Idea 35: Everything Controversial - The Wikipedia Of HotOrNot

Can't seem to find a central place where people's opinions are aggregated for all controversial issues. Religious articles are frequently ousted from Wikepedia; one can only find average looking pictures on hotornot.com anyway. People express their opinions on blogs, comments, taking polls with surveymonkey, but how to mine that data and generate useful information and insights?

Here's an idea. Host a stackoverflow-like user generated content site, where users can propose a controversial issue, post opinions and articles on any existing issue, or rate other users' articles. The end result is an aggregation of user produced, user rated, meta-tagged opinions and reference information for any controversial topic.

It's different from urtak, where you see no user comments or reference links except the percentage numbers; it's different from whereistand, where, similarly, you hardly find people's rationales, or the reasons why people take a particular stand on a particular issue. In other words, the underline wisdom of why people make choices for a controversial issue is missing.

In sum, the new service will not only provide the statistics, but also references, information on the backgrounds, and most importantly, the wisdom behind people's minds. As I have commented before, the user voices can be extremely valuable and represents a potential gold mine.

Update (8/23/2009): dibake.com provides such a forum for user rated discussion on controversial issues.

photo credit slworking2

Idea #26 Twitter Automated Polling By @Replies

A phenomenal amount of online activities and user opinions are being expressed in Twitter.

4 startups that facilitate polling opinions on the Twitterspere, plus Twtpoll. Well, not quite satisfying. Users have to be redirected to a separate website.

How nice would it be if I can directly "tweet" my answers and it gets automatically captured ? Here's an idea to do that.

Ask your question by a reply to @_poll_ with hash tag describing the name of the poll, and "Q" indicating this is a question. Example: "@_poll_ #abortion Q: should be legalized yes or no ?"

Answer your question by a reply to @_poll_ with hash tag as poll name, and "yes" or "no" indicating your answer, with a possibly briefly extended description. Example: "@_poll_ #abortion Yes support legalized abortion".

The answers will be automatically captured by software through Twitter API and populated to database for analysis. Quite simple, eh ?

Let me know if this would be useful.

photo credit Neil Wykes

Idea #25 Fund Raising Through Crowd and Peer-to-Peer Banking

Capital is the life blood of the free market economy. The future of capital will not be the conservative bankers and the over-paid investment bankers. The future of capital, I believe, is the crowd, i.e. crowd funding and peer-to-peer banking.

Rather than counting on a few venture capitalists, crowd funding raises fund by appealing to a large, really large, number of ordinary people for small donations or investments. So far it has worked brilliantly for a number of cases in the media industry, film and music making, by attracting funding from the community of future customers. See Wall Street Journal, Time, and PBS.org.

By appealing to the crowd, i.e. the long tail, it significantly lowers the risk on the investor side. At the same time, the project needs to be so appealing, it needs to acquire a large audience, either through the statue of the initiator or the idea itself. I guess this is also why it has worked for the media, but not yet for the technology industry, not enough geeks.

There are also regulations from the Securities and Exchange Commission that limits the form and amount of equity investments, for instance lending site prosper.com is working hard to gain access across all states. However, I believe as technology and innovation marches on, the regulators will have to adapt.

Entrepreneurship is the ultimate driver behind long-term economic growth. We need to enable entrepreneurs to pursue their passion by allowing capital to flow as liquidly as possible to the innovators, inventors and game changers.

Peer-to-peer banking enables that. It significantly lowers the risk on the buy side, and bypasses the resistive conservative bankers in the middle. We need non-profit peer-to-peer loan service Kiva.org to thrive, and we need for-profit peer-to-peer banks.

Feasible? Impossible? Please use the comment form to give your feedback.

Idea #23 How to Generate The Best Ideas For Art And Business - From Crowd

Threadless is a web service that sells artistic T-shirts. All shirts are designed by the member artists, voted by members, and eventually sold to the members. Taking this further, Twitter Tees allows the same community members to design T-shirts from their Twitter updates.

This is a excellent concept for generating the best ideas for art, and in fact, business.

• Don't know what product will sell ? Ask the community.
• Don't know how to design the product ? Ask the community.

As long as there is a virtual platform to gather a large group of people with common interests, enable them to contribute, vote, and exchange ideas and designs effectively, this is going to be a bulletproof business plan.

It is slightly different from crowd sourcing, which was made popular by Jeff Howe in an article in the Wired magazine. Crowd sourcing, like out-sourcing, is to completely hand the problem to a group of people, who would design their solutions separately and one winner takes the final award. What's more important is the collaboration between members that gradually build up an ideas or concept.

