A service that would text you when there is a great or historically significant sporting event in progress and the network you can watch it on. If Lebron has scored 30 in the first half, or someone has taken a no-hitter into the 7th inning, or a record is in the process of being broken, etc.

Would charge a small monthly fee and you could customize it to the sports you want to be alerted for, specific players or teams, what you want to be alerted for, etc.

You stole this from Ali G.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SaHW6Y7_Yg

Yup, that's my thoughts as well.

To go a little further with this, maybe a system to post a real money bounty on solving a problem. For a simple question like how do I enable armv6 in xcode 4 might cost like $3. The market will eventually dictate the price. [edit] Oops, just rehashing suzzer99's post. lol.

I've posted "bounties" before to get experts to solve my problem, but unfortunately all the "experts" on eLance couldn't even understand my problem but pretended they knew wtf was going on. I finally found someone with a lot of experience with the library and he even did it for free. I gave him $300 because it was definitely worth the money. I think he was a grad student.

I we can jump back to some of the TableTap discussion for a second, here's an idea that is admittedly not unique (because I stole it from an existing European concept) but has a tiny twist that I think makes it a winner.

Networked Self-Service Bars

When I went to Central Europe (Vienna, Brno, Prague) two springs ago for a spring break trip/school project we stumbled across a nice little drinking establishment called The Pub. There are a lot more of them now than there were then, but the idea was still in concept.

While you are free to order food and beer and all that good stuff, there is also a tap in the center of every table. One nice feature these taps had (outside of no pour limit) was that it had a digital screen and you could buy on each seat separately. So if you were going to split the check each seat could actually have its own bill.

But anyway, the cool part was that all of the taps at these locations were linked up and each restaurant had a huge projection screen that was showing a running count of which table was drinking the most beer in the restaurant, which restaurant was drinking the most beer in the country, and which tables were drinking the most beer in the country. It was outstanding. We had no idea this existed when we walked in, but you better believe we didn't leave until getting on the top-10 list for the entire Czech Republic.

You can imagine how well this would work in the right locations in the US. How do you decide those locations though? Allow me to demonstrate.

You let Tuscaloosa, Auburn, Gainesville, Athens, Columbia, Baton Rouge, Fayetteville, Lexington, Nashville, Oxford, Starksboro, and Knoxville compete against each other in drinking? How does this not work?

The problems:
1) Liability. Like, a lot of it. I'm not sure encouraging college kids to binge drink is going to be well received the first time someone gets waaaay too drunk and either drives drunk and gets in a wreck or gets alcohol poisoning.
2) Liability. No, really.
3) Construction costs to build out a restaurant and get all the special equipment installed.

The networked self-service bar sounds so awesome. It literally pumped me up just reading about it, but the liabilities seem completely insane. I doubt it would be remotely close to possible in America, which is a shame.

What about just doing the same thing but with chicken wings or anything else that can be turned into a competition.

I think it would be much more hit-or-miss with a product other than beer. Chicken wing competitions are good, but not everyone wants to be in one weekly, whereas with beer, every thursday, friday, and saturday would be primetime.

This was my next thought, so I'm glad someone else had it too. LL listed some of the drawbacks I immediately came up with, but I'm sure there are plenty more.

That said, I don't think it's an awful idea for some other type of consumption competition. It's just not as "good" upon first glance even though it fully addresses the major hurdle.

What if we expanded this to something like "pub trivia", or other games (wally and busters?) where the results were tallied nationally.

I would expand this to a "which games should I watch / when should I start watching" service. Here's a similar idea I never implemented: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...&postcount=582

I slept through Tebow-magic Sunday - I would have liked a service like this.

That's been done pretty well already, but the "compare your consumption to other people around the world" is potentially going to delight a lot of customers.

I would also take a stab at doing some sort of social/checkin/sharing thing over mobile where anyone with a smartphone can show the world what they're drinking and compare to others in real time. Easier than getting restaurants and bars to install hardware, but also tough to build any sort of moat around this, and earning badges for being an early adopter seems to have lost much of its luster lately (eg "I'm the mayor of Barftown!" or "I'm the first to eat 50 spicybites" or "I spend more time at Joe's Bar than anyone else" etc).

Or how about a PUA social app where you take photos of girls you want to hit on, crowdsource how you're going to woo her, then post results and pics in real time? m.ipickup.com BOOM. LOL I almost deleted that this one to keep for myself.

lol, this is pretty awesome.

A friend of mine from undergrad did a CRM for PUAs. I don't think they've done much with it since I talked to him about last, but he got married to a pretty cool girl so it must work!

http://www.puatracker.com/

Honestly I'm not even sure it's still functional (or that it ever was) but whatever.

