Idea-Mill.net

Blog Matchmaking

What does 'social networking' mean, anyway? My definition is that it's any activity online that people pursue expressly in order to interact with each other. Blogging, posting photos on flickr or videos on YouTube, podcasting, and building personal websites are all part of it.

What's usually left out of the 'social networking' discussion however are the dating and matchmaking sites. Yet here more than anywhere people are getting together in order to get together.

So why not combine the two?

Here's what I'd like to see: a dating site that pulls in content from people's 'social media' activities online in order to round out profiles. Everything people post to their blogs, photo streams, video uploads, etc. can be tagged. I would like to see a dating site where peoples' profiles are complemented by what they've tagged to be included. Likewise, this tagging would allow people to determine not just who is commenting on some of the same issues (like they can through technorati and other engines) but which of these people is in the market.

Would-be daters would give up their anonymity in some ways - it's easier to track back a blog or personal site to an actual person than it is a personal profile on Match.com (whose very business and revenue model requires anonymity and the site as an intermediary). But they would also end up providing a lot more information about who they are, what they think, how they interact, and what's important to them than most are able to reveal through the 20-questions that drive dating profiles. Plus, what would be augmenting their profile would not be content designed expressly for an audience of prospective suitors. This might make profiles richer, more authentic, less postured.

Maybe the site plays to this concept directly. Instead of "Favorite movies" a profile question could be "Which photo on Flickr that you posted be represents how you feel about your family?" The whole profile could be comprised of content already created and distributed.

What's the revenue model then, if the site is no longer the intermediary? I guess it depends on who owns it. There is undoubtedly a way for Match.com to incorporate some of this functionality and still preserve their role. But I think the opportunity is greater for someone that has the social networking in place to add this functionality, which would then increase their opportunity to monetize their existing social networking business - through advertising, sponsorships, etc.

I'm not a big fan of most of the new sites that hope to make money through online advertising - it's growing, but not nearly as fast as would be necessary to support all the ventures purporting to rely on it. But I do think this dating feature would give the right personal publishing platform a point of differentiation, create higher switching costs for its users (which is vital), and some new appeal for advertisers. Trouble is, I don't own one of those, so I'm giving this idea to you.

Text-to-List

Now that it's the holiday season, I spend a lot of time thinking about holiday presents. But I often get an idea when I'm not trolling for one. For example, a couple of weeks ago I was at my father's house on a quiet weekend. I suggested to his girlfriend and my niece that we break out the Scrabble and have a game. Great idea, but there was no Scrabble. Normally a discovery like this would prompt a search for a replacement activity. In November, it suggested a gift opportunity. So I made a mental note to remember 'Scrabble' to add to my holiday shopping list, which incidentally is an Excel spreadsheet with a column devoted to each giftee, using annotations like bold and italics to show purchased/received or ordered status.

The following weekend I took a getaway with my fiancee to St. Michaels, Maryland, a precious little town on the Chesapeake. One morning we hit the local shops, a context that generated a handful of gift ideas for her. Most weren't  things in the stores I could buy on the spot, so I had to remember them. Absent a pen and paper, but not my mobile phone, I sent myself text messages to my email address listing the items.

Incidentally, on the same trip I sent myself text messages to my email address listing other 'ideas' for this very site.

Good ideas come very often from observing how people use and modify existing products. I remember reading a case study in school once about product development at Whirlpool. They saw that their customers were buying gallon jugs of milk and jamming them into the shelves on the doors of their refrigerators, often bending or breaking the little shelf guardrail. Other customers were buying 3 or 4 half-gallons of milk to line them up along the door shelf, when a full gallon wouldn't fit. Whirlpool designers promptly increased the depth of the shelves on the fridge doors to accommodate the fatter gallon milk jugs, and then began marketing this feature expressly.

I'd like to find a way for my text messages to go straight to lists that are actually actionable and manageable, instead of to an inbox that I then paste into Excel (itself not a list management tool without some modification on my part). So imagine a website or widget that is pre-designed to take in lists - holiday shopping, grocery shopping, to-do, whatever - all the things we keep in our brain and try to remember, ultimately stressing us out with their insistent overwhelm. When we're at our computers, modifying each list should be easy (why I think a widget would be better than a site - you could drop it right onto a personal homepage or if it's an O/S widget right onto your desktop or dashboard). They should be shareable with multiple people having the ability to modify them.

