feed" idea. Maybe it will come via an unexpected route, like Google Chrome integrating some of the ideas from Flock. Or a law requiring all Anonymous comments to be tied to a real person (scary).