The Perfect Pitch - Biz Idea In 140 Characters

The business idea competition on Twitter hosted by @perfectbusiness completed. I covered this in an earlier post about what to do with your startup ideas.

Thousands of idea was Twitted in the short period of time, many of which are extraordinarily bright ideas. The final winner was indeed an excellent one, quoted here:

@perfectbusiness #micropitch Power from water: turbines safe for fish, drop-in w/no dams, 1M+ sites, helps 1B+ people www.hydrovolts.com

My idea 28 on mobile route sharing and smart calpooling was featured in the top 10 runner up. The full list is here.

Thank you @perfectbusiness! This gives me enough confidence to pursue the idea further and continue this blog with even better ideas.

image credit Sir Richard Branson & PerfectBusiness
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Entrepreneurs: Be An Enabler

Having a brilliant idea is still far from real entrepreneurship; striving to provide real value to real customers is.

One efficient way to do that is to be an enabler, an enabler in technology, relationship management, customer service, supply chain, or whatever area that is critical for your customers to do their business.

1. Develop a process, or as people in academia like to call, methodology.

It's better to know a whole lot about one thing, than a little bit of everything. Any Ph. D. graduate will tell you that a methodology with good theory can save a lot of hard work. Be an expert. Use the expertise to invent new ways of doing things, selling staff, or managing operations, not just a little better, but 10 times or 100 times better than the ordinary.

Sometimes, it requires a few genius minds to work things out. Just check the TED talks for some mind blowing new inventions, like the wireless power transmission; or the processor with order of magnitude less power consumption from PA Semi (accquired by Apple).

Other times, it's just a bag of accumulated tips and tricks. John Chow, like other probloggers, has developed a system of how to make a living through blogging, and enjoys a good life style teaching others doing the same.

2. Develop an algorithm to automate the process.

Don't stop at the methodology. Automate it. Turn it on and forget it, if you can.

Google is a great example of process automation. You hardly need to talk to a real person when dealing with Google services. It uses algorithms to figure out where the hotspots on the web-sphere are; uses algorithms to match buyers and sellers through keywords; uses algorithms to pull and push information to just about every corner of the web.

The electronic design automation (EDA) industry itself is enabling semiconductor design companies to tape out their chips faster, cheaper, with better quality. It emerged from simple drawing tools like magic and zero revenue in the early 80's, to now a $4 billion industry (estimate).

3. Duplicate the process.

With a methodology and automated process, all that's left is to enable everyone to do the same, so the entire world runs more efficiently. There goes your entrepreneurship dream and global impact.


Just some thoughts. If you liked it, good, subscribe the newsletter for more exciting updates; otherwise, let me know and let's start a conversation.

image credit estherase
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Idea 47: Voice Enabled Auto Tweet

I like one thing about human nature that is bringing a lot of motivation for technology innovations -- laziness! Yes, we are lazy, and we invent things to justify being lazy, which is good.

Today's idea is for all those lazy Twitter-holics. You don't have to type anything on the keyboard in order to Tweet your status. Just speak to the application on iPhone, or other mobile devices; the voice recognition software will translate the sentences to text, making sure it's within the 140 character limit, then transmit to Twitter server.

What would make it more interesting is, if it can understand emotions, and transcribe that into Tweets as well. Make a laugh, now you have "HAHAHA", or ":D" in your Tweets. That would be fun.

Or, how about automatically discover URL links? Whenever you say "Guy Kawasaki blog", it finds the URL and brings that link into your Tweet.

Lazy is good; lazy motivates innovation.

image credit Louise Lazell
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How To Generate New Ideas - Part 1

In this intriguing video presentation at MIT, Prof. Patrick Winston summarizes his recent research work on how to make computer smarter by developing algorithms to learn basic reasoning and associations, which he call "common senses".

The key insight is that creative thinking process of us humans, is not a linear progression of words or ideas, but rather a complex combination of images, languages, symbols, dialogues, and interactive feedbacks.

He summarizes four things to do in order to become smarter, which I agree and think are also the key points in coming up with creative new ideas.

1. Take notes - The act of taking notes forces us to reason about the thought, and use the logic of language to formalize the thought. With an iPhone in my pocket, it is now easier than ever for me to take notes anywhere, any time.

2. Draw pictures - We think with images. Even with things we have never experienced, we use our imagination to picturize sequences of images, no matter how blurry they might be.

3. Talk and imagine - We learn by talking. There are certain logic reasoning skills we acquire in our childhood only after learning how to talk. Talking not just solicits feedback of your ideas from others, but yourself also.

