could you expand a bit on why?

Subscribing to excellent thread.

I saw this today and thought it was great....

The NDA for people who understand how worthless they are...

http://friendda.org/

This thread is going to get huge.. I think using colours for ideas would help people to quick browse and read ideas you're interested in, bolds good but a designated colour would be better. It's not my thread but it's an idea if OP wants to try it.

Anyhow few quick ideas:

Bullet point news, summarise the daily newspapers in bullet point form. Reading articles takes time, with good editors you could probably cut the article by 80% and get the main points out. Great for business people on the run - or anyone busy these days.

A service for manufacturers shipping products, basically working the most efficient way to pack something in a container. Some things naturally nest, eg. pots. But if you could work out ways to 'nest' (or redesign) products that generally don't nest a manufacturer would smash their competition as you drive freight you make your products MUCH more competitive.

Bulk buying site spinoff. Basically manufacturers/agents offer a product at X price, if the number of wanted purchasers is hit. Manufacturer makes X product, purchasers are charged. Problem here is leadtimes would be large like 60-90 days to get goods. I thought you could create a marketplace on the same site where you can offer your purchase to someone at a higher price then you bought it for. Naturally the closer it gets to being produced/shipped the price will likely increase from the original price. In essence people could invest/trade goods they don't even want if they believe someone would purchase it for me then they paid later on. You'd also have to work out the logistics of shipping the product out, my country is small you could serve one country from one port. In states you'd probably have to restrict to certain states until you see it takeoff.. Will people wait 90 days for a bargain??

Online auctions, I really think there is a market for an auction type site (maybe just an online marketplace) that truly helps businesses get online. I'd attack this by focusing not on the consumer but on the actual businesses providing the products. Something like being able to walk into a store and say "I'll list everything in your store online for $0 and you don't pay me anything till xyz sells." Nearly every business uses barcodes and some sort of inventory system, so you'd have to run a custom fix to suck the stores data into your marketplaces format. Currently sites tend to make it easier for the end user while forgetting that most business owners don't want to list 10000 items on his ebay account.

This is a basic one travel world collect art/furniture from around the world sell it online, being done. Could be done much better.

These are the one I've been thinking about recently, currently working on a basic art import business but from China. Just copying Bed Bath and Beyond type arts and crafts and spinning the items for my local market. But want to move to a more technical based idea when this starts generate a decent income.

Nice thread.

I really can't imagine there is any demand for Coinstar in PI. There is actually a coin shortage here, lol. Not to mention the vig would have to be vanishingly small or else it's worth it for the vast majority of filipinos making $5/day or less to change their own coins.

Betting against marriages ("short selling") is fairly typical in the industry, which is why photographers, bands, etc usually get most of the money long before the wedding, with nothing being refundable. It's basically free money.

Makes me wonder if I could pull off a photography gig using borrowed pictures and ONLY take on clients that I was sure would fail (I don't even own a camera).

Who is going to ship the products off and handle customer service? Who pays for shipping supplies and postage? How are you going to handle keeping track of inventory quantities? Either it isn't $0 cost to the business or it is expensive and resource intensive to offer what you propose to a business.

I think a better approach would be to sell businesses websites and then upsell. Maybe they just want a simple website that has their location and address. You can upsell them on an eCommerce store, offer training/consulting, maintenance services, SEO/SEM and I'm sure their are others.

You could just get to know some photographers and have them step in as a replacement for you if the wedding actually takes place.

Here's one that I did as a project for a social entrepreneurship class during my MBA.

It's a eLance-type site matching up college students who need to build relevant experience with small non-profits (less than $250k annual income, which means they are not required to file a Form 990) who could use their help.

Because there's a decent bit to explain here and I've already put a fair bit of work in to it, I figured I may as well just share the presentation I put together.

http://www.***************/theryanand...oject-10475857

I've done a little more on this a couple times and am hoping that a couple of events over the next few months could help me get in touch with some of the people who could help make this happen. It's a classic chicken-or-the-egg problem for getting students who will volunteer or non-profits who need it.

Any takeways to share on conversion paths for purchasers/upgraders?

Hey Everyone,
I've recently been working on a web application that reviews Facebook Games and Applications. The idea is to be a "yelp" for facebook games. I am starting the focus on FB games and apps because unlike other application stores, the FB app store does not exist. Thus, I would be adding value to an extremely inefficient market. After that, I would like to move into other application markets. For now, my product, AppRankings, aims to be the premier site for Facebook game and application discovery. Here is the beta version on facebook: http://apps.facebook.com/apprankings/?ref=tpt
Many of you probably do not play FB games, but FB games are now making over 3 billion a year of rev and social games are expected to make up to 10 billion/year overall. Having worked at a FB game company, I realized that the largest cost was in advertising - user acquisition. With this site, the possibilities in advertising for FB games and apps are endless and can also be made more efficient by offering services such as advertising consulting, analytics, and traffic sharing.
Recently, Facebook took down its reviews on all of its pages, which means that ratings of games and applications are now unknown to users. The reason for getting rid of the reviews was because there was too much spamming in the reviews. Luckily, I’ve had this idea for a few months and have been working on tackling the spam problem. There is still spam, but it is significantly less. I’ve already found countless games and apps that have had thousands of ridiculous 5 star reviews with worthless comments, links to porn sites, or scam ways to earn free credits.
I'll try to keep it short, so check out my blog www.kenthecow.com if you to learn more about AppRankings or check it out at http://apps.facebook.com/apprankings/?ref=tpt
PMs are welcome!

kenthecow

sorry if it was tldr! It's my first post in this forum!

I really like this idea (especially the supplier partnerships). What's stopping you from launching a MVP?

