Idea book
Well, the summer doldrums are in full force, and it’s hard to find the time to blog. I still have lots of ideas, but between vacations, family, and a real job (I can hear you laughing out there), I don’t really have the time to develop any of them.
I recently found an “Idea Book” that Louisa and I used while we were traveling around the world. Inside the front cover it says “Hanoi, Viet Nam, August 2000″. I find it fascinating to peruse, particularly since a number of the ideas have since become technologies in general use. For example, I had the idea of allowing readers to add links to a page, with two variations: actually editing the page (with admin permission) to insert the links, or browser-side with “sticky notes” that only the author can see. The first is basically Wikis, and the second is Mystickies or Diigo.
Since we were traveling at the time, and updating our site Shields Around the World from random internet cafes was a laborious process, the first idea was a travel journal site. Now, of course, there’s TravelPod and TravelJournals and quite a few others, but at the time there weren’t any good ones that we could find. The main idea we had that isn’t quite as well developed yet was the GPS integration, so it’s easy to see on a map where you are. We also wanted to mine emails from travelers for recommendations. I won’t take the time to write up a recommendation of a place just because we visited it. But if a friend emails and asks “how is this place?” I’ll definitely write back with some impressions. If those could be captured automatically, that would be incredibly valuable.
The book lists some fairly generic thoughts, like delivery of ads to PDAs via Bluetooth, and other Bluetooth ideas captured in a previous post, Bluetooth World. I’ll try to list some more ideas in later posts.
August 15th, 2006 at 8:06 am
I use to keep an idea-book as well, I should really pick up the habit again, they’re great to look through from time to time, and you never know what might come out of it (I’ve even made mock-ups of some of them, and others I just collected the materials for and have yet to construct).
I really enjoyed reading your posting though, one thing it reminds me of is this great idea for a scooter that runs not by pushing it with your foot but by bouncing. It’s a pretty neat design. You can check it out at http://seanwise.typepad.com/wise_words_lessons_in_ent/2006/08/dd_potential_pi.html. The inventors will pitch it VCs on the CBC show Dragon’s Den that comes out this fall.
April 1st, 2009 at 10:36 pm
By far the BEST voice Ive heard on all of youtube.