Every once in a while someone comes to me asking if I want to participate on a new idea. I guess everyone wants their “million dollar exit”. Naturally, so do I. Unfortunately I haven’t made any progress lately with ideas, but I’m not pushing it – when the right idea comes, I’ll have all the [...]
A long time ago I told you about an idea I had for a lyrics database that could also be used for Karaoke (previous post link). Now I read that Microsoft’s Zune (the failing-so-far iPod competitor) is going to get a feature called “Synchronized Lyrics”. This is a reasonable advancement for digital audio players (DAPs) [...]
Another day goes by, and another questions and answers service comes up. As this TechCrunch article suggests, Q&A services are growing bigger because people are better answer-givers than search engines. Yahoo! Answers is now the biggest Q&A service around, but more and more are popping up. I already wrote about Guruza and Illumio which look [...]
Following Illumio, another implementation of my own UQAN idea has surfaced lately. This time – Guruza – where you ask a question and state how much you’re willing to pay for a good answer. Then you enter a chat and when you’re satisfied with the answer, you pay the “expert” who answered it. Seems to [...]
Here’s another old idea of mine that gets implemented by someone else: Illumio (NY Times story) is the implementation of my UQAN idea for distributing questions over a network of users to get answers from apparent experts. Here’s Illumio’s website although there’s not much to do there. I have mixed feelings about this. Although I [...]
I’ve been using IM (instant messaging) software for years. Currently I have 55 contacts in my MSN Messenger list. Generally speaking, at any given moment around 15 of them are online. One of the things that keep happening to me is that days can pass by with no one talking to me and then, all [...]
A conversation with a friend reminded me about an idea I had a long time ago. There was a karaoke thing at work, and I thought it would be nice if there was a standard file format (say, a derivative of XML) to contain song lyrics. This kind of file will include not only the [...]
This is a short idea… adware and spyware authors rely on connecting to some of Windows’ (or Internet Explorer’s) services through the Windows Registry. Generally speaking, there’s a DLL somewhere, which is pointed to by a GUID in the registry. It’s possible to know, from the DLL, which interfaces the classes inside implement and implement [...]
While reading this post about C# 3.0 on MSDN Blogs I thought about an idea to make pluggable compilers. Let me explain: In every programming language the language designers have to decide which features go into the language and which features stay out. These decisions are crucial to the development of a language and the [...]
Previously, I wrote about experimenting with TAPI3. TAPI3 is Microsoft’s implementation of a Telephony API for Windows. One of the new things in TAPI3 (except for being implemented using COM) is that in TAPI3 the abstraction of the API goes beyond phone devices, and also includes H323 (which is a Voice over IP protocol) telephony. [...]