Haven't searched for this so it might exist:

A lot of customers will only buy items with free shipping. How about a site that scours the web daily for products being offered with free shipping deals. Could make money through referrals to the retailers website.

I saw a show on Travel channel or something where a bar had an interactive section where you could video chat with people on the other side of the bar, so guys and girls would have forced interaction in a chat-roulette type of way with people they could meet up with in minutes and party.

Using this idea to create an app which allows people to chat over a mobile device with other club-goers/ partyers in a specific are of a city may work.

http://grindr.com/

Yes, but no lol

I used to work for a company where my job was to go around to NFL & college games and implement the yellow line (NBC SNF for example). It doesn't work by infrared. You attach hardware that captures data off of the cameras. You then train the software to know where the field is at and draw the line in real time. Then it's integrated into the feed for the truck. For it being a simple line it is very complex. As a result it could sometimes take quite an effort just to get it working in time for the game. On top of that any little bump of the camera can throw the results off and the camera needs to be retrained.

So... your idea hasn't actually been implemented. In fact my idea when I was working there was to make something like a fiber optic turf that could display the line on the field so that it is WAY more accurate and people in the stadium can see it. Then maybe you could do ads on the field, touchdown celebrations videos, etc.

If you could substantially reduce costs for that, officials review will be available on every field in America down to pee-wee ball. It must be made at a relatively trivial cost.

I am on the board of a high school football referee's association. If it worked i'd buy it in a heartbeat.

I have an idea pad as well. I had an idea for a website called Wallyworld.com a good year before I ever saw peopleOfWalmart.com. I ran the idea by a friend and he didn't get it so I never built it. Atleast that is my excuse I use now.

Another idea... I started building it but I don't have the balls to launch it for fear of someone getting hurt badly or me getting sued. My website idea is.... what would you do for money? You have a pool of money that you gather through donations of some sort (or the site provides) and people post what they are willing to do for the cash. Vistors vote and once the time limit expires the winner creates a video of the stunt. Once the video is posted they receive the prize. This could also work similar to kickstarter where say someone wants $500 to do xyz. Everyone that wants to see that throws in a couple bucks. He does the stunt and then the video is posted.

Not sure how profitable this could be but it sure sounds like a fun site to run.

I would expect it to cost millions to develop and millions to install. I really don't know. That's why I never thought about it much afterwards.

Now for peewee if you didn't care about actually seeing the line and would rather use it for the officials review then i could see there being a low cost way to map the field and put a chip in the ball or use infrared in the 1st down markers.

First off this thread is great.

Now for my contribution: Pay at the pump was a huge success for consumers in that it allows us to quickly swipe our credit cards and not have to go through the hassle of going inside to pay for gas. However seeing that gas stations make the majority of profits from goods sold inside the store I can only assume that this has really hurt the overall bottom line as naturally the less people that enter the store the less they buy. To combat this I propose a system much like you see at your bank where small items can be sent right out to your car via pneumatic tubes (chips, soda, candy ect.) This coupled with a nice touch screen system that advertises store specials to you while you pump your gas. Once you've selected your items someone in the store grabs them places them in the tube and they are out to you in seconds. The best parts of this idea is the massive captive audience that has already swiped there credit card is forced to stand there. I would often buy something just to relieve myself of boredom as I wait for my tank to fill. Company would make a % of everything sold via the system.

I was brainstorming ideas while reading through the whole thread, and this one came to mind.

Like you said, you have to worry about being sued or getting hurt.

I'm glad this thread popped up. It got me to finally start learning PHP and start reorganizing my ideas list last week.

I've recently had a long list of ideas I'd like to sift through someday and toss a bunch of them up on the web, but I've never been motivated enough to do much about it.

A couple of the ideas are:
A mobile app that lets you organize a trip together, but then also lets you keep connected and push out places to meet or go to lunch at to everyone in the group.

We recently had a largish group (20 to 25 people) go to a city hardly any of us had been to before and it was a mess trying to keep track of what groups were meeting where and trying to send out mass texts before going out.

A mobile taxi app that allows you to not only book a taxi where you're standing, but sends you a picture and taxi number of the cab coming to pick you up so you never have to feel worried that someone unsavory would show up. This would probably be more useful in less safe parts of the world. In the same vein, you could use this for repairmen and utility workers.

I'm not sure if this exists already, but software that allows you to WYSIWYG dynamic web apps.

I also threw together a website, based on this thread, with the PHP I learned over the past couple weeks: www.WorthlessConcept.com (working title). It's very simple at the moment, but the gist of the idea is that you can enter in any ideas which will launch a discussion thread. At the top of each thread, anyone can edit the idea at will, and you can see all the edits that have been made since the idea was conceived. Any feedback is appreciated!

see bolded