Chennai Photo Snapshot 03 Nov, 3:11pm

Idea: Take a photo samples of a city at a specified time(3 Nov 3:11pm), consolidate in one pool, make snapshot of city life forever.
Execution: Ask a anyone and everyone to take a photo and submit it to a photo pool in flickr. Pre and post moment support garnering through every communication channel including blogs, news item, sms, etc. Coordinated by website 311pm.com.
Profit: Snapshot for posterity. Community bonding.

Update: Now, remote participation via SecondLife is possible.
From Remote participation via SecondLife:

Not in Chennai on Nov 3, 03:11pm?

Not to worry, SecondLife and Avatar Voodo to the rescue. Labsji has setup this amazing facility to help you participate in 03:11 PM campaign virtually via SecondLife. Visit SecondLife Sim Treepu. While there, launch a virtual balloon with your request for a photo shoot at a particular location, as if you are taking it! Some kind natured 03:11 PM enthusiast might take your request seriously and shoot a snap exactly as you requested. Your requests are actually queued as Human Intelligence Task request in Amazon Mturk.

Want to help someone wanting to participate from afar?

Log on to http://mturk.com and search of HITs titled AVooDo. Fulfill the HIT as requested and make someone’s day! As a token of appreciation your good natured gesture, there will be small inconsequential (yet fun!) rewards that you will be able to claim against your successful HIT completion.

Help spill the fun from Virtual to Real and vice versa.

More details can be found here: http://treepu.in/wp/chennai-311pm-photo-freeze-event-now-from-anywhere-via-secondlife/79

Extending SecondLife Avatar Action to Real Life with Mturk

Idea: Avatar Voodo: Extending Avatar Action from SecondLife to Real Life
Execution: Avatar Voodo, Avoodo for short, is a mashup of SecondLife with Amazon Mturk. Avoodo is a way to extend/spill Avatar action to real world. The way it is done is, Avatar action is set to trigger posting of Human Intelligence Task(HIT) in Mturk market through Linden Scripting Language(LSL) scripts. The Linden dollar based micropayment mechanism is bridged to the Mturk based micropayment to make the HIT enticing enough for Mturk worker to complete. The HIT can be geographically targeted so that the SecondLife as geography barrier basher can be further enhanced.
Profit: One of the biggest complaint about SecondLife as a marketing medium is that it is just toyland and activities there and transactions there cannot be linked to real world and revenue generating commerce. With Avoodo, it is possible to engage the user in mixed reality play which can be a very effective marketing tool. For the seocndlife developers, they don't need to huge budget to create a mixed media experience like the CBS CSI:Virtual that involves huge hype and fanfare to work. As an illustrative case of the profit,

Teepu is an use case that uses Avoodo to give opportunity Avatars to participate in mass tree planting movement despite geographic barriers. In short, Avoodo, Treepu makes (digital/real) tree a social object for participation and conversation!.

New Cartoon: Getting Drowned in Search Engine Alphabet Soup!

Hat Tip to Hugh MacLeod of Gapingvoid.com for inspiring me and making me try cartooning.

Dawnkey's MyFridj: Cartoons as Social Objects

Idea: Cartoons as longtail tradable social objects. Dawn Douglas through MyFridj is adding a new twist to User Generated Content. She is creating scarcity mechanism for the content( cartoons and animations) through the virtual goods route. An interesting aspect of the idea is that the virtual goods are user tradable.
Execution: Just like people are ok with the idea of buying songs, people will get used to buying cartoons and animations to enhance their online presence. Slowly saying it with a cartoon will be easy and fun way to express yourself - Just as saying it with flowers or saying it with your dress. Slowly when the supply and demand equations work out, this long tail syndication mechanism will gain momentum as investment opportunity. Yet the success of MyFridj depends largely on the scale of execution, choice of platforms that will make the micro-payment frictionless and more importantly how mashable and developer friendly it emerges.
Profit:

Wisdom of Crowd Weather Prediction

Idea:Weather as a source of profit! Much of economic activity in some form or another is a response to Weather and its cycle. With economy becoming more and more knowledge centric, weather information and weather related prediction( knowledge) becomes source of profit. Hackshaven Harford of NOAA build in Secondlife has an interesting idea for the complex compute intensive weather prediction biz. He is proposing to simply ask the crowd. Let the wisdom of the crowd work for the prediction!
Execution:Amazon Mturk with automated script that rewards bonuses based on accuracy of prediction post fact. The script could be coupled weather derivative market through a mashup with WeatherBill like service.
Profit: Predicting weather( or the lack of it) is a big biz. Weather is something where everyone participates already. Market linking it and wisdom of crowd linking it will widen the market and thereby widen the opportunities.

This could be a good way to widen the base of Mturk Workers on a world wide basis. This will engage the workers on a daily basis. The variable reward makes it very sticky.

Shel's SAP Global Survey: Push vs Pull

As for a survey by big corporations goes, typically, suites decide what market intelligence they need. Then they charter an internal or external market research team to do the market research/survey. They churn out data, charts, and reports and the Suites further decide on their course of action.
Shel Isreal spearheading the SAP Global Survey is approaching the Social Media survey in a When In Rome approach. It is a clear demonstration of shift from Push to Pull.


