I just spent an evening with a bunch of cohorts who are concerned they may be soon without a job. They asked me what my ideas were for future products. These are people with a lot of money but no ideas. I recommended one idea "i" (b_b, mk, insomniasexx, ecib) had and after sharing my idea they all looked at me like I was INSANE.
Tonight I had the realization of how powerful I am.
Why?
Because I'm someone with access to ideas. Never EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER underestimate that.
P.S. i'm a lotta bit drunk
But seriously guys and gals, ideas propagate everything
A subtle fleshlight... that looks like shampoo and also contains shampoo! One thing I learned about guys is they love combining things. ie: Old Spice Shampoo + Conditioner + Body Wash. I've seen that in the shower too many times. Why would you want to combine all of them together!?
I think that's what I use, shampoo/conditioner. Mostly because I don't pay close attention when shopping and just buy my usual brand of shampoo. I do almost no maintenance or styling on my hair, just a haircut every once in awhile and a basic shampooing in the shower to stay clean. Also, I could certainly be incorrect about this, but aren't most shampoos today usually just combined with conditioners? Perhaps this is more so for men?
These two were both from dreams I had: 1. CIA created indie band goes on tour looking for (eco-terrorists?[Pacific Northwest tour]terrorists?drugs?) Maybe they have an accidental hit? Maybe the "lead singer" is actually really good?Introspection and hiliarity ensues. Working title - Band of the Man. Movie or book? 2. A Behind the Music type production company creates your own personal life-story as you approach your twilight years. They go back to your high school, talk to your family, teachers, show athletic or educational highlights etc....basically a BTM on your life to play at funeral?Keep for grandkids?Watch repeatedly yourself......I dunno.
There's a few of these companies out there already. They have various approaches to creating digital life stories. It would be many hours of work and you have to wonder how many thousands of dollars someone or their family would be willing to pay. At the same time, I see it being a lot of fun. Since I teach (or used to teach) memoir writing, I've been contacted by various digital filmmaking companies or individuals wanting me to promote their services to my classes. I know of research done creating digital personal histories for people with early stages of dementia.
A Behind the Music type production company creates your own personal life-story as you approach your twilight years. They go back to your high school, talk to your family, teachers, show athletic or educational highlights etc....basically a BTM on your life to play at funeral?Keep for grandkids?Watch repeatedly yourself......I dunno.
-This is a great idea. Did you (or anyone else here) see the Facebook video they made for each user? It was very well received which makes me think your idea is a good one. Do it.
A niche market, for sure. My guess is that the people that could afford this product wouldn't be caught dead in a corvette.
Well, I work in insurance, for a large company. We make like 99% of our money by approaching small/medium sized businesses and trying to upgrade their benefits package. Last year our region was #1 in the whole company for production and production increases, however, in the process of doing so a lot of my fellow agents burned a lot of bridges. So, I came up with the idea to do a survey of our region, figure out where all of our existing clients are, where the people who don't like us are and why, and where we haven't penetrated much of the market and why. The answer I got was 'Sure, I'd love to see your data, don't break any laws, but we're not going to pay you.' Fuck. That. The type of analysis I'm talking about will take months, dedicated effort, the designing of a ton of survey protocols/forms, and a lot of just number crunching and mapping, on a bunch of different scales. BUT, It would provide a comprehensive map of dollar-value-density of various areas of our region and would most likely help us repair our relationships with burned prospects by letting our agents know areas to avoid, and for how long.
they are losing money by not paying you to do that. I say create a consultant agency doing exactly that and then when they come crawling to you for your product, charge them ten times what you would have made doing it for them when you worked for them.
I would love to, but how am I supposed to make money until they come crawling? This would be a massive market analysis, on the order of months if not years, just for my area. Do I just look for business consulting agencies and put in a resume? Edit to include, If I did approach a marketing agency, what do I tell them? Pay me for months to create a product with an unknown demand?
You should probably find out the demand first....market research. If you do the market research you may be surprised at the level of interest. Or underwhelmed and realize it's not worth quitting your day job over. Then figure out how long it would be until you have a product that you can sell for something. Even if it isn't the whole shabang (which will deliver more on the money but will require non-stop work for months). Perhaps you allow people to sign up and pay $X / month for the database of information that you are collecting to create your real product. Like if you have a database of names and addresses for X location, you can sell access to that database for $100/month. If you have another database of maps of the area with another data point, you sell that for another $100/month. You'll need to have all these for yourself anyways. Then you can at least have some funds to hold you over until you are done with the number crunching, analysis, etc. I have no idea if this is feasible for your situation or not. I have no idea what I'm really talking about. Do you have any under or unemployed friends? Is it something you can oversee while others do the dirty work? LLC with a couple contracts and split ownership can be mighty appealing to a lot of people these days.
