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 40: You Daily Dose Of Bible Verse, Based On Your Twitter Updates

The Bible is rich of spiritual wisdom that can help you get through the most challenging part of life. Popular iGoogle app delivers a random verse to your desktop daily, but how do you know which verse is just the right one for your day?

Here's an idea. At the end of each day, your Twitter updates are collected, analyzed, and based on the keywords in your tweets, the most relevant Bible verses are extracted and presented to you.

In fact, not just your Twitter updates, your emails, places you visit, people you talked with, anything related to your day, as long as you can record it, can be used for analysis in the calculation. Another way to produce information from our lives. (see earlier idea about personal metrics)

As the Bible says:

Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. - Matthew 7:7

photo credit Andy

Idea #17 - Search is about keyword

Have you had the experience of going through the overly crowded results from Google search, only to realized that the content that you are interested was buried in the 7th "o" page, or you need to do multiple searches with different combination of keywords just to make yourself understood. Exactly. The Web is filled with good information, but computers do not, yet, understand the semantics, or meaning of their relationships.

Semantic Web is trying to solve it all by a new way of designing web sites, which is ambitious, but I don't know how it will turn out. TechCrunch review on this.

I propose keyword-keyword search, i.e. keyword in, keyword out.

For example, if you type in "George Bush", you get a page of other keywords such as, "president", "white house", "Texas governor", "George H. W. Bush", "Walker", "Dick Cheney", "Republican", "War on terror", etc. a ranking set of keywords that are all associated with George Bush in one way or another. Each will also be a hyper link that explains why these two terms are associated.

There is an internal database that stores the prioritized relationships between any pair of keywords, phrases, or concepts, which is learned by mining billions of web pages, news articles, documents, and books publicly available.

Think about it. Isn't this how our brain remembers and learns new things ?

Note, a linguistic approach was taken by PowerSet, and a number of other approaches are being worked on by companies.

Update 1: application in brand advertising. Nielsen Online creates Brand Association Map (BAM) that gives a detailed analysis of the competitive brands, product categories, key attributes, market segments associated with a branch, which I believe are derived from data mining the massive articles from the websphere and blogsphere. This can be very useful for a marketer to create a targeted strategy. Imagine this association map applied to any person, event, concept, or object!

Update 2: Ervi has a similar goal of making sense of the web by connecting contents associated with each other.

Idea #13 - Information mining by association

The memory in our brain is associative. We associate things, events, people together, which we observe at the similar place, or time.

We can visualize a "triangle" as a three-sided polygon, not because we inferred it using logic, but because someone told us to associate the term and concept, at some point in our past. We know "1+1" equals "2", not because we calculated it in our head as computers do, but because we were told to associated the calculation and results together.

We tend to think that we understand the world as a set of rules and logic that governs its behavior, and we can use these set of rules to predict its future, but in fact, what we have is simply a set of observations associated in time and space. (This concept of understanding the world is worth further exploration, which I may revisit later.)

The point I want to make here is that association is powerful.

We can already make a lot of sense of the world by associating the huge amount of data from the web, through similar space, time, or other metrics. Data itself does not constitutes information, only when it is structured in a way that entails consequences of low probability. By association, the data, whether textual or graphical, is organized into a web of concepts, possible scale-free. Thus any term entering the web will trigger a sequence of other related terms, which are highly correlated, and hopefully far from random.

This is how we may mine information from data. Information is gold.

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 #7 - search engine for jobs

Current job sites requires employers to manually enter open positions, and more importantly periodically updating them, a hassle. On the other hand, all companies post their current openings on their own website, usually the "career" section, which one can apply directly by either filling out a form or sending an email.

We need a search engine tailored for jobs.

Implement a web crawler that scans the entire web, and collect information from the "career" section of all companies' web sites, and store them in an indexed database. The update is done automatically by the crawler.

New popular career sites may have been doing this already, simplyhired.com and juju.com.

Idea #4 - Smarter search, better relevancy

Internet search has advanced dramatically in recently years, thanks to Google. Yet I still find myself unable to locate the exact information I'm looking for (possibly it never exists, or I'm not smart enough to exploit advanced search features provided by Google). For instance, I would be interested to find blogs having real insights into technology and startups, possibly the one I'm writing just now, but yet I have a hard time navigate through the thousands, maybe millions of, search results to just find real interesting ones.

Prioritizing search results by relevancy has certainly been a major break through in the search engine technology. However, with more and more websites using Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tricks, the relevancy becomes less and less relevant.

Maybe it's time for search engines to start truly understanding the users real intent: what semantics are being searched, rather than what is the syntax being provided. This possibly has something to do with natural language passing, or artifitial intelligence, or maybe something quite simple! Yahoo Mindset is certainly a step towards addressing such concerns, but I would say it's far from the target.

This is a tough one, but the implication could be huge.