User:Dan-aka-jack/Business ideas

Have you ever had a great idea for a business but you haven't got the time to get it off the ground? Well, here's a good place for us to collect our ideas so - hopefully - some kind person will make our lives easier (and make loads of money) by taking up the idea.

If you already know of a business which serves one of these ideas then please make a note of this on the relevant page.

Communications

Web-based SMS service

We all need to send SMS messages. But it's a real pain doing it from the handset of your phone. So why isn't there a decent web-based SMS messages service? Sure, there are some out there, but they're all crap.

It would be really cool if you could send SMS messages messages from your email client.

I have done a fair amount of research into this idea, but had to shelve it due to other employment commitments and lack of finance. The basic concept is to recive ordinary email which the sender want's relayed to a physical mailing address. The destination address is placed in the subject field of the email so it can be filtered out for printing of envelopes. I called my service "Wemail"

The company acts as a mediating service. The emails are recieved and collated, translated perhaps into postscript and spooled for printing. There are many large companies that allready exist which handle bulk mailing services, and they could be a outsourced to handle large mail runs on the apropriate scale, sending large numbers of mail to different destination addresses.

The only tweaking needed would be to make arangements with mailing service, so that they can handle the printing and collating of letters which have individual contents. I'm sure it can all be done. You set up a website with Information, payment systems, and disclaimers. A customer can register for some credit say 20 virtual stamps, you charge a nominal amount allowing for profit. The customer can then write a letter using their normal email system, and it will be sent to the destination of a normal street address via snail-mail.

Environment & Wood products

Greenpeace should get into the timber industry, and charge a premium for wood from well managed forest & sell to their environmental buddies.

Time Management

A combination of a journal and a calendar. This would say the date and time when ever you write in it. It would also show previous entries, so that if you write in it January 2nd, you would see all of your other January 2nd entries. You would open it up and just start typing and it would automatically enter the date and time. It would have 365 pages (one for each day), and it would put entries for each year on the same page.

I think this would be cool because it would help you get a sense of progress, as you compared what you were doing the previous years on the same day.

Computers

Battle Field of Ideas--A Wiki based computer game

We should create a system where ideas can compete in a survival of the fittest-tournament.

We could use this website. We would start by letting the popularity of different ideas be used as the strength of an online role-playing-game’s character. Much like [Everquest]'http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everquest'. I would call the game, battle field of ideas? Why would I do this? Because I believe that we should create a system where ideas can compete. This would be a way that people would be interested in the success of an idea.

For example, any of the suggestions on this web site would work. A game player would go looking for the idea that he thought was the best. Then he would try and convince as many people as he could to agree with him, during the duration of the game… Maybe a tournament would last a couple of months.

To accomplish this, first you have a web page where people debate issues. Then you track the popularity of a couple hundred different particular ideas. These popularities will be represented by the percentage of people who agree or disagree with that issue.

You then let these percentages represent different characteristics of a particular character in a role-playing game.

For example, this game would work much like [Everquest] [an online multiplayer computer game -Ed.] However in Ever-quest characters have different pre-programmed strengths. In this game, maybe once a day, your game would download the strengths for your character from our database.

Why would I want to build this game and why would people want to play it?

I would like you to ask me why, and I’ll try to respond, however I’ll explain a little bit more here.

This web site would be ½ discussion board, ½ video game. I’ve been thinking a lot about evolution. Businesses and species evolve because they allow for a system of survival of the fittest. We need to come up with a system where ideas can compete. To do this we should track idea’s popularity over time, much like stocks are tracked. We should also make people want to be involved in the war of ideas. So why not make a video game out of it? However I am bringing up lots of different issues, and we should just do one at a time…

=Electronics=1.0 I would like to discuss the possibility of developing an electronic textbook for our school childern. This single unit would contain all the text books for a set grade and remove a lot of weight from students backpacks. I would also enhance the security of our schools by removing a large bulky space in which something can be hidden. I'll keep an eye out for anyone interested in this discussion.

A CD player that will play the separate parts of songs.

You could control the levels of each track of the different instruments with any given song.

Reason to Agree

Amature Musicians would pay to be able to hear just one part of a song isolated from the whole, so they could learn that part. Record CD's, and build CD players that will maintain the separate tracks from the original recording. Example: Vocals, lead guiter, bass, clap track, etc. Ideas: This should be simple. The technology already exists, however it needs to transition from studio/home recording equipment into a component which fits nice and snug with the DVD player, reciever, etc. Why: This would be of special benefit to those who are interested in trying to play an instrument. Principal: Empower future musicians. Let them take control of the music that they listen prefer to learn from and allow them isolate the tracks for ease of learning. It would follow that the source CD compnent could export out the individual tracks for editing and remixing.

Transport

GPS map wiki

GPS map wiki for satellite navigation - Most of the GPS maps used for car sat nav systems get out of date very quickly. So why not apply the wiki concept to GPS maps?