Scale that shit the fuck up. Do you know how valuable accurate statistical GIS data can be? There's a company here that I know of that specializes in providing large companies and banks with data on retail. They have done thorough, good research (for instance, they count for every shopping street the number of people walking by) and combine numerous statistics to provide risk indices. It's not just the raw data, it's the information and analysis that really large corporations base their choices on: that information is valuable, man. Brb doing it myself.
Maybe you can combine existing databases? For instance: that company (Locatus) recently made a new 'product', which they called the Retail Risk Index: by analyzing companies moving in and out of retail properties and combining it with other databases (which you can buy, man) they calculated (among other things) how long a retail company will survive. So: there's a new shop opening, and according to the value of the property, the amount of times it has moved of ownership in the last decade and the quality of the street, how likely is this shop to succeed? Approach a bank. Tell them you can tell what retail properties in their portfolio are good and which are large risks. Then, buy the necessary data. Profit?
Just, shoot the CEO an email or what? How do I know who in an organization like that makes those kinds of decisions? Usually it's a committee. I have this dream scenario where I have a team of like 3-4 other guys/gals, spend Mon-thurs out in the field, gathering data, talking to people, Friday grouping up and conducting analysis and making our data sell-able.Approach a bank.
Well I don't know the details on how to start it all up, there's no guidebook. You need to get creative yourself. What I do know is that useful (geo)data analysis is valuable and that if you think you can do better than companies out there, by all means do. Find out who you'd want to help, what you want to tell them and how you're gonna get the data and a solid argumentation, numbers that are representative and useful in a combination that suits your goal. Then find the smallest part you can monetize to get closer to your goal. I heard the story -whether it's true, I don't know, but that doesn't really matter - about Richard Branson, who wanted to start his own airline company. Tough start, right? But he figured he had to start somewhere. He wanted to make some progress, so he figured out the smallest thing he could do to get him closer to his goal. The 1%. He figured that he could go to airports, rent a plane and offer delayed customers to fly them there himself if they split the cost +10% for him. If you really, really want to do this, find the first step. Keep that end goal in mind, but realize that it is far away and not something you can achieve easily. There aren't people waiting in line to throw money at you. There may be corporations interested in good statistical data analysis.
I'm working from practically 0 starting capitol. I still go to school full time and will be until at least the end of next fall semester at the earliest. I'm in love with the idea, but I'm one man, with almost 0 resources and very little time. I know I sound defeatist, but I can't see a realistic way to get started. If I dropped everything else and started today I would guess I'm at least 8 months away from a useful product/dataset.
Recently, I've been thinking opening a Poutine stand in a big city in Europe would be a great idea. The only drunk food available is McDonalds and Kebabs. I'm sure everybody is sick of kebabs (I am). The only problem is that cheese curds don't seem to exist here but if there's a viable way to import/produce them... I'm also very surprised they don't put pickled beetroots in Kebabs anywhere here. Goddamn it it's Poland, it's not like beetroots are scarce. It was my favorite part of the kebabs back home.
I've never had Poutine. I'm excited to try it one day, but I want to make sure it's a good poutine.
Poutine is junk food. It's basically fries with gravy and cheese curds. I would say it's our equivalent of the corn dog in some parts of the US. Nothing really mind-blowingly good (unlike some people are trying to sell it as the new hip thing would like you to think) but when you grow up eating it, it's hard to imagine a world without it. It's decent in pretty much any "la belle province" (a food chain in Quebec). If you want something fancier, or even add couple ingredients to the recipe, "La banquise" in Montreal is a well know place for a reason, i would recommend going there but try the classic one before experimenting with their variations.