This video/machinima was part of Survey Answer by K G Prasad, Universal Print System, Chennai. He is going ga ga about Mashups and Wikis:

There is a lot SAP can help to make doing business through Social Media sustainable. There is a lot of drudgery in engaging with multiple social media. For instance, uploading photos and tagging each one of them takes a lot of time. SAP with its tight involvement with the internal and external ‘business process plumbing’ can make Living the Business Aloud easy and drudgery free. For example, workflow could auto generate a draft of a blog post summarizing the work done for a customer, with pictures and link to relevant customer public profiles, relevant tags, etc. This draft could be further embellished with human interest elements by a human and published.
I have high hopes on SAP in helping SME businesses ride two significant trends, viz., Mashability and Serendipity. Let me explain.

Make Our SME Business Mashup Ready. I believe judicious exposition of capacity through mashup(interface) is a good technology antidote for technology driven rapid commoditization. I believe mashup is an attractive channel to graduate cold calls into revenue generating relationships. An ERP with built in support for mashup exposure: a doorway that knows both sides – the internal business process, as well as the Wild Wild Web, will be very attractive. I believe mashup is a potent strategic tool to increase capacity utilization as well as a low cost business development method.

Enhance Serendipity for Our Network of Suppliers and Customers. When Geography is History, Serendipity is the new Geography. This, I believe, again is a strategic tool that will prevent premium erosion. With our continued practice of Living our Business Aloud, our social media engagements will increase the findability of whoever that has done business with us. In other words we want ‘Doing/Done business with UPSL’ as a social networking factor just like musical preference, interest in books, pet ownership, etc. And of course the ERP will have to help in achieving it in a sustainable manner.

The machinima is of course whipped up in SecondLife, and Incidentally, SAP is all set to open their Sim featuring their clients and partners soon( Oct 1?).

Autotwit: Making mundane automatic

Idea:AutoTwit - Unix Cron job like twittering service.
Execution:

Tired? Stressed? Overworked?

No time to keep Twitter informed about what you're doing?

AutoTwit takes the effort our of updating Twitter.

Simply write a post and schedule an update.

It's that easy!

Key Benefits:

1. Make you wealthy
2. Improve your appearance
3. Help you to be more well-liked by your family or friends
4. Make you live longer
5. Attract members of the opposite sex
6. Update Twitter automatically

About AutoTwit

AutoTwit is the rather hare-brained idea of Toby Hede.

In no particular order:

1. AutoTwit came together in a Friday lunch break and Sunday afternoon.
2. It's made with Ruby on Rails and Love!
3. It's dedicated to Scoble in the interest of making Twittering much easier.
4. Toby lives in Melbourne, Australia.
5. He works as a software engineer for a small web company in between hacking things and creating games.
6. He is increasingly obsessed with Rails, Prototype and Scriptaculous.
7. He is available for project work.

Contact: tobyhede {a t} autotwit

About AutoTwit

Most things © AutoTwit 2007

Twitter posts probably belong to the people who write them

AutoTwit: Automatically Pointless! Now with 50% more Web 2.0.

Made with Ruby On Rails and a pinch of love

Profit: A washing machine does the washing for you, a VCR watches TV for you, similarly AutoTwit will twitter for you! Yet another playful profitable idea out of twitter ecosystem like TwitterLit. How small thing can make big leverage.

Advantages of Blogging

Idea:Five Advantages of Blogging
Execution:When I talk to students I tell them these five benefits:
1)Blog can improve your communication skills: By blogging your clarity of thought improves. Reinforced by written communication, the overall communication skills improve.
2) Blog is great way to keep your network of family and friends posted: Only if you keep them posted they will be able to add value to the relationship. Cluttering them with email is a bad idea. Inbox overflow is a major problem for many people.
3) Blog can be a good way to increase your network of family and friends: What you write about may not be relevant for your family and friends. But your writing gets found by people who are interested in it. They start interacting with you and becomes part of your network. Serendipity works!
The above three are personal benefits. Here are the biz benefits.
4) Blog can be a wonderful marketing tool. Many people simply google anything and everything. If they find you in google, your ideas have reached them before you. That is marketing. Google, 'paper file tracking' and reach me! Enough said.
5) Blog can be a good sales tool. If you are into selling low value item where people trust that it will be shipped. You can sell off your blog itself. Blog +paypal will just do wonders.

As an added bonus blogs by itself can make money. You can feature ads( like google ads) and make money off your blog. There are people like Amit Agarwal( http://labnol.blogspot.com) that pay highest tax bracket due to earnings from single blog.

Nuf blog sermon.

Profit: Make money with blog. Make money because of blog.

Unconference the Book

Idea: Unconference The Book
Execution: Wiki
Profit: Fun!

TwitterLit: Terse teasers that kills the cat, milks AZ

Idea: TwitterLit?
Execution: Interesting first line of an interesting book, twittered!
Profit: Amazon referral fee.

