Hi, my name is Terry Smith and I'm a developer and aspiring entrepreneur.

As part of the Jaxified service, we’ve developed an e-mail “client” that downloads a copy of all of your mail for an account you sign up for.  And I see a lot of spam messages everyday.  For a while I’ve been thinking there has to be a better, more involved way to fight spam. 

Today I realized that spam fighting as it stands currently is done at the ISP or mail server or on your computer.  There’s no central service that consumers can use to fight spam.  Why not create a consuemr oriented website where consumers can sign up for an anual fee?  This service would create an IMAP client to connect to a customer’s mail server, check each new message for spam and if it’s spam, then move it or delete it.

There’s not much else to it; it’d be an interesting challenge and you would have A LOT of information to fight against spam.

Terry

Hello all!  Here’s the next idea I came up with a few days back while brainstorming for new ideas with a couple friends:

One of the biggest problems people have is that applications on their computers may not be the same.  A laptop may have Office 2007, a desktop Office 2003 and the computers at school Office XP… you can see where I’m going with this.  To combat this, Google, Microsoft ad others are moving their applications into the cloud and making them accessible through the web browser.  But this transition phase is long and development heavy so I think we need an interim solution.

Someone should create a client that allows users to install software on their computer and simultaneously uploads the software and the necessary info to the cloud (registry settings, etc.).  Then at every computer a user logs in to that has this framework or software installed, has their software available to them.  Users no longer have to worry about having Office 2003 on one computer and Office 2007 on another.

As for implementation, you’d probably need to have a working knowledge of installers to get all of the necessary information out.  Users could even initally take a pre-install snapshot of their settings and then a post-install snapshot in the alpha and beta versions.  I would also host the data itself on Amazon’s S3 or a similar large scale data service, since some of these programs will be pretty big.  But the great thing is you only need to store one copy of most files for each program then just store the changed files or settings for every user who installs it after that.

The revenue model for this is simple; I would make this a paid service.  You could also potentially do a freemium model and allow a certain amount of space or a certain number of apps and then charge for an upgrade.

There are a number of services out there which have similar goals in mind, but nothing I know of that’s the same.

Comments are always welcome! Thanks for reading.

I’ve been holding this one to myself, selfishly thinking I might develop it; but as with everything I’ve posted on here, I simply don’t have time. 

A little background: Things are moving towards 3D and virtual environments.  Recently Google released Lively, it’s 3D hosted “virtual spaces”.  As TechCrunch noted a little while back, there are a lot of virtual worlds coming out right now and they’re hot.  This brought me to the question “What is the next iteration in web pages?” and I think the result is going to be the web turning into a virtual reality.

Which brings us to the idea: a 3D world web browser, where sites are accessible by domain, IP, etc. (no need to reinvent the basics).  For example, the Apple store could be an actual store with Apple Geniuses in it for assistance and the website for a library could be an actual library. 

It needs to be simple to get any adoption so I think you should be able to create content based on basic rooms, textures, etc. and brought together with a simple XML file.  It should be a completely distributed client and server architecture, just like web browsers now.  Create a server that serves up content and a browser that is able to connect to said server.

Finally, you can make money on this by designing content or doing initial hosting for people or both. 

There are a lot of possibilities for making money and a lot of potential for the application overall.

As always, thanks for reading.

A lot of my ideas revolve around social and that’s because I think people are way more involved in the web sites they visit.  They’re more comfortable with being involved and they actually enjoy it.

So why can’t we apply these ideas to search?  I would imagine that the big 3 (Google, Yahoo and MSN) already take user clicks into effect.  However, I think that a search engine should be trained by the people to find things that they actually want.  Where Google says that machines should be responsible for organizing everything, that mantra is going to grow outdated.  Now that people are involved in user-generated content on sites like Digg, YouTube, Wikipedia, etc. the ability to scale your business is possible with user feedback and “human powered” results.

One of the most successful sales models to date is the related results you see Amazon or Netflix: “Users who liked this also liked…”.  Why not bring that same model to organizing search results?  Find a good initial model to rank results (or even use Yahoo BOSS or something similar) and then store your own rankings based on what users clicked through to.  Did they come back to that search page 30 seconds later and try to find another result?  Which one did they finally stay on?  You won’t know for sure, but you can make an educated guess.  And the more feedback you have, the better your search results become.

Feedback is welcome; as always, thanks for reading.

For a long time, the anti-virus community has been closed off, a walled garden of its own.  But as everything else in the world becomes social and sites like Wikipedia and many others facilitate and encourage user support, the movement has been overwhelming.  Entire profitable sites like Digg (and hopefully YouTube when it starts really making money) are powered by user generated content.

Why not harness that power into anti-virus and anti-spyware software?  Created a closed-source platform (for obvious security reason), but allow users to report spyware and viruses and, along with some creative logging and maybe some AI, the software would be way more capable of staying on top of things than any company can.

There would obviously need to be a lot of security measures in place, but if something gets reported enough times, clearly it’s something to look into.  This could even be two-tier with people who generate a lot of good results becoming moderators which could even be a paid position.  The software itself could be for a fee or more likely, have either an upgrade path with more features or a yearly subscription fee after x months or a year.

Social is everywhere now, why not harness tht power to do something really cool and useful outside of profiles and photo albums?