4. Tell stories - Life consists of stories. Ideas are illustrated best with real-life stories.

The video is rather long, but worthwhile to go through. If you're pressed on time, then check out the conclusions section, at around 41 minutes into the presentation.

video source MIT world
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Idea 46: Free Local Public Transportations

Today, I took the ferry between Wall Street and Staten Island. The view was simply amazing, blue waters and city landscape, under the bright sparsely decorated sky. I would say this is one of the must-do's for anyone visiting New York City.

Even more surprised to me was that the ferry is completely free, running every 30 minutes with heavy traffic, 7 days a week. Similar ferry in San Francisco, between the Pier 39 and Sausalito would have costed $22 round trip. Salute to the transportation department of NYC!

This got me thinking, why should we pay anything at all for local public transportation?

Local city buses, subways, ferries, should and can be made completely free! This would encourage every commuter to seriously consider abandoning driving, thus reducing our carbon emission, eliminating highway congestion, resulting cleaner air and better lives for all.

The online world has gotten used to free services with ads support. Why the same model can't be applied to public transportation? Make some creative use of the empty inner walls on the bus, in the subway, and in the stations. Free services will guarantee a huge spike in the amount of people taking these buses and subways, and thus the amount of eyeballs, which increases the value of these ad spaces also.

Let's learn something from the Staten Island ferry, and make public transportation free!


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Idea 45: Record And Share Your Life Style

iPhone is bloody useful. We touched merely the surface with idea on personal metrics for diet optimization, and idea on real-time route sharing for smart carpooling. Now with people sharing daily meal pictures on Twitter, it might be useful simply to record and share your entire life style.

That means recording the places you visit, thing you do, media you consume, people you befriends, what, when and how. The new iPhone app will have the following:

A push button to record the current time and place, and the reason you're here. It might takes a bit of discipline to form the habit of writing down the activity whenever you visit somewhere, but that might just prove useful. Over time, you'll leave a trace of footprints as to how you lived your life, what you've learned, what you did right, or wrong. It might help if there are pictures annotation as well.

Another button to start and stop the recording of real-time routing trace. When started, the app will intermittently query the GPS for current location, and record the complete travelling route, until the stop button is pushed. Want to share your shortest driving routes? Want to share your favorite running tracks, hiking tracks, biking tracks? This is the way to do it!

Life is short, interesting, and full of excitement. Why not record it, share it, discuss it, and pass it on?

image credit omar eduardo
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Six Things To Do With Your Brilliant Startup Ideas

You've got a brilliant idea for startup. What do you do? Hopefully this article will give you some ideas.

Before we jump in, let's make a few things clear. First, search around and make sure someone else hasn't already done it, because the same old ideas do get picked up again and again. Martin Zwilling has more to say about these recycled ideas.

Next, you probably heard that you should not hide your ideas in the closet. Chris Dixon explains why in this excellent article from both an entrepreneur and investor's point of view.

Knowing that the market for ideas does not exist, you can not sell it. (If not convinced, Joshua Gans' research paper may give you some theoretical grounding.) The best thing to do is probably find a partner, start a company, and make the idea work. But before launching the effort, following are six things you might consider.

1. Cultivate you ideas with community support

The best ideas usually emerge after a few rounds of brain storming, iterations of prototyping and tuning. The concept of real-time search was latched on only after many people have used it and explored for a long time. So iteration is useful. Embarkons.com is a social network platform for people to share, cultivate, and tweak ideas. There's even a market place for mature ideas to eventually find funding and launch projects. In addition to finding feedback and getting insights from other peoples' ideas, you may find biz partners as well.

Similar sites include Ideablob.com and Ideazinger.com. Ideablob also has regular $10,000 challenge, which picks its winner based on user ratings. It would be a nice bonus if you win.

2. Get funding from the crowd

If you are in the mature stage of an idea and want to seek funding for launch, there are a few places to look without bothering a VC. Kickstarter.com has a very interesting "all or nothing" model. You may launch a campaign for a pledge of X amount within say 3 months. If enough people pledge, you get the deal, or else, you still receive plenty of feedback and encouragement.

Similar sites include Joel Yatscoff's crowd-funding of ideas.

Update: Open Fund wants to fund your startup ideas related to the web and other emerging technologies. The first call for applications is open until Sep. 30, 2009.

3. Get noticed with a big corporation idea

If your idea is more on the improvement of a big corp guy, you may try sharing it on an idea exchange site like innocentive.com or ideasxchange.com, and hope it gets picked up. Chances are slim though.

Or, if your ideas are specific, these smart companies have established channels just to tune in to you: Virgin's entrepreneur got a big idea campaign, Dell's idea storm, Starbucks my starbucks ideas. These guys are on the front-line of biz innovation.

