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

I’ve been reading A LOT of news lately about The Cloud.  Haven’t heard of it?  The Cloud is this revolutionary concept of all your data living on the internet in distributed services in services like S3, dropbox, etc.  From my understanding from recent articles and hype (which we all live and swear by, right?), it’s a fairly new concept propelled by Amazon and other companies to make it so you don’t have to store data on your own computer.  This concept has been applied to documents, e-mail, and even web sites!

So I thought: wouldn’t it be great if the whole internet lived in a distributed, cloud computing environment?  Where we no longer had to host our own websites on our own machines?  Could you imagine if we had the ability to host our websites on other people’s servers 10 years ago?  And add more servers by clicking a few buttons and then setting up a custom image, just like Amazon does today?  We would be so much farther ahead of the curve!

So welcome to Web 3.0: where you no longer host your own your documents, and eventually you may not even host your own websites.  And as more websites move to The Cloud it will be even easier for people to host them elsewhere and scale them, with just the click of a button and the installation and customization of your software image (EC2 in this case).  It’s a whole new world we live in, and I can’t wait until the entire internet lives in The Cloud.

/s

Sorry for the lack of ideas lately, I’ve been working hard to get another version of Jaxified out and haven’t really had any bulbs go off.  However, while lying in bed before I got up this morning, this gem came to me:

Product photos are tough, especially when they need to be modeled on a person or manikin.  I think this could fairly easily be moved into a cloud application.  Make a manikin model, and have the user upload a front/back to the t-shirt.  If you have a t-shirt model as well, you could simply texture it with the uploaded images and automatically get a rendered model wearing your shirt.

I’m sure this could easily be applied to other products, and would need to be in order to build a successful business, but the cost savings in a down economy like this could be huge if you sell it right.

As always, thanks for reading and feel free to leave feedback, additions, etc. in the comments.

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.

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.