And there should also be alternate means of adding to each list - SMS certainly, but also dynamic or recurring events, such as regular searches of retail or shopping comparison sites that add 'Buy iPod - $50 off this week at Radio Shack' or 'Transfer money from checking to savings' every month to cover the recurring payments in your online bill pay, or 'New product that meets your criteria now available at eBay'.

Not that I need more excuses to buy things. Maybe seeing all in one place everything I think I ought to buy, right next to everything I ought to do, will result in me contributing more to the economy as a producer than a consumer.

'I park like an Asshole' bumper stickers

Self explanatory, especially when you see demonstrations of sheer, unmitigated thoughlessness like this:

Plenty more offenses at Flickr.

I don't know if this is a business opportunity or a marketing opportunity, but I do know that if I had a dozen of these stickers in my glove compartment I'd go through them in a week

Coffee Connoisseur Travel Kit

Now that I've stopped drinking, coffee is my drug of choice. I got hooked on coffee during my first job out of college, when my boss signed me up for a Green Mountain Coffee Roasters subscription program. They're crafty somebodies over at Green Mountain. The minimum order for the subscription was something like 3 pounds every two weeks, roughly the equivalent of about 8 cups a day. I lived alone at the time and, combined with my father's waste-not ethic, it's no surprise I quickly spiralled into addiction.

I don't know if mine is the average addiction, however. I'm not a coffee snob. When I travel and there's nothing in the hotel room but the bitter-bag-o-blend, or I'm at a rest area and the only place open is a Roy Rogers with a half pot of sludge on the hob, I'll still belly up. With me and coffee, it's a bird in the hand philosophy. If I happen to see a Starbucks or Caribou 10 minutes later, I have another hand for another bird.

I probably would be a connoisseur if I had any self-restraint. Or if I had a Coffee Connoisseur Travel Kit. Its purpose would be to enable anyone who loves coffee to enjoy it fresh-brewed wherever they are. It's a self-contained kit that has everything necessary for storing, brewing and - importantly - repeating. Ideal for the coffee lover on the move.

Here's what it might contain:

• French Press
• Portable  Water Heater (this is the missing link, I think - portable water heaters exist, like this one from Coleman that runs on propane. But other power sources would be more appropriate, which I'll get to in a minute)
• Mug(s)
• Canister for coffee beans or grounds
• Portable bean grinder (like this hand-crank)
• Thermos to keep milk or cream chilled
• Small canister for sugar
• Necessary scoops and stirrers
• Travel bag or case

The important question is what actually constitutes 'on the go'? Is it camping or hiking, where you're removed from civilization but want to carry with you some of the creature comforts you're addicted used to? Probably not - it's simply not feasible to be a connoisseur of anything when your bedroom is a 1/16" swatch of nylon and your bathroom is a shovel. There are plenty of camping coffee solutions available, but none that rise above bird-in-the-hand status. Carrying your domicile on your back entails some necessary compromises, connoisseurship among them.

Is it business or vacation travel, typically by air? Here, you'd only be able to use your Kit when you weren't actually in the act of traveling. So carrying it around, checking it onto the plane, and carting it to your hotel room may ultimately yield diminishing returns if the place you're traveling to has decent coffee.

So that leaves car travel. There's enough room in the car for the kit, and little need to carry it anywhere other than door to driveway to motor lodge or tailgate party or campground or fishing boat. I'd start there and then see which of the above components are need-to-have, and which are nice-to-have.

Keeping in mind that the objective is to solve a problem - which would also have to be clearly defined before beginning. Is the problem:

1. The unavailability of B+ or better coffee at periods when decent or better coffee would be desirable
or
2. The unavaiability of A/A+ coffee at periods when premium coffee would be desirable

If the conculsion (via hunch or research or whatever other means available) yields (1), then the bean grinder could be done away with. If you're going full gourmet, it's a necessary inclusion. (And it would have to be a burr grinder, not a blade grinder.)

But the other consideration is how 'unavailable' are we really talking about? Are we on the interstate where we could at least stop for hot water and cold milk? Or do we need to be entirely self-contained, in which case we'd even need a place in the kit for the bottled water used for brewing?