In summary, I think the Threadless concept can be generalized to many areas of design that requires creative thinking and collaboration among a group, reminded me of open source silicon. I further think this is a unique business model that will appear more often in the near future. How about a threadless furniture design store, community designed Ikea ?

photo credit Franco

Idea #20 User driven project specification

One of the ingredients for success often quoted is to reach out to customers with a less than perfect product as soon as possible, and gradually refine the product with constant user feedback. Now with the communication mediums shrinking the distance between people, one can collect a tons of feedback even before a project starts.

Check out how the New York City office is collecting big ideas for making the Big Apple a better place - http://bit.ly/bigideas.

Companies like urtak.com and uservoice.com are making the collective wisdom of the users work for you, letting the biggest ideas shine.

Want to start up a new company in the Electronic Design Automation business ? Check and contribute your ideas here - urtak.com/u/eda.

Idea #10 - Automate the customer support of server applications

The high cost of product support is affecting the financial health of the Electronic Design Automation (EDA) industry. Each developer in RD needs to be matched with one application engineer (AE) or product engineer (PE) to sell and support the software, making sales un-scalable.

Use intelligent software and online service to automate the after-sale support of EDA products, such that the design technology can be easily deployed to a large audience of the semiconductor design community at a moderate cost. In fact, this applies to other server software applications as well.

The support system will consist of three components:

1. Online database of execution results composed of such characterization as design type, special tool options, quality of results at each step, scripts used, etc. Each run of a particular build contribute to a unique entry to the database.
2. Search engine that finds correlation between runs in the database.This is the most interesting feature, which is to use data-mining algorithms to automatically identify reasons that contribute to the degradation or improvement of the final results between different runs.
   
3. User interface that provides the results relevant to the user's current design from the database search.

Design expertise and user experiences are captured and organized in the database. They are provided to the user through the search engine, thus eliminating the need for application engineers.

Idea #9 - Road Express - GPS Navigation By The Crowd

The best point-to-point driving route comes from the people who drive them every day.

Embed a route recorder in the GPS navigator. Record the actual route taken by the driver between any two points. This can be done automatically, or as instructed by the driver. Some incentives can be given to the first contributors of the system. Once the driving records reach a certain level, the wisdom of the driving crowd will show its intelligence.

Whenever a new route is requested by a user, the GPS system can use the huge driving record from the drivers to compute the fastest, most convenient route, for that particular day and time. You will be able to obtain the special local road connection to avoid the highway commute traffic at 9am; you will get a different route suggestion at 9pm, or on Sunday; you will get inter-state highway 80 to Lake Tahoe on Friday, but highway 580 and 5 for your drive back on Sunday.

It will take some time to attract driving records and establish the network effect, but once it is established, it would be immensely powerful.

Note: I realized later that Dash Navigation has been pursuing intelligent navigation using the wisdom of the crowd for long, although with a slightly different approach.

Idea #6 - Power of incentivization

It is surprising to know how incentives can change the behaviors of people's every-day lives. This was well explained using the rules of economics in book Freakonomics (Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner). Given enough incentives, there are always people willing to take every effort trying to accomplish a task. It's only a question of how much the incentive is and who do you find to provide it. Used well, it's such a powerful concept that can harness the enoumous creativity and energy of millions of people connected through the Internet. Google AdSense is such a good example.

Yahoo Answer was launched today, somewhat late in the game after Google Answer and Amazon Mechanical Turk, but none the less giving some interesting new features. For instance, question prioritization based on popularity, solution voting and credibility mechanism, RSS feed for latest development on a question, etc.

What would make it even better, would be to draw more people to the game, by providing incentives to BOTH people asking questions and the ones who answer them. Where does the incentive come from? Ads eventually, but there could be awards given to the most popular geek who always asks the right question, and the most knowledgable guru who always has the comprehensive answers. Social incentives are also appealing, which may eventually be turned into economic incentives.

Idea #5 - Discovering the Long Tail

I finally understood the concept of long tail, one of the foundamental concepts for internet commerce. In a nutshell, 99% of all the contents ever availble to man kind, has it's audience and readership. Internet provides the platform that enables the commerce of such contents, which traditional channels have never been able to do.

I make mistakes; I learn from them. I make detours; I discover shorter cuts as an afterfact. I would have appreciated advice that could have avoided my mistakes and detours. In essence, every piece of learned experience has its value and thus a market for it, no matter how small it might be. This could be mistake-avoiding experiences, as mentioned, or entertainment experiences (music & video), spiritual enlightening experiences (books), money saving experiences (travel packages & online deals), .... on and on.

There has been some form of market place for such experiences, but only recently has the internet started to really expore their long tail. Google Base, Yahoo Travel, flickr.com, digg.com, de.licio.us are different flavors you may find today. What about tommorrow?

Market place for user experiences - making life more enjoyable and efficient!