4. Enter a biz-idea competition

I was amazed at how many such idea competitions are taking place at any given time. Most of them are local though. One of a recent buzz was put forward by perfectbusiness.com, who invited Sir Richard Branson to review micro-business ideas on Twitter, each under 140 character limit. All you need to do is tweet your idea in reply to @perfectbusiness with hashtag #micropitch, to get a chance to win a $2500 trip to L.A. for further elaboration of your idea. A really neat idea by itself!

If you're into B2B selling, then take a look at another ongoing $10,000 startup idea challenge launched by Chinese Alibaba.com.

5. Have some fun with impractical ideas which you'll never implement

Ideas come and go. Some are witty, funny, intriguing, yet you just don't know how practical it is, then come to halfbakery.com. As the creator put it, it's a communal database of poorly thought-out ideas for inventions. Quite a lot of interesting people hanging out there, and once in a while, there is something truly unique pop up.

A good site almost always has a clone. For halfbakery, it's whynot.net.

6. Twitter.com

Well, if after exhausting all of above, you still don't know what to do with your brilliant, original, world-changing idea, then just tweet it on Twitter.com, and tweet it again. Search people from the keywords in your ideas and tweet them. Good things will happen.


That concludes my short summary of things to do with your brilliant startup ideas. Hope you found this useful. If you find any other ideas on ideas, please, do contact me and let me know. Thanks.

image credit Cayusa
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Idea 44: Stock Exchange For Residential Houses - Own A Piece Of My House

WSJ reported in May 2009 that more than 20% of US home owners now owing more than their houses are worth. If houses were stocks, they probably would have exited the long position by now. Why should houses be so illiquid?

The value of a company is extremely difficult to calculate, especially when intengibles are involved. In comparison, the value of a house should be much simpler. Why can't we operate a residential house ownership the same way as a corporation?

1. Let's have quarterly and annual reports. Fixed the roof, upgraded the appliances, or new carpets? Put it in the report. Let's have some debt, equity and cash flow numbers to back it up.

2. Partially separate the ownership and the right to live in it. Split the ownership into pieces so that anyone can purchase and invest.

3. Have a board of director and let the board decide major upgrades and home improvements. Of course, if you own more than 50%, you pretty much have the say.

It doesn't have to get so complicated by inviting thousands of share holders. In fact, issuing 20 shares can probably do the job.

Yes, this will likely cause some rapid fluctuation of home values, but no, it should be much safer than the hyper-leveraged mortgage-debt-equity derivative manipulations, which had disrupted the financial system in the first place.

photo credit seier
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Idea 43: AdSense For City Resident Street-Front Windows

June 18th, 2003, the way people do business on the web changed for ever. That's when Google launched AdSense. It's such a powerful business model that captures the long tail of online publishing.

The real estate in big cities such as New York are expensive, for a reason, location! A lot of people go there. For the same reason, why can't we cash in from the location by renting out street-front windows for ads just because they catch a lot of eye balls?

Using a similar business model as AdSense, one can connect empty ad spaces from millions of apartment dwellers, to ad suppliers and agencies. With creative, artistic designers, this may as well put some additional coloring in the dynamic city landscape.

To put this idea further, in fact, yellow cabs have lots of ads, outside and inside. Smart marketers have noticed that ton of turn-overs in and out the cab, which means gazillion eyeballs. Hey, why not stick some ad on my car also? I don't mind, knowing that it generates additional income. :)

Ad is a form of information transfer. If it delivers that right piece of information to the one in need, it's beneficial to both and our society. Shall we have more ads, please?

photo credit bass_nroll
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Idea 42: Relationship Analyzer - How Close Are You And Your Friends

How many friends do you have? Do you talk to them, or rather Twit? You may not realize, that the person you talk the most, share the most, connect the most may not be the one who you think is.

Have an algorithm to analyze your daily communication streams, Tweets, SMS, phone calls, emails, and then calculates, for each of your contacts, their degree of closeness from you.

Why is this useful? For a number of reasons, at least.

To set your priorities. What you want to achieve versus what you are actually doing. Have you called your mother lately? Call your mother right away.

To know yourself better. What is your biggest dream and untapped potential? If you're still unclear, the daily rumbling of yours might give some hint.

To discover friendship, and well other relationships. Who do you reweet the most? Who do you share the most tweet words, tweet links? If you chose to share the meta-data extracted from your streams, that may help the matching algorithm to suggest you some interesting fellows. (like an earlier idea here)

There might as well be other reasons that this can be useful. If you have one, do let me know.

photo credit loungerie
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