In my country (and many others too) no one is working on sundays due to labour laws (besides the police, firemen, tourism and other similar "essential" services obv).

The same often goes for the support of websites/web based businesses, they don't work on Sunday because it's customary (or even required) for them to pay their own workers more by 25-100% if they were to work on Sundays.

There exist a lot of companies that offer outsourced "Level 1" (the most basic) support 7 days a week, so my idea is a company that offers level 1 support on weekends to companies who want to be reachable 7 days a week but can't or don't want to have their own staff available then.

Maybe the idea is stupid but recently I often got mad because I had to wait like 3 days just to get a (electronic, not paper) catalogue from a company for example if I emailed them on Friday.

A monkey could have done the job of emailing it to me - of course this would only work for the most basic support/contact requests but imo it's still better to get a response from a real human telling me he has passed on my request and I will get an answer on Monday instead of just nothing (they assume you know/are fine with "no one answers emails on Sundays", so most often you don't even get an auto-response).

As for the people doing the work I'm thinking of students or even stay at home moms and jobless people who would like to make some money by working from home 1-2 days a week and they would get paid by the email rather than an hourly wage I guess.

B&M companies spent buckets and buckets of money to figure out hot to sell the most stuff to you - not how to make things the easiest for you.

Everything from shelf location and display placements and promotions and discounts are all tested and researched continuously. You are just a monkey in their game.

The last thing they want is people coming in and getting 1 item they came for and leaving the store without getting anything else. That would be a disaster.

When you grow up, you will start to value money and realize that you are not willing to pay $10 for detergent just because it's slightly easier to grab the one right next to the cashier. You will instead cut that coupon or walk around the detergent isle for discounts and get the $5 detergent. You'll see...

So labor laws don't apply to temporary/part-time workers or something?

Do you want to hire fellow nationals or outsource this to another country?

the laws are just one part of the problem, the other part is that companies are required to pay their own employees a multiple of their base salary on weekends. so for example if they get 15€/h normally it would have to be 25€/h on sunday.

My guys could be had for less than the 25€/h obviously or even work as independent contractors not getting paid by the hour but by volume.

About the laws, it is allowed to employ people on Sunday if you apply for an exception on the grounds that the work can only be done on this day/"has" to be on this day too in order for the operations to work which is the case for gas stations, fitness centers etc so I guess it would be possible to get this exception for a company that is fully based around that too.

It's mostly retail and offices that aren't open in the weekend.

If such an exception weren't possible outsourcing would be a possibility but I don't think I'd go there since I wouldn't know where to get cheap, willing, qualified and perfect german speaking workers abroad.

I'm 99%+ sure I won't do anything with this, just thinking out loud that it would be cool to be able to reach a company on the weekend and get simple answers in this day and age imo.

My initial thought is that the margins are too low...

In the US, a temp worker agency basically charges double of what the worker gets. So they charge $30 to the business, but the worker ges $15. Temp work agency is a logistics business with sizable overhead and expenses. You're trying to somehow make a profit on that 15 to 25 Sunday wage gap which is really small.

Do you have temp work agencies in your location? First thing would be to call them up and see what they would charge a business for the sorts of jobs that you would like to do.

That said, there must be some opportunity and some way to skirt the law. If people work M-F, they only get Saturday to do their shopping which sucks and it would be nice to have Sunday to do shopping as well... The govt created an artificial hurdle so if you figure out how to get around it, it could be a good idea in some shape or form...

Meh. Such antiquated thinking. Companies of the last century (cable companies, airlines) may have been built on screwing customers to the fullest extent, but the companies that are crushing it now (Apple, Google) drive customer loyalty by putting effort into making their customers' lives easier.

And your last point is wayyyy off. I have lots of disposable income; it's time I'm short on. Would gladly pay a bit extra for detergent if it means I can spend less time hunting around a walmart. I suspect there are many, many people who feel similarly.

Both these companies turn the screw hard where possible.

Hmm, ok... Examples?

Well google adwords is a virtual money pit if you don't know what you are doing. It's akin to online poker in that if you know your stuff you can really make it work - but fish get fleeced hard and quick.

For example on a campaign I was running I analysed the clicks on the content network. 90% of my clicks were from flash game sites - i.e. misclicks from games.
Now the campaign was still profitable, but if I hadnt checked (and many dont) google would have happily taken my $ forever and a day.

As for Apple, I really dislike their "sue everyone everywhere for everything" approach. Kills innovation imo.




Not saying neither offers value, they do. But don't think for a second they aren't ruthless as anyone ever was.

Transcript validation and collection website for high school and college transcripts. Submit your official transcipt and get it validated. The website will then submit it to colleges, employers, etc. Not sure how the revnue model would work though. Tired of doing all the legwork myself for grad applications and job opportunities.