My guess is that if George Foreman can make and market 12 different variations of his grill, there are as many iterations of the Coffee Connoisseur Travel Kit brewing as well, for different applications and functions. The first and easiest to market would be one that relies on existing components: thermos, canisters, french press and spoons - all in a bag and ready for picnics, soccer games, fishing and hunting excursions, and road trips. But a battery or 12-volt auto charger powered water heater could be a real gamechanger, and open up a niche not yet tapped.

At the very least, it would create something to give my gadget-loving father for Christmas, since he already has two of these, three of these and four of these.

The Modular Kids' Car Seat

Why is it that the smaller the person, the more space is required to transport them around? Throw a young-un in the car and you also have to find room for the stroller, diaper/toy/snack bag, and whatever other accessories you've deemed essential for your bundle of joy's joy.

And then there's the car seat, perhaps the most short-sighted invention ever to achieve raving success.

Remember when the family car actually used to be a car? Today the most popular car on the road is something like the Toyota Camry, a modest sized sedan or wagon with seating for 5 adults. It's economical to own and drive, reliable, and equipped with all the safety features responsible parents look for. Good honest transportation. You could say the same thing for dozens of other cars and wagons and SUVs - perfect family vehicles, differing largely in the quality and quantity of their accoutrements to satisfy families' different tastes.

But what they have in common is less interesting than what every single one of them lacks - enough room for 3 small children in the back seat. Put an infant or toddler seat or even a booster in the back and suddenly your back seat for 3 adults has enough room for one adult and a diaper bag. Strap 2 seats (of any variety) in and your diaper bag had better be a fanny pack. My own car is a wagon the size of a Subaru Outback, with seating for 5. I've got seats in the back for my 3- and 5-year-olds and the cup holders on the seats brush against each other. I couldn't strap a goldfish in between them without feeling remorse that I'd cramped his quarters.

I did a lot of research on this, which meant that I looked it up in Google. There are no shortage of online forums where people discuss this very idea - how do I get 3 kids in car seats into the back seat of my car? Here's one of many examples:

Best vehicle for my 3 kids under 3 years old

Invariably, the feedback comes back the same - Get a minivan a SUV with a 3rd row of seats. Either way, that means get rid of the 'family' car in exchange for a family truck. One that takes up more parking lot space, has a bigger footprint on the road, guzzles more gasoline, and in general is less respectful to society than a smaller 5-person car which should actually accommodate 5 people.

Families should not have to get a new car just because they have a 3rd child, or because one of their two children have a friend who needs a ride to pre-school once in a while.

So how about this: A modular car seat system where the seats (infant, toddler, booster) are designed expressly to fit 3 across a standard-sized car. I'm no engineer but it seems to me there must be a way to safely put a child who is 12" wide at the shoulder into a space less than 18" wide. You know how airplanes have shared arm rests? Why can't car seats have a shared should bolster? Or cupholders that don't enlarge the footprint, or at least interlock with each other, or something?

My idea would be a rail system that is secured to the back seat using the car's existing restraint systems. The seats could then snap or slide onto the rail and interlock with each other in some way, based on their design. The rails would come in varying lengths based on the car (like roof rack rails and systems, though the need for variety wouldn't be nearly as complex). One option for each however would need to be a 2-wide rail, so that two car seats could go into the back and still leave room on one side for someone to sit without a car seat.

Also using this system, it would be easier (and probably less expensive) to swap out seats for different occasions, and as children grow. Snapping or sliding them on and securing them would have to be designed to be relatively easy, especially since the straps and tethers would be to the rail system and already in place.

Want to turn this into a bigger opportunity? Design center consoles with entertainment systems or toy bins or juice box holders or whatever that will fit and use the space perfectly between two seats on either end, so that the system has appeal to families with two kids as well. Need to give a friend a lift to school? Lift out the console and snap in a 3rd booster. You're done, and on the road.

This is the one idea I wish I had the time and know-how to pursue on my own. I can't, and I'd rather see someone follow through with it than never have it materialize. If I'm giving up my inventor's profit so that families don't have to needlessly upgrade to bigger, costlier, environmentally sensitivelesser trucks and vans, well, that's worth more to me than bragging rights on an idea that never goes anywhere.

Someone have at it, please.

How to Contribute an Idea to Idea-Mill.net

Have an idea of your own you want to be free? Send me an email with the idea and as much context or thought around it as you care to pull together, and I'll review it and post it.

