Idea 49: Live Web Interactions With Video Chat

The popularity of Chatroulette shows that plenty of people on the Internet are eager and ready for live video interactions with another stranger. Why not? People are social animals.

Emerging technologies not only provide platforms for massive live video interactions right in your web browser, like Tinychat, but also providing API's that enable web developers to easily embed video chat boxes into every page of your website, like Tokbox.

These technologies will, along with upcoming HTML 5, open up a new world of rich, interactive, multimedia web, where the possibilities of applications are only confined by your imagination. For example, dibake.com is a new web service that enables live video debate, along with a dichotomy of user opinions, on any given subject, from political to scientific. Or, go see a psychiatrist with a virtual therapy session online at Pretty Padded Room. 

Well, not to mention the most important face-to-face interactions: education. This opens the door to a potentially disruptive force to change the way education is done.

Idea 48: Keyword Group Chat - Real Time Twitter / Quora

Ever had a question about something, could not find it online, then post it in a forum, or Twitter/Quora, and painfully waiting for someone to reply? What if you can have instant communication with a person holding the right piece of information, whenever you wanted it?

The idea is to provide an infinite amount of real-time chat rooms organized by key words.

Type something on your mind, "laptop", "heroku", "health insurance", "games", "Chinese food", the related sentences or key words that other people are typing in real-time will start to show up. Along with the sentences are chat-rooms associated with the sentences. You may choose to join one of them, or create your own, while letting all the people who are interested in similar topics know.

It is not the chat room in traditional sense, where you look into a category and see what are the rooms in there. Here, you type something and find related things that are happening in ALL chat-rooms in real time. On the technology side, this may require some complex real-time reindexing, however, demand is the mother of invention, right?

As the user base grows, businesses can establish real-time customer service reps answering questions, and because the common information is shared among all interested participants, the rep redundancy can be kept at a minimum.

Please let me know if you are interested in implementing such an app.

Idea #30 Open Source Peer-to-Peer Education

Education, I still believe, is the key to freedom, spiritually and financially.

Enable education at every corner of the earth is one of the most effective approaches to making the world a better place.

MIT is opening up its intellectuals to the world through the popular MIT open course.

We can do more, and we should.

Everyone has something important to say; everyone is a teacher in some way. As Seth Godin rightly pointed out in his book, Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us, any individual can lead a tribe and enable change in an unconventional way.

Meetup.com provides a platform that enables anyone, passionate about any subject, to lead a tribe.

We can and should enable everyone to become a teacher, a good teacher.

Here's an idea.

Provide an open platform where anyone can develop a curriculum on any subject, technical, political, literature, or recreation. Anyone can contribute further on the curriculum to improve its quality, whether it's uploading course materials, exercises, references, or providing a video.

From the database of curriculum, anyone can teach a course; anyone can take a course, virtually, from anywhere in the world, even in the remote villages in India and China, as long as wireless access is available.

Yes, I'm aware of unclasses, a good initiative, yet we need more curriculum, wider accesses, broader coverage.

Educate the mind; free the soul.

photo credit slideshow_nyc

Idea #11 - Advertising in online video

Object recognition in image is still in its primitive stage in academic research. Yet, there are already efficient algorithms available for matching image patterns, such as SIFT. Already, companies are started to make real image search usable, such as TinEye.

Present relevant ads while video is being played online.

As video is played, match the videos frames against a huge library of product image patterns. Think about Coke, Nike, iPhone. Whenever such a product appears in the video frame, an image match can be found, which then triggers a text-search by the product key work, in the ads network, like the AdWords network. The found ads text is then displayed, in a very non-intrusive fashion, on the right-hand-side panel, for the viewer to click, just in case, the viewer is not 100% focused on the contents of the video, which is highly likely.

Quick note that, the image search does not need to happen in real time. Vast preprocessing can be done overnight for all videos and tag the ads into the video player.

Idea #1 - Automatic BlogCasting

Starting from today I will periodically post my startup ideas. Some may not be viable, some may already exist, some may actually get me started implementing something.

Given the more than 14 million active bloggers out there, and the popularity of iPod and Podcasting, wouldn't it be nice if there is a service to automatically convert blogs into audio and podcast into my PDA? In terms of technology, automatic speech synthesis is already quite mature, and in fact heavily in use in those automated customer service phone calls. The infrastructure for podcasting and RSS feeds is up and running, or almost mature. It is just a matter of putting all these pieces together. In terms of business model, advertisement is a nobrainer, both online sponsered links, and audio ads as suggested by Audible.com. The only concern is the speech quality may not be attractive enough, or tolerable rather, for the majority of people to stick to listening to them.

Towards personalized media - Web TV

We are in fact moving along quite well towards my ideal world of personalized media. Microsoft offer Web TV, although not very successful at the moment, is certainly one step in this direction. Woundn't it be super nice if you can get the following from the MSN service ($199.95 for a setop box, $9.95/month for subscription. Refer to Budda's review.) ?

• Access to the latest and most popular Google Video from the Web TV
• Access to Apple iTunes or RealNetwork Rhapsody or Yahoo Music
• Access to my Audible book and magazine subscriptions, and the Cramer's RealMoney show
• Ability to stream the above media to my mobile device (iPod or others) anywhere I go

Although there are business model issues preventing all above from happening just for now, this media revolution is for sure coming, in one way or another!

Media feed through WiFi

Now that the Bayarea is underway to be fully covered by wireless internet, potential applications are beyond imagination. What I would like is to be able to subscribe to media feeds and play them at the time of my convenience, through the mobile device of my choice, continuing my thoughts about personalized media.

The enabling technologies are essentially almost all ready: online media streaming servers, wirelessly enabled mobile devices, either audio or video, wireless coverage (almost) and a variety of online content providers, TV, short video, audio programs, you name it (almost).

Completely personalized media - my ideal world

Continuing the thought on Television with no schedule, here is an ideal world I would like to live in, where instead of tuning in existing broadcasts, I have the complete freedom of choosing what media to consume:

• In the morning commute to work, I would like to listen to my favorite news of the day, MSNBC, PBS, CNN, whether in real time or previous recorded, as long as it's timely updated. I'd also like to listen to my subscribed talk shows of the day, e. g. Cramer's RealMoney, and other podcasts that interest me.
• In the evening after dinner, I would like to turn on my HDTV and watch my favorite TV shows, e. g. Apprentice, in my own schedule, again regardless of it being recorded or real time. Similarly in the weekends, I would like to pick a movie from my subscribed list, directly delivered to my living room, through broadband, instead of me going to the store or checking the mail inbox.

All I need to do is to visit my web-based configuration center, through secured protected channel, and subscribe all the media-feeds that interest me. This is a dream for now, but it will come true in foreseeable future! The enabling technology will be single-/multi-cast media versus broadcast, which includes both radio for voice and cable network for video. At this point, you can guess what is the technology I'm talking about. P2P is here to stay!

Note: reference Paul Allen's interesting viewpoint on the future of media delivery.

Contents to have infinite supply

Google Print is digitaling books online. Media, and all human-made origina contents as a matter of fact, will never run out of print again. Online giant Yahoo and Microsoft are following suit. This is certain one big step forward towards the wholy-grail of internet, distributed content publication and distribution.
We are still not quite there yet. As I search for Hemingway's Old Man and the Sea , only the first few pages show up. As I search more, more sporadical pages show up, which arrogantly requests logging in with a Google account for viewing more pages. The most annoying thing is, none of the enlisted online bookstores actually carry this book! I cannot get a copy even if I want to pay for it! What a loss of business opportunities! This will never happen again in the future. Infinite supply, just like software!