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

This is the time for PPA advertising to come to the forefront, when people really want to see results for their advertising dollars.  Now AdSense has PPA, but I think it’s time for a good startup to come out with a dedicated PPA system that’s easy to use.

The difference between my idea and what’s out there now comes principally in the ease of use.  You could create a system to allow the user to actually navigate through their own site and track their actions.  It’s difficult, but doable.  Then, when users click an ad, they would also need to complete one of the actions on the account before the advertiser pays.  This would of course result in less actual completions, but advertisers would be willing to pay considerably more for actual results.

This is actually one of my more interesting posts for the reason that I’ve already built a system like this, but didn’t have the time to pursue it, nor do I now.  So if you’re really interested, let me know and I can get you into the system to try it out and we can work out a deal.  It’s written in PHP and uses MySQL on the backend (with S3 to store ad images).  There isn’t a publisher section but the ad display code is written.  There is also no payment system, but those are relatively easy to implement.

As always, thanks for reading.  If you’re interested, e-mail me at terry [at] icedteapowered [dot] com.

Hello all!  I’ve been really busy with Jaxified trying to get things in order for our next version, and it’s coming along really well, but I apologize for the lack of updates.  Let me make it up to you with this doozy (sp?) of a good idea (so I think):

With the progression of OCR and scanning technology, it should be really easy to take a book, unbind it and scan it into a document (PDF likely).  But it’s still extremely complicated and moreover time consuming (especially using one of those handheld OCR readers for big books).

So the idea is simply that: Create a website that gives people a shipping address.  Have them create an “order” on the website and, on receipt of payment, give them a shipping label to print out complete with a barcode for tracking.  When you receive the book, you get the ISBN (this is important for later), unbind it, scan it in using some OCR technology and convert it into a PDF. 

Once this process is complete, you rebind the book and send it back.  You also e-mail the user a link to where they can download the PDF.  For assurance, you could also give them a preview of the scanned pages (select a few at random) for the user to review and accept before making the final payment.  Once you’ve got the book scanned in, every subsequent user who sends the same book can just get a copy of the same PDF to save time and money (but because the user already has the book, you’re not selling an electronic copy of it, you’re selling a scanning service).

I’m sure the legal issues surrounding this are gray, but for students and lots of others this would be a huge hit, especially with some good OCR technology that you could actually search through for text, etc.

If anyone has any thoughts, let me know; I’d be up to using this myself if someone did it.

As always, thanks for reading.

Back in the day I used to be good friend’s with a guy who ran PlanetFreeStuff.com which referred you to people to do things you do every day (check your credit, sign up for a credit card, etc).  In exchange you accumulated point you could use on Amazon.com.  Anyways, long story short, he got too busy, the site took up too much time and it got pulled offline.  Then about 2 years ago I took the site and built it up again.  It performed decently but was past it’s prime.  Offers were dead.

Now with the resurgence of social networking we have a chance to bring that back, but in a less annoying form.  Someone should build a site that allows people to add their Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter and other accounts and analyzes that user’s reach.  Based on that information, you could post links to advertise on the user’s profile (Facebook: “so and so” posted a link, Twitter would just be a post, etc.).  How much are advertisers willing to pay for that reach?

I imagine there’s a huge profit to be made there.

Thanks to Timoty Leung (Twitter, blog) for the inspiration through our discussions.

This is kind of a fun idea I had a while back; it shows off my darker sense of humour…

There are a lot of reports out there that come out every day that say “x food is bad for you, causes cancer, etc.” and 6 months later you find out that, while bad for you, “x food [also] causes you to live up to 3 years longer on average.”.

So I propose a fun themed, user contributed list of all food reports and what they say the food does to you.  Users can vote a report up or down to validate it’s source and then when the average Joe (I really hate this name after the election season) comes along, they can input what they ate that day and then BAM: You tell them congratulations, based on what you’ve eaten you’ll have y number of cancers in x number of years, but you’ll live until this long! Enjoy!

Again, it’s a fun and quirky way to see what’s going on out there.  It could be complimented by some real daily food alerts and reports and paid for by advertising or subscriptions to the real alerts.  As usual, there are a lot of ways to monetize the user base when you have one.