Archive for the ‘business idea’ Category

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A Thing Someone Needs To Build

Friday, February 26th, 2010

I have this vision of A Thing.  Right now it’s a cloudy vision, but I’d like to ask your help clearing it up.

The time seems particularly ripe for a Thing that helps People start Projects to make useful Stuff.  For example, people could collaborate to make a story.  Or get an idea patented.  Or start a distributed business making handicrafts, and connect to customers.  Of course, I say the time is ripe because of current employment market, or lack thereof.  The unemployed could be spending some of their time creating valuable stuff or connecting valuable stuff to people who need it – hence becoming employed.

The qualities this Thing would need (IMO) are:

  • easy and interesting to get started using
  • gives a comfy feeling that if the Stuff you’re working on generates revenue, you’ll get some kind of reasonable cut
  • helps People find Stuff that needs their talents
  • helps Projects find the talents (or other resources) they need to generate revenue
  • possibly include a system of currency so People with Stuff can trade it with other People for Stuff they need
  • helps People leverage other resources for their Project (e.g. instant messaging, wikis, etc.)

I kinda sorta started a wiki some time ago about this sort of Thing, but it never went anywhere.

Whaddaya think?  If someone built it, would they come?  Or is that impossible to answer without knowing a lot better what it is?

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Posted in business idea | 1 Comment »

The missing link

Thursday, November 26th, 2009

I forgot the link to the D&D treasure generator.

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Posted in gaming, webapp idea | No Comments »

Old school nerd^2

Tuesday, November 17th, 2009

I’ve been doing my nerding out lately building a git repository of python scripts that look up values in tables, and support things like random lookups and tables whose values refer to subtables.

Of course, the point of this was to pull in all the old first edition Dungeons and Dragons tables and generate treasure (including magic and generating the list of spells on each scroll), random encounters, etc.

If you find yourself in desperate need of a way to quickly generate the hoard for an ancient huge white dragon, I’ve got you covered. Or if you have some other batch of tables that you’d like to generate values from, drop me a comment and I’ll ship you my code.

At some point, I may build a little Choose Your Own Adventure style wiki-thing that lets you create CYOA adventures, complete with combat tables and random effects. Then you can send your buddies links to the online adventure you created.

Oh yeah, the link: http://bobbymartin.name/dnd1e/

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Posted in gaming, personal, software development, stuff I did (aka shameless plug), webapp idea | 5 Comments »

Simple web idea

Wednesday, July 1st, 2009

I’ve been thinking about building a web tool that lets you mash-up images, either from your hard drive (after you upload) or from a URL. For example, you could:

  • draw directions to your house on a map
  • put a flag where you sit on a company map
  • draw a mustache on a teen pop star
  • merge a pollution or school district map (or both) with a map showing your neighborhood
  • apply fog, black & white, etc. effects to a photograph online

A simple javascript interface that lets you change transparency and placement of one image on another, as well as choose from a palette & draw on the image, is all you’d need.  You could then send the URL to the image to friends.  You wouldn’t need to provide any hosting yourself – this is for quick & dirty hacks that pretty much anyone should be able to do.

Once again, a call for a vote: Would You Give a Shit?

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Inspired by ‘House’

Friday, June 5th, 2009

I *really* hope this already exists. It would be quite easy to put together a little statistics program that a doctor could enter the symptoms into, and would generate possible diagnoses.

I’m 100% sure that part exists, but there is another next step that would be nice. The software could also use the likelihood of errors in the diagnostic procedure (e.g. when the ’symptom’ is the result of a blood test) to determine when it’s more likely that there was an error in diagnosis than for it to be that rare Uruguayan parasite.

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Javascript info bar

Tuesday, May 19th, 2009

I was thinking it would be cool if you could put a little gadget on your site that displays blurbs from various sources, like tweets only in the form of a little bar on your website.  The look would be like the bar at the top of GMail, but you would define the content with a web page.

Here’s the kind of sources the page could list as content to display in the bar:

  • text blurbs like old unix ‘fortune’ entries
  • links to twitter feeds that you’d like to sample from
  • links to other source pages

So an example page might have in it:

  • Slow day.  Practice crawling.
  • Live in a world of your own, but always welcome visitors.
  • http://twitter.com/bobbydmartin
  • include:http://some.pbwiki.com/moreInfoBlurbs

Which would mean your text bar might display “Slow day.  Practice crawling.”, or “bobbydmartin tweets: Woohoo! Twitter account! New blog entry: http://blog.bobbymartin.name“.  Hitting the left & right arrows would rotate through the available entries.  Of course, some of your entries could be ads if you think your readers will be interested.