Oh, and you can make money in the process. Read the FAQs below:

Contributing an idea FAQs:

How do I contribute an idea?
Via email. Use full paragraphs that don't need to be edited. It should be spell-checked, grammar-checked, fact-checked and ready for posting.

Why would I contribute an idea?
Because you've come up with a way to make the world a better place, or make people's lives easier or more rewarding, or simply found a way for someone to make some money. And now that you've got this idea, you're probably not going to do anything about it anyway except bellyache when someone else finally does it, lamenting that it was your idea and that you wish you had done something with it. Giving it away IS doing something with it.

Why should I give a lot of context instead of just giving you the elevator pitch?
The further along you can show that the idea is, the more likely someone will recognize its potential and want to run with it. Also, more context makes the idea more actionable, resulting in a greater likelihood that someone might make an offer on the idea in order to keep it from would-be competitors.

If I change my mind, can I have my idea back?
No. Once you give it to me, it belongs to the world. But you can always make an offer on it.

If someone makes an offer, how much do I get paid?
You and the offerer will agree on a price. You'll get all of it, sans a 10% commission.

If I accept an offer on my idea and get paid for it, do I give up all rights to the idea?
No, nothing here is protected in any way. You're not selling the idea; you're agreeing to have the idea taken down from this site so it's not visible to anyone else. But you still have it, and until it's patented or trademarked or otherwise protected, you can do whatever you want with it.

What if I use the money I get from an offer on my idea as seed money to fund the same idea?
That would be ballsy. And ironic. But since I came up with it first, it would also be unoriginal. (And given this context, even more ironic.)

Like an Idea here? Make an Offer.

See an idea here on the site that you like, and want to somehow implement or launch? Everything here is free - go ahead and take it.

But know also that if you found it, some current or would-be competitor has also. It's out there in the ether and cached within Google's servers somewhere, and there's nothing I can do to bring it back. So speed to market is your best friend right now.

But you can give yourself an advantage. Make me an offer for the idea and if I accept it, I'll remove the page with the offer from this site completely. The idea isn't patented or trademarked or copywrighted or otherwise protected so you're not buying any exclusivity. You're just removing it from view from everyone who visits this site after you.

Who might that be? I always keep my Sitemeter open so you can look at this site's traffic, and I publish the number of feed subscribers as well. Look over in the left margin under 'Site Traffic.'

Offer FAQs:

How do I make an offer?
Send me an email and let me know which idea you like, and how much you offer. We'll then correspond via email or phone until we reach an agreement. Or not.

How much should I offer?
Some products are cost-based. Some are value-based. These ideas are neither, because cost-based pricing would put them at $0, and you and I will never agree on value-based pricing. So these are offered at whim-based pricing. I have no idea how much they'll go for.

When will you let me know if you accept the offer?
You're offering to give me (or someone else who has contributed an offer to the site) real money for a concept conjured up at no cost. Believe me, your email gets a high priority.

If you accept the offer, when will you take down the page?
Once the money hits my PayPal account.

Once the page is down, do I own the idea?
No, you haven't bought the idea and own absolutely nothing. You've paid for the page with the idea to go away. Anyone else could still move forward with the idea, including the person who came up with it in the first place.

The Idea behind Idea-Mill.net

What I do for a living now isn't what I expect to do for a living forever. But changing careers isn't easy, even when I figure out what it is I actually want to do.

What is easy is coming up with ideas. I don't know if I'm good at it, but I know I enjoy it. And I believe that any career should have two requirements:

1) You're good at it
2) You enjoy it

So far, I've been choosing careers based on what I'm good at. Great for making money, making your mark, gaining some confidence. But lousy for personal fulfillment unless it's also something I enjoy. And since - whatever my job - I end up working a lot, I'd like to find something I really enjoy doing. So I'm going to start instead with doing what I enjoy, and seeing if I'm good at it. Implicit in there is the perhaps unrealistic assumption that someone will pay me for it, but I think if you look hard enough you can find a way to make money doing almost anything.

So maybe someone will jump on one of these ideas and want to build it out.

Or there's a prospective employer out there who will pay me to think up new stuff - maybe a think tank or VC or incubator or restless multi-millionaire.

There's also the (remote) possibility that this little site is the idea itself, and evolves into some sort of idea exchange that not only generates ideas, but also generates some income.

Thanks for stopping by. Hope you find an idea you like, or have an idea you'd like to share.