Category: Ideas

Posted on

Idea: Cellphone Call-Again-If-Urgent Mode

Cellphones are a necessary evil. That’s the position I adopted after reading it somewhere. I believe it’s true – these days you really can’t get along without a cellphone. Believe me, I tried. I went on as long as I could, which was until I got a car. One of the ways cellphones changed the way we behave is that today it’s nearly impossible to pre-set a time and a place to meet someone. Remember the time when, if you wanted to arrange to meet a friend, you had to decide together on a time and a place? Seems like ages ago. These days it’s always “call me to see if we can meet”.

While this may be considered a good effect of cellphone adoption (I’m not always sure it’s good, but I digress), cellphones can be very intrusive. If you’re in a meeting, watching a movie or sleeping – people can get to you any time. If you don’t want to be interrupted you can always silence the phone or turn it off. Still, I need a mode in between – a mode that, if someone calls once, doesn’t light up, vibrate or ring unless the same person calls again immediately – then the phone should come back to life and do whatever the current mode instructs it to do (ring, vibrate, whatever).

Currently I “emulate” this when I’m in meetings. If a call comes in and I think the person may need me right now I send back an SMS saying “call again if urgent”. This can be part of the implementation of the call-again-if-urgent mode. I wonder if current smartphone software allows such control and if it can be implemented today. The best thing would be if the network supported it and so, assuming you urgently need someone, your cellphone will tell you that the callee set the call-again-if-urgent mode and ask you if you would like to bother him/her.

Posted on

Social Networks And Me

Social networks are the big thing these days. Recently I joined two social networks: LinkedIn and Facebook. LinkedIn, a business-oriented social network, was fun to play with at first. I, too, joined the “add your friends” race and added as many as I could find (I didn’t just add anyone, though. Only people I actually know well enough to consider contacts). After a while, I became bored with LinkedIn. There was just nothing there for me to do. I’m not seeking a new job, I’m not looking to “network” with high-profile names. I just have nothing to do there.

Facebook, on the other hand, gives users as much stuff to tinker with as they can handle. Considered a genius move, Facebook creators opened the site by providing an application API that can be used to create “Facebook applications.” There is a huge amount of applications, from gift-giving to playlist display and whatnot. You can post images, videos, thoughts and anything you can think of on Facebook.

There’s a lot of hype around Facebook with regards to the applications. However, the applications thing can be a little annoying. Let’s say a friend posted a song that can be listened to on his profile page. To listen to that song, I have to install the application on my profile as well. Why? I have no idea. I guess either that’s an enforcement of Facebook itself, or application makers are in a race to virally spread their applications to get better numbers in the overall application installation statistics. This kind of behavior makes me not want to use the website.

Recently, Google announced OpenSocial, a way to build social networks applications in a way that is independent of a website. While the OpenSocial group includes MySpace (the biggest, yet ugliest, social network that exists today), it doesn’t include Facebook. That’s a shame for application developers, considering that Facebook is rapidly growing and appears to have a better application delivery/installation mechanism than other websites.

Assuming I have an idea for a social network application, a few questions are bothering me:

  1. What kind of a business model can you have in an application that is hosted on another website? I’m guessing there is such a model or otherwise there wouldn’t be companies investing efforts in creating such applications.
  2. Should I create the application in Facebook? As an OpenSocial application? Both? Maybe I should create an independent website and hook it up to the social networks later?

Update: After writing this post I went to see a video that discusses the possibilities of monetizing on the Facebook platform in addition to the problems that Facebook application developers face today and why they simply have no choice but to make users install their applications to get recognition by more users.

Posted on

Ideas That Made Money Although They Shouldn’t Have

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 time I need to implement it.

MadConomist.com came up with a list of ten ideas that shouldn’t have been profitable, but were very much so. Some items there are really surprising. (via Digg)

Posted on

Synchronized Lyrics, (kind of) like my IKDB idea

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) now that they already show the album covers and art on the screen while playing songs. So – another one of my ideas gets implemented. I wonder what the lyrics format will be. If it will be an open one, I predict that pretty soon an open database will come to life.

Posted on

I should have followed my UQAN idea

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 very similar to my own UQAN idea. The new guy on the block is Answerbag and there are probably more to come (Google Answers is a paid service so it’s kind of different.)

All this brings me to the inevitable conclusion that I should have followed the idea of UQAN (Universal Questions and Answers Network) instead of dropping it a few years ago.

Posted on

Guruza – yet another UQAN implementation

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 work with a kind of honour system… I hope it’ll work.

Posted on

Illumio – they implemented my UQAN idea

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 never thought I’d actually get to implementing UQAN, and I want to see how Illumio turns out, I still feel like I should have done it myself. Oh well.

Posted on

IM Waiting

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 together, three of my contacts will start a conversation.

Personally I can’t handle three conversations at once. Actually I can, but I don’t stay as focused as I would like to be, especially if any of the conversations has any emotional value to me or to the other party and requires my full attention.

My idea is to have a call waiting feature for IM software. You define how many conversations you can handle and, assuming you’re already having that number of active conversations, when one of your contacts tries to send you a message she gets a message saying that she’s “IM waiting”. Just like phone call-waiting. Naturally, you will be notified that you have an IM buddy waiting for your reply, so you will have the choice of talking to her.

Note that this is different from having an “on conversation” status (or an automatic “busy” status, for that matter). This kind of status would let people track your talking habbits, so it would be the wrong solution.

Posted on

Lyrics/Karaoke Database

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 lyrics themselves, but also the information of where a line starts and ends, verses, choruses and one more thing – timing information. The timing information will be for media players to show the lines at the appropriate times according to the music, even to the level of specific words, so it can be used for karaoke as well.

Then the idea grew bigger – I thought about an Internet database for these files, just like CDDB. This way you won’t need all the web sites for lyrics and media players will be able to get the lyrics/karaoke information for a playing song.

This could simplify the world of karaoke DJs. These days a karaoke DJ walks around with DVDs or video tapes that contain the videos with embedded lyrics on them. With this karaoke database, eventually a DJ could tell the audience to bring their own CDs from home, and while playing them get the karaoke information from the Internet database. All this while playing a random karaoke-style video with the lyrics superimposed on it.

The only missing link was a lyrics file generator, which will be a simple add-on to widespread media players, and will allow anyone to create these files easily. For example, let’s say you have the lyrics for a song that you like, but there is no timing information. So what you do is you load the editor with the lyrics and play the song. On each new word you press the spacebar on the keyboard, and when the song ends you have a home-made karaoke file.

Posted on

An idea on how to fight adware/spyware

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 their interfaces yourself. Then, by changing the pointing GUID in the registry to a new DLL, which implements the same interfaces, Windows will load your stub DLL (which does nothing, for example) and this will disable the malicious software.

I admit that I didn’t look into it in enough detail to make sure it works, and right now I don’t feel like infesting my computer with crapware (nor am I going to buy virtual PC software) so I’m just wondering if it’s a good idea.