An app that keeps track of what I ordered at a bar/pub... After the 10th beer I really have no idea if I ordered 9/10/11 beers or whatever...

Probably just the fact that when I've worked on it I focus way too much on the VP, and not enough on the M.

It's very frustrating to try and create your own job-listing site (which is admittedly a ton of overkill) when you don't have the cash to throw around at it.

There's a pro-bono consulting group called CCT that operates out of Atlanta and Boston and does similar work to this, but uses professionals and is on a once-a-year schedule. I did a project with them last year helping out the Metro Youth Symphony Orchestra in Atlanta put together a strategic plan for attracting students and involving their past alumni. Two of their projects this year are actually working with their organization to help structure everything a little better.

I'm hoping to get on one of those and pitch the main people this idea as an additional way to get help to the small non-profits (especially on smaller-scale projects like designing marketing materials, or redoing a webpage). Then I could leverage their relationships in that space and also hopefully develop a new stream of volunteers for CCT after some of these kids graduate and are used to helping.

to get back to a burger restaurant, apparantly according to new research, people who ear 40-60k a year in the US go the most to mcdonalds.

http://www.mavericksoftwaregames.com/AppRankings.html

Has already branded "AppRankings" (just a headsup if you didn't know that already). failed app that scraped app rankings and gave a trending list in an analytic-based style.

Moreover I'm not sure Apple or Facebook will like you directly competing with their rating system on their own platform (in the case of Facebook I guess this could lead to an acquisition if they suspended their rankings).

Also, how would you monetize? What incentive does a consumer have to seek out and use an app to rate random applications? It seems like a catch 22 with regard to user generated content that would produce a significant enough signal for a company within all the noise.

what's mvp?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_viable_product

The businesses fulfill the orders themselves, just like ebay businesses fulfill their own orders. The idea is to make it very simple to list their current inventory online. Do it to enough businesses you can create a marketplace, from their you get buyers (consumers). The hardest thing about challenging a monopoly like ebay is nobody wants to be first. Supplier's don't want to sell because their are no buyers, buyers won't buy because their is no sellers. That's the problem you need to solve. UI etc is a moot point in my opinion, people will put up with an average interface and user experience if the marketplace is good enough.

Your idea is along different lines but of course doable.

A website where, before you go on vacation, you submit a few appealing photos of yourself and your traveling companions. Then while on vacation, you check in via your cellphone every time you are at a well known location or monument. After you get home you will be mailed prints of you and your companions edited in to postcard quality photos of said locations. Thus, you get professional quality prints instead of amateur snaps, and you don't have to lug around a camera or ask strangers to take pictures of you.

Is there a site now that you can put pictures of yourself up and it will place you in funny poses together?

jibjab is something that comes to mind but its videos

Whenever I see little kids in these nice new strollers I am always so jealous. So why not a nice, big, comfy, stroller for adults.

Find someone to push you around and you are set.

Calorie Hunter (quick and easy idea)

There are a lot of apps that help you keep track of calories. There are a lot of apps that list restaurants close to you. I'd like something that combines them both.

You put in how many calories you are willing to eat for a meal and get a list of menu options from nearby restaurants. You can build off of this to do meal-by-meal ratings and recommend other meals that fit in to their searches that you think they'd like.


Read for a Reason

All written works go out of copyright after a certain period of time (for the purposes of this discussion the intricacies of that time period isn't import but you can read up on it here if you're so inclined). This is why you see stuff like Project Gutenberg, or about a billion different publishers of $0.99 Huckleberry Finn ebooks on Kindle store.

Nothing makes them demonstrably different since they're all derivative works of the out-of-copyright original.

You could potentially differentiate this by do a mobile-designed website that offers free ebooks, a great reading experience, and intersperses specific advertisements that the user opts in to. The reason the user would opt in is that a portion of the advertising revenue they bring in for the company is shared with a charity of their choosing.

No idea if this is even economically feasible, but there you go.

As I've posted here before, people are working on ways to use FB/twitter to gain alpha thru stock investing from things as simple as the #of mentions of a product/firm [both good and bad] to more sophisticated ideas. Think about the CROX lifecycle.

It is obvious to see how this could be extremely useful at a small-cap HF. Or, if you started a firm selling this research to a small-cap HF. A dozen clients at 100-250k per annum, or a 10k per report basis, et al, is not that hard to imagine in a year or less.

If I was younger and had any programming skills, I'd start this firm tomorrow with 3-4 buddies. Worst case if you execute properly [as pure research] is selling it to some bigger research firm or bank for a few million each down the road. Best case is you launch a HF with some backing and become DE Shaw.

phone app for ordering at fast food places. they must be planning on mass replacing cashiers with computers pretty soon. seems like mcdonalds should have this already.

i know this exists but why dont bars have robots/machines bartending yet?

There's something to be said for the interaction with a human bartender, I think. Also, I'd imagine there is a concern about verifying ages and not over-serving drunk people.

That said, a friend of mine from school built a lot of the software for Table Tap, which is a company that designs systems for restaurants to put a self-service tap at the table. (fwiw, he's not listed on the website, so don't go telling Jeff that you know me and expect that to mean anything)

The way they get around these restrictions is by having a locking mechanism that stops the flow every 96 ounces. Then you have to get a server to come back by and unlock it for another 96 ounces. But I've used them in a couple restaurants, and it's super convenient for a small group. Once you get above 6 people though, that 96 ounce limit means you need the thing unlocked all the damn time.

I know he's gone around and done installs all over the country and Ireland. They did a test pilot at MSG for all the vendors there during the Big East tournament a couple years ago (they like it as an inventory control system rather than a self-service system since it has a flow monitor that records how many ounces are coming out and when).