GPS maps used in car sat nav systems get out of date very quickly as the roads develop. So what better way to update the maps than with a wiki system? If you, as a driver, find an error in the map then you can submit a change using a very simple interface on the map system. This wiki idea could also be applied to the mapping of speed cameras, restaurants etc.

A wiki on building new maps and online maps already exists, but I wish it were easier for individuals to make small corrections to maps. Other wiki would benefit a lot from wiki-like map updates.

Giving Bus location info by SMS.

The most frustrating thing about catching the bus is not knowing how long it will be until the next one comes. Sometimes it might be quicker walking, or catching a bus other than the one you usually wait for. The bus LED Bus schedule screens in the UK are expensive (prohibitively so I suspect), often out of order and have proven prone to vandalism. This could be easily solved by putting a GPS tracker in all the buses and linking them up to a cental database.

The person waiting for the bus would then SMS the code of the bus stop they are waiting at followed by the number of the bus they are waiting for and receive a SMS reply with an estimated time until arrival. The transport authority could charge a small fee for the SMS and tehreby recoup the cost of the system.

Note: In Swindon, UK, this system is already in place. Each bus stop has an alphacode on it, which can be texted to a 5-digit number for a list of the next buses, and their estimated times of arrival. Thamesdown Transport Ltd charges a fee of 25p (I think) on top of your normal text rate.

See also

• http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/estates/txt2traveline%20leaflet1.pdf
• http://www.camcnty.gov.uk/sub/eandt/highways/bustimes/sms/full_list_19_19a.pdf
• http://www.travelwm.co.uk/events/ptv/bconnections.asp
• http://thamesdowntransport2.sequence.co.uk/text_go/text_go.htm
• http://www.devon.gov.uk/index/transport/public_transport/buses/services-4/text_messaging_service.htm
• Malcolm may be able to tell you a little more about the little history behind the Text Code 84268.
  • He might say, 'Imagine a wheel on your phone keypad, and for UK, the service number starts with Eight, anti-clockwise'

Reason to amend this idea: Each Stop should have a smart card or RF tag in it which trasmit a standarized signal within a foot raduis of the bus stop. PDA, phone, notebooks should develop an interface that recieved and display the bus schedule.

This idea is also in use in Dublin, Ireland by Dublin Bus, you can text them a code, and you get a list of the next bus and expected arrival for that route. CGorman 20:50, 13 Mar 2005 (UTC)

An e-bay style hitchhiking network.

E-bay lets you rate a seller after you buy something from them. This concept could be used in many more areas letting peers-to-peer networks replace current institutions. For instance, instead of having the government or a single business provide a city's transportation needs, people could organize rides on the web. All you would need to do is let people pick where they are and where they need to go, and up would pop a list of people who are going the same way and are looking to car pool, charge a small fee, or who are just looking for company.

After each ride people would evaluate the other person Of course people could choose to only ride with people of the same sex, and luckily for us we live in an age of very little online privacy. Maybe you could have links to sites that do criminal checks or other things. In a perfect society this would be the way to go. It might also work in small towns, where everyone already knows each other, but they might not know the travel plans of their friends.

This might not work among the larger population, but if you were able to enter in people that you already know it may just work. For instance, I know about 30 people at work, and about 30 people at church, and about 30 people from school that I could catch rides to places with. If I wanted to go into town on any given Saturday, there is a chance I could catch a ride with one of them.

This is already in use in Germany and it works not only in small towns also in EU. Here is a website from Germany: www.mitfahrzentrale.de

Use GPS To Find Lost Items

Inventory Control tags for personal use. They could be placed on cell phones, iPods, wallets, you name it. Anything that you have tagged could them be located by your GPS device when misplaced or lost. --137.53.180.128 22:52, 27 Feb 2005 (UTC)

But then you would have to have a GPS attachted to each of these items and some means of broadcasting that information to the wider world which whilst may help you find your MP3 player but it would also help criminals because your stuff will be advertising its location to the world through Radio waves. Also, a gps would not fit inside a wallet or cell phone. And finally! GPS units can be rendered completely disabled by placing an empty packed of crisps above the reciever. So provided your GPS's are small enough to fit in whatever you want whilst having enough battery life for you to be able to find it, if it is underneath something it wont know where it is.

A simpler idea is just for a little radio broadcast unit inside the personal item just to broadcast beeps and without the complication of GPS but using the same priniciples you can triangulate the location of your item with 3 or more recievers.

Better yet might be a small label with a phone number and dollar number you are offering for return safely.

external links

• the HalfBakery allows you to post (partial) ideas and let other people flesh out the details. Some of them are pretty interesting... "million dollar idea site". But they just stop with the idea -- maybe Wikibooks:Business_ideas could take a few of the top ideas and run with them.
• the Futures wiki
• TheSurrealist: randomly generated ideas
• the Software Bazaar focuses on software ideas. Is there a way to turn it into a business ?