I’m trying to decide whether to build it or not.  Opinions welcome.

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iPhone app idea – Ex Out

Monday, April 13th, 2009

So, this the only other iPhone app that I’m currently seriously considering writing. I’m not 100% sure that it can be done in the time I’d be willing give it, with enough quality to be worthwhile, but I have a couple of ideas that I believe would make it work.

The app is called Ex Out, because what it does is let you remove things from photos. You pull up the photo, trace around the item (e.g. your ex) you want to remove, push the button… and wait… and voila! You get the same picture, with the item gone, and the space filled in a way that *usually* looks as if the picture was taken without the item. I.e. the background of foliage or whatever is extended out through the area where the item was, in such a way that the photo looks natural.

If this were sold on the iPhone for $1.99, would you buy it? Assume that on 2/3 of the pictures you try, the resulting picture really could pass as an unedited shot to the casual eye. On the other 1/3, it looks funky in some way that might be amusing, but would never be believed as a “real” photograph.

If I get enough interest, I’ll build it.

Posted in mobile idea | 1 Comment »

Some of my plans for the new blog

Friday, April 10th, 2009

I have way more business ideas than I’ll ever implement.   I think my problem with my ideas is that I don’t publicize properly, anyway, rather than that the ideas suck, or that my implementation sucks.  The other problem is that I don’t do much to continue development on my ideas once the initial release comes out, but that’s because I don’t get much response on the ideas.

So the plan is that I’m gonna post all of my ideas here, and you’re all gonna love them so much that you go check out the ideas that I did implement, and tell all your friends about them.  You’re also gonna tell me what you think about the ideas I post, so I know which ones to build, and which ones not to build.  Hopefully I can also build interest in the ones I’m building before I finish them.

Since I have a ‘personal’ category, I can also be more prolific posting on aspects of my life that most people don’t give a shit about.

Posted in business idea, personal | 2 Comments »

More from Bash.org

Monday, October 9th, 2006

I’m sorry it’s been so long since I’ve posted! I’ve been taking some family time, some hobby time [ geek out: my wizard hit 9th level ;-) ] , and working on MoochMuch.

Anyway, here are more funnies from Bash:

<goat25> what is the volume of a pizza of radius z and thickness a ?
<goat25> answer: pi z z a
—————————–
<w-ll-am> well its nearly working
<boltbait> You are aware, code that ALMOST works looks NOTHING like the code that ACTUALLY works.
<w-ll-am> dont tell me that, its due tomorrow
—————————–

Posted in business idea, funny, science, software development | No Comments »

Two things that would make web browsers way cooler

Friday, December 30th, 2005

I dunno how often it happens to you, but it happens to me all of the time: I go to download a big file, and tons of people are already sucking up the bandwidth, so you get nowhere. This is an easy problem to solve given the tools that already exist, and I’m at a loss to figure out why someone hasn’t already fixed it.

So, the overview is that I’m about to describe how we can turn the problem upside down: instead of it slowing you down when tons of people go to download a big file, your download rates would improve the more people go after it.

Step 1: Make browsers support bittorrent as a first class protocol. This would mean that when you click on a .torrent link, the browser would automatically kick off a torrent client and start the download, then when the download completes the browser would render the resulting file just like it was downloaded normally. If the file is something the browser knows how to render, it would just display it (e.g. a picture or an html page) and otherwise it would let you run the file from the browser (e.g. a wmv file or whatever).

Step 2: Provide a service that automatically torrents. This would be a service like the coral cache, but for bittorrent. You would hit a special URL within that server (e.g. http://autotorrent.net/[some other server]/[path to a file on that other server].torrent). If no torrent exists for the file provided by that URL, one would be created and seeded with the original file. If it already exists, you would just get back the existing torrent file.

What Step 2 would provide is a way for you to access any file as a torrent, whether the original publisher provided it as a torrent or not.

Step 3: Make the browser give you an option to right click on a link and download it through the service provided in Step 2, as a torrent. Just clicking the link would work as normal, but if you right click and select “download via bittorrent”, it would use the autotorrent service. Optionally, you could configure the browser to automatically stop a download that has a crappy dl rate and try the autotorrent link instead.

So, why don’t I just write this magical plugin for Firefox? I just might…

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