For a long time I've wanted us to develop magnets in the bumpers of cars so that low-impact collisions would be avoided as the magnets would repel each other. This actually says a lot about my personality, which includes the fact that I want real cars to be like bumper cars. Of course, the mechanics of a car being beyond me, I've been stuck at the "but could we actually do this?" part, and I'm willing to believe it's not viable for a couple of reasons. It's still a fun idea to throw out at parties. Makes me think of this article
kleinbl00 the DreamCrusher checking in. So the main problem is that cars weigh a fuckton. I'm going to guess you've never pushed one out of an intersection, or had one nearly fall on you while you were removing something from underneath. Let's pick a nice round number like 2,000 kg (4400lbs). It's barely over the national average so we'll call it a slim margin of safety. Let's figure out what sort of force we're trying to avoid. We'll take it easy and stick with something we don't need - 5 mph bumpers have been mandatory since 1974. that's 2.2 m/s... which is a speed, not a force. Not to worry: f=ma. Oh, shit! acceleration, not speed! Let's accelerate (decelerate, actually) from 2.2m/s to 0 m/s in, what say, half a second? Drifting like a cloud over here. Awright. vf=vi (plus) a x t; 0 = vi (plus) at; at = -vi; a/2 = 2.2; a = 4.4 m/s. f = ma = (2000kg )(4.4 m/s^2) = 8800 newtons necessary to stop an average car from 5mph. What a cute little number! Surely such magnets exist! Here's the problem. It's not a cute little number. It's a shade under 2000lbs force. Go play a little with this calculator and see if you can get there. I hypothesize you'll be terrified long before you succeed; if not, you haven't seen this image: Run the numbers on that guy. That's a repelling force of 200 lbf. With a finger in it. _________________________ All this, of course, is assuming things line up perfectly. If they don't, you end up with some fraction of 2000lbf pulling towards each other. Kind of makes parking lots seem a bit like deathtraps, eh what? And then, of course, there's the fun involved in having thermonuclear magnets just sort of sitting around. Bend down to clean your license plate and your car keys are going to pin you to the bumper, for example. Of course, we'd use electromagnets, right? Well, we've got our numbers, let's calculate using the ever-helpful eHow. Or, since we've got our engineering degree and don't need to prove shit anymore, we'll just up and buy one. We need 2000lb of force. That looks to me like about 90lbs of electromagnet (180, really, if we're putting them in front and rear) which are going to run on about 200w of power. Which, by the way, is the ragged edge of what a superhot aftermarket alternator can put out. We'll run it off the car battery, obviously, but the point is this: You're talking about adding 200lbs of weight and 200W of circuitry designed to accomplish the same thing that bumpers have been required to accomplish since 1974. The problem magnifies the more ambitious you get in a nastily quadratic sort of way. So it's a good idea in realms where things don't weigh very much, like toy trains on carpet. Out in the world of metric tons of steel sliding into each other? It's a complication at best, to put it mildly. Next time you have a dead hard drive, tear that fucker open. Savage the magnets out of it. Try not to give yourself a blood blister. My dad keeps a collection of dead hard drive magnets on his fridge and it's a pain in the ass putting up a note without drawing blood... and those things are designed for data, not fender-benders.
I like the craziness of it, but weight is going to be the issue. If materials science could make a big leap forward I could imagine very short duration magnetic field generation between cars, maybe using doped graphene that could carry a current. Back in undergrad physics, a pal and I envisioned a car-based weapon that used a laser to ionize the air between two cars, then the alternator to charge a capacitor that discharged between the two cars. You could blast tailgaters. Several years later, we found it was more or less realized.
Besides weight, safety is also an issue. Our bumpers crumple relatively easy so that the de-acceleration we experience in an accident is gradual, and less of an sharp impulse. Now, if mk's idea of an electromagnet could be implemented selectively for low-velocity collisions, that might be desirable. You'd still have the problem of non-metallic/non-magnetic objects though. Like, errr... people.
When I wasabout 8 or 9 I thought up those headlights that can pivot and you turn the steering wheel. I had diagrams and everything but that lazy little shit couldn't be bothered to file patents or develop a working prototype. Somehow Mercedes Benz got into my journal.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucker_48#Innovative_design_featuresThe most recognizable feature of the Tucker '48, a directional third headlight (known as the "Cyclops Eye"), would activate at steering angles of greater than 10 degrees to light the car's path around corners.
And the reason I never post about that invention is because I know someone would pounce on the chance to prove me wrong.
Buck up, li'l camper. I designed a rotary sleeve valve for internal combustion engines when I was 15. Got as far as milling prototypes for a spare briggs'n'stratton tiller motor we had sitting around. Discovered that not only had a crazy Frenchman beaten me by two years, he'd turned a large fortune into a small one discovering the very same problems I would have. And he still didn't interest a buyer.
Well at least we can celebrate the failures of others together! Haha
Digital (and analog) musician here. I want to say "spill!", but I don't think you'll acquiesce... ;) P.S. I am poor.
I peed all over Greenville SC tonight. Let Hannah Know.
"Yo! You know that guy Steve you met the other night? He wants me to let you know that he peed all over Greensville tonight. Hope studying is going well. Take care!" hahahhaha. I'm so glad I'm not drunk or I might actually text her that.
Yeah... when you say it that way it loses it's luster.