What do you guys think about a digital wallet. Basically imagine going to the store with a device that has your cards info stored in it.. before you make a purchase you have to input your pin and like fingerprint scan it or something.. and you pretty much just walk around the store and scan the barcodes on stuff to buy them. The device could even have reviews about products on it before you buy it, and for example like clothing and stuff.. possibly with google glasses in the future you can see what you'll look like in them without even trying them on.

All the barcodes are linked to a DB with the prices//inventory and once scanned and confirmed, you can pick the item up off the shelf and walk out the store with it. No more lines. No more cashiers. No more debit//credit card machines.

Video game platform/website where you can place wagers on the matches. Kind of like a dotacash clone with their client and a matchmaking lobby with different buyins. $5 matches plus a $0.50 fee to the website.

I like the whole concept of no-lines, but how do you deal with theft?

In many stores, they have self-checkouts now. But they still have a person overseeing self-checkout stations and it's not just for tech support. Loss prevention is a huge deal for all retail stores.

It's insane to me that one can pay $3k in broker fees to find an apartment in NYC (even most listings on CL are through brokers). Someone should figure out a limited-service way to broker apartments and hit the price point of $250 or so.

Well theft prevention would be in the form of the fingerprint scan and pin code. If you want to take an extra step you could do voice authorization. Theft is still going to happen anyway. As it does now.. can't really prevent it from happening but can definitely make it harder. The money stores save not having to hire those cashiers//baggers they could use on scanners that scan someones bag for items that arent cleared.. and if they find something they just lock the whole device and the person has to clear it with their bank//store to be able to use it again.

I used to live in NYC. I have never used a broker to find an apartment and 90% of people I knew never used a broker, either.

This one time, I decided to go through a broker and it's nice to have someone do all the scheduling and showings for you, but they never showed me anything that was good value and I still ended up finding a place on my own.

I don't know what the stats are on how many people use brokers and pay fees and how many do not - but my guess is that it's not as high as you think. It's one of those issues that gets a disproportionate amount of press making it seem like a much bigger deal than it is... that's the way it seems to me... Well-off people also come and go to NYC so paying 1 months' rent to have someone find you a place so it's ready when you arrive is hardly a bad deal when you consider the cost of of a decent hotel.

I am very glad to hear this. How did you find apts? I'm likely about to move to NYC. Feel free to pm me if you don't want to clog the board.

For the record almost all my NYC friends used brokers.

RFID can basically do this already.

Can be setup just to place (no need to scan) then when you walk out the doors it instantly bills you for what you have in trolley or baskets.

They still have to solve a few issues around theft etc but likely it will happen eventually with either this technology (it's kind of old) or a newer one.

This is close to reality, if not already. I do survey research and tools are in development to send surveys to mobile phones as consumers are walking by a specific product. Problem is GPS rapidly kills cell batteries.

BIDU is a very successful clone company... what better company to clone than google.

I want to set up a website for people to post their stance on issues. I want it to eventually connect with FB. I want it to be very basic and simple. There are X number of issues, and underneath them, you get to write 100-500 words about each.

Example:
Education
<box> I think we should get away from grade levels k-12, and switch to subject levels and campuses because this allows people to learn the most they learn about their weakest subject, and not advance "grades" because they got everything else right. It also allows them to excel in their best subjects </box>

I want to give others the ability to give popularity points to stances to the point where certain people gain more and more popularity for their stances.

I want to be able to search these "stances" for "common ground." Otherwise, people that think alike, I want to give them the opportunity to connect, and discuss.

I want people to be able to search for others based on stances.

I want to further down the line create web based debates on only one issue amongst "popular" posters that disagree with each other. When both individuals participate, the video will be included within their stance page.

Much, much further down the line, I would want a small, local election to be ran solely on this (not including votes, just the campaign) with $0 campaign funds being spent.

I was thinking a universal voting on top 5 currents issue of the day would be neat. So each day you get the result of the day before and get to quickly vote on 5 new things...current trending stuff.

A guy I follow on twitter sent this out. Seems to fit here

"Imagine the most beautiful scene ever. Now paint it. Now you understand why your awesome idea for a business is 1% of the work done"

An automobile that runs on love.

Both companies charge as much as possible in order to maximize profit, and apple is infamous for their screw-you pricing on some items. Last product I bought from them was a Time Capsule which costs $299 for the 2 TB version or $499 for the 3 TB version. An extra TB of storage doesn't cost anywhere near $200 even at full retail (not to mention their lie about the drive being "server-grade" which it is not).

And while google might be great for free users, their main paid product AdWords has got to be the least user-friendly thing ever.