Online Backup software

Idea:Online Backup service DataDeposit and a book by David B Little)
Execution: With DataDeposit it is much easier to implement suggestions made in the book Implementing Backup and Recovery: The Readiness Guide for the Enterprise (Paperback) And it is a good deal at $2/GB month.
Here is an overview from the site

Online Backup Features
Easy to Set Up

* Register online for our secure online backup system
* Installation is easy and takes less than 5 minutes
* Backups are instant and will never interrupt your work

Extremely Secure

* Bank grade encryption protects your data
* All data is encrypted before it leaves your PC
* Only you have the key to access your web storage data

Affordable Price

* With our online file backup system you can store as little or as much as you need for just $2 per GB per month.

Ideal for Small Business

* Backup as many computers as you like with our web backup system!

Fast Recovery

* Restore lost files from your secure online file backup system in a matter of seconds.

Web File Sharing

* Share files or entire folders with others by emailing password protected links.

System Requirements

* This web storage system runs well on any Windows PC with an Internet connection.

Profit: Data is more valueble than money. A backup can save a lot of angst!

I, II, III Life, Kitkat video

Via aTTa boy Rajat

Of incompetence, innovation and cashcow

Nitin Borwankar has an interesting post on how companies 'settle down'
The Peter Principle of Innovation

He also talks about why potentially viral innovative ideas dont take off due to self created containment:
Virus in a Petri Dish and instantly illustrates it with an alive example on the post itself.

Interesting!

Intent Signals With Twitter Enabled Devices

Intent Signals with Twitter.
Twitter the new fad in town 2.0 - dubbed the prom queen of SXSW - all the top geeks are at it. Even if they hate it. I'm trying to figure out what the hell the fuss is all about. I guess a good way of figuring out is think up cool applications for twitter. Here you go: I'm fascinated by the shift in economic paradigm from scarcity based economics to surplus inundation based economy( Just 10 years back I had to wait for a phone connection, now the telcos are queuing up to give me connection along with value added packages like mobile, broadband etc) . In this new market, the customer is the real king. Just grabbing the attention of the potential buyer is not enough. It is not just enough to fulfill the potential buyers requirements. Appealing to his/her ego is a good strting point. To cut a long story short, paradigm is shifting from Attention to Intention. Being tuned to Intention signals of the market becomes the key. My conjecture is, twitter like tools can become Intention signalling mechanisms.

Twittering, in combination with Intent Economy based tools like roots.net could make it a way to signal intents. With tools like yahoo pipes, the intent could be responded by other players - possibly a supplier of a product or a service that will facilitate the intent.

My biggest complaint with Twitter is that I have to actually do it: The lack of automation. If smart devices around me are able to pick up my intent and my activities and post it to twitter, then I can fill in the gaps with more quirky stuff. With so many geeks becoming fans of the Twittering, we can expect a horde of gadgets tuned to twittering soon. And in the mid term, everyday objects becoming twitter enabled.

In a way, Metaverse like SecondLife is striving to do.

Today Twitter looks like a useless waste of time and a fad that will fade. Yet it has lot of potential as a enabler in the conquest of the plenty. Accelerating the era of attention/intention as new currency.

Idea: Secondlife as a business tool
Execution: Secondlife, the online 3d game that is fast evolving as a mini economy is an active breeding ground for innovations. IBM alumni meeting has proved that it can be a wonderful way to convene a meeting. It has good potential as an unconference medium. Recently it is being experimented as a recruitment tool: a place to hold job fairs and such. With the membership base zooming beyond a million, online money spent per day at a million dollars, it will be taken seriously by innovators. The avatar can be more expressive than a chat or an IM making in the process reducing the travel expenses and lost time in travel.
Profit: Richer interaction.

Better Retirement Plan = Better Productivity?

Idea: Better Retirement Planning for Employees using a professional Specialist
Execution:Today I came across a unique service company called Retirment Capital Group. They offer executive compensation seminars in the changing dynamic world of retirment planning. Retirement is a constant nag in every employees back of the mind. If this constant nag can be addressed effectively, it gives peace of mind to the employees and productivity for the employer. Defined contribution, and custom design of plans are hot areas that can differentiate an employer and improve their chances of retaining talent. The Retirment Capital Group's offereing and Knowldege Centre are worth checking out!
Profit: Retirement worry taken out of the employee's mind => better productivity!

Wikicamp.in Video made with SecondLife

Amazon Mturk earnings now in Indian Rupee:: Tap the housewife resource pool

Idea: Tap the housewife resource pool
Execution:There are a lot of household with a PC and internet connection sitting. Just decorating the living room. Where the kid plays the 'educational' game. And the grown ups use it for email and google. Now with mturk earnings available in Indian Rupee, the housewife glued to the TV serials, sob soaps can be given a gainful alternative. Mturk is part of suite of services opened up by Amazon Web Services as part of Jeff Bezeos strategy of increasing the utilization of Amazon installed capacity. To quote the Amazon FAQ on Mturk:

What is Amazon Mechanical Turk?

In 1769, Hungarian nobleman Wolfgang von Kempelen astonished Europe by building a mechanical chess-playing automaton that defeated nearly every opponent it faced. A life-sized wooden