Published on September 30, 2007
in Ideas.
We could all use more friends. FYI, this is not swinging. My wife and I enjoy going out with other couples and would like to meet more people where we all four enjoy each other. Sometimes with couples, the men get paired up and the women. One of my friends is always complaining that he hates the husbands of his wife’s friends. But, she’s the one always organizing the social calendar. They would probably have more fun going out if they were both excited to hang out with the spouses.
What if there was a dating site for married couples? Where a couple profile was created with some shared tools that let couples find each other for friends, to go out to dinner, and maybe play games or whatever you like to do.
Published on September 30, 2007
in Ideas.
I’m getting on a roll with dating ideas. Have you ever wondered what makes a successful relationship? Or looked at another relationship and thought, I’m so glad that’s not me. Or thought. Wow. They have a great relationship.
Today, we went over to Berkeley to visit our friends new house and some other friends drove up from Palo Alto with their two week old baby girl, Julia. Julia is especially sweet! A beautiful healthy baby. Julia is luckier than she could know. She has two of the most considerate parents that appear to be truly supportive of each other. The other couple is remarkable well matched as well. The interesting thing is each of these couples is very different. The way they interact with their spouses, their families and the people around them is all different, and totally distinct. At the same time their relationships work extremely well together.
So, here’s the idea. To profile married couples about themselves and their relationship with their spouses. Find out how healthy their relationships are. Then to correlate a personality type to other people with the best chance of creating a successful relationship. At the same time, it can be used to identify predictors of doomed relationships.
An interesting twist on this would be to let married people with healthy relationships see the single people that match them and help them with their dating or offer relationship advice. Or a tool could be created to let people plug-in information about their relationship that shows the chances of success, or if they’ll get married and how long they will be married. It could be pretty entertaining.
Published on September 30, 2007
in Ideas.
I’ve asked several people the question lately if they think there is room for another online dating service. The response is a resounding YES! Why, you might ask. The answer if fairly simple. They are motivated to date. For lots of different reasons. Some what casual sex. Some what wives. Some whan to meet new people. The reasons don’t matter that much. What does matter is, why do they think there is room for another dating service.
The reason. They quickly go through the available candidates at each service and find that there is huge overlap in the dating pool across sites. What they really want is to go to a dating site with fresh faces.
It makes a ton of sense. If you are recruiting employees, you don’t want to look at the same resumes over and over. You want fresh candidates that meet your needs. So, here’s an idea for a dating site.
- Find a way to expose people for dating that they haven’t met before or seen on another dating site. Or put it this way. Prioritize connecting people that have never seen each other in person or online.
This could be done by collecting information about which dating sites they use and cross referencing it with information about their ideal dating relationship. I haven’t thought too much about the technology behind this, but it would basically be a way to expose me to people that I may like, but that I have never met anywhere. You could use wisdom of the crowd technology to flag people where they have been spotted before and exclude them from each other if it is likely they overlapped. Like flagging a person that you saw on Match or Plenty of Fish and annotating it with a time frame.
Anyway. I still think there are great opportunities in dating and if you can expose people online to the products that they might like, but haven’t seen could be big business. Kind of like shopping recommendation engines.
Published on September 30, 2007
in Ideas.
I think most conferences are a waste of time and money. However, there is the occasional gem that makes it worth the time away, hotel, flight, meals, and conference costs.
For the people that exhibit at conferences usually a customer or two makes it worth the fees. Or for the people that sell at trade shows. They can get half a years worth of orders at a single show if they nail it. I know one successful business that does about $5 million a year in sales that does all their business through three trade shows per year.
But. For the people that pay to attend. I doubt that it’s usually worth it. Some people hype up the out of session networking. Or how cool it is to hang out with people and talk shop. When I read SEO Black Hat’s Conference Strategy posts, I thought, good idea.
With so many sessions at leading conferences getting video taped, it would be quite easy for someone to aggregate and organize the information online so that people can get the benefits of the worthwhile sessions. Although. They’ll still miss out on the late night bar sessions that few remember any way!
Published on September 30, 2007
in Ideas.
My parents just left after coming up for my brother’s annual Augustfest party that is a take off on Oktoberfest. It’s a great party. They serve oak pit barbecued sausage with German Mustard. I ate three, but should have held it to two. Anyway, the party is great. Lot’s of people, sausages, beer and games. It’s a big party and they even have committees to organize everything.
This is where the idea comes in. Any big event like a major party, a wedding or class reunion has lot’s of things to organize. For the budget minded party thrower, they often do their own coordinating. They make a guest list. Maybe in a spreadsheet. They send Evites out. They plan the food, music, decorations and activities.
Once the party is over, there is party review. Was there enough food. Yup, about 50 extra sausages. Was there enough beer. Yup. We only drank half of the three kegs. What should we do with the extra beer? Keep drinking…Were the games fun, did we have enough of them. Were the parents able to enjoy the party? Yes, they had a sitter come. Good call! In the end, there was a lot they did right. And a lot of waste. It could have been planned with less excess, the party would have been just as fun and they could have saved a ton of money.
How about one system that pulls the party coordination all together?
Features include
- Evite style invites
- Food quantity estimates based on the number of people that are coming. This would solve the over/under ordering problem.
- Committee organizers for the people in charge of decorations, setup, cleanup, music, food
- A budget tool to estimate costs
- A childcare tool to plan the number of sitters for the kids
- Recommendation tool that suggests items you may have overlooked like vegetarian food items, diet sodas, games etc.
- Weather tool that lets you know the chance of rain or how hot it will be to consider heat or cooling and shelter requirements for the venue.
- Potluck tool if others are going to contribute food
- Theme tool to give ideas and supplies for specialty parties like cocktail parties or 80s parties…You get the idea.
- Directions to get to the party. Including alternative transportation options for drinkers.
- A photo and videos section to post pictures of the event
If this could all be wrapped into a nice set of wizards and checklists, I think it would be a great tool for the do-it-yourself party thrower.
Published on September 28, 2007
in Ideas.
One of the most difficult things for Internet companies is selling ad inventory. Lots of ad networks now exist from contextual networks like AdSense to vertical networks like the women focused Glam. They work because they can aggregate a large audience that gives advertisers the reach they need and they can sell to national advertisers which means they only need a presence in a few major cities.
However, one of the largest markets and fastest growing is for local advertising. The challenge has been that it is very difficult to sell into these markets.
So the idea is for a local ad exchange that aggregates content focused on local topics and that let’s anyone sell the inventory. I believe this selling is a bit like selling traditional yellow page ads where you need feet on the street to sell. With the key difference that all sales people are independent contractors.
I’d have two programs. One that recruited local publishers and another that trained people how to sell.
The system would need decent inventory control, excellent customer service and a very well done training program.
This could turn into a grind it out business, but the company that figures out how to scale local ad sales is in for a tidal wave of good fortune.
Published on September 27, 2007
in Ideas.
I believe that if we track it that we can do a much better job at optimizing it. I also believe the most valuable and perhaps wasted resource we all have is time.
There are applications that track your spending, applications to tell you where you are, applications to manage a schedule, applications to track how you use your RSS reader, but nothing that actually tells me how I spend my time.
I do know that if I plan my day the night before I’m twice as productive as when I don’t. I also know I get more done when I’m swamped than when I’m not.
So imagine an application on your PC that every time you switched applications that it logged when you did it and for how long. The application would be categorized like outlook would go into an email. And maybe even a little bluetooth sensor that made you log when you went somewhere like a meeting or lunch. After a week or two you would get a report that said how you spent your days. How much time you did each activity, when you did it, number of activities per day and the list goes on and on.
Than all this data could be aggregated and analyzed. For example, a sales team could use it to see how the top performers spend their time and help others perform better. Also, the personal humiliation of how much time I spend in my RSS reader might help me be more judicious like quicken does for how much I spend in restaurants.
This may feel like a little big brother. But. I bet there are lots of commercial uses for something like this. And if we managed our time a little better the compound effect would be enormous for each of us.
Published on September 27, 2007
in Ideas.
I read this post about education on foreclosures, which somehow lead me to thinking about buying and selling houses. Real estate fees are stupid. What costs 6 percent for sticking a listing In a database? However those are the rules of the game - at least for now.
If I were an agent, I’d have a digital camera, blog and a phone that does email (another blackberry curve review). With that I’d kill it.
Every week I’d go on the tour of new houses and take pictures of the homes that came on the market. Then I’d do a write up of each home and evaluate it on location, schools, price, yard and floor plan. That’s it. I’d do a post for each house that came on the market and tell it like it is. None of the flowery BS language that agents use.
For a little more content I’d do evergreen posts on the schools and other things to link to from my posts.
Two things would happen. I’d establish myself as an agent that works and I’d own the SERPS for my local real estate market that would generate a ton of leads.
Published on September 26, 2007
in Ideas.
The excitement of a new blog disipates when you quickly realize that not even your mother knows your writing a blog. Hmm. You don’t want to spend any money. You don’t want to be lame and post it on Digg or Reddit for the first 20 visitors and you know that pumping out content will work, but you want a kick start.
Here are a few ideas of how to kick start a blog.
- Write a guide on how to start a blog and throw in a few trackbacks to recent posts on the same.
- Mention you have a feed. Hey, I have an RSS feed. Add it to your reader and you’ll get this little bit of daily ideas. ShoeMoney says that each subscriber is worth like $2. Well, that’s for him. I bet subscribers to this blog are worth about 1/3 of that if I ever add ads. None the less. ShoeMoney is solid gold. And you can launch a blog on a few dollars. Although I’m not quite ready to spend any.
- Make outrageous statements. And. Stand behind them. OK. Here’s mine. The economy is going to get hot. Real hot. It’s going to make the bubble look like an ant hill. And it’s going to run strong through 2010.
- Share a little extra. Jay just told me about this deal and I’m sharing it with you. There is a very good deal on memory. I just pulled the trigger.
Published on September 26, 2007
in Ideas.
We’ve all heard ideas are a dime a dozen. The truth is. They are. The good news is I have thousands. So that’s at least a couple of bucks. Don’t worry, I’m not planning on supporting my three daughters with this.
The hard part about ideas is making them a reality. And. The moment you start. They start changing. That’s a good thing. But, to start, you need a seed. Hopefully, we’ll seed lots of ideas.
I once wrote a new business idea down every day for a year. And just because I stopped writing them down, doesn’t mean they stopped coming. As I sit here I just had three that could be viable companies. So here are my thoughts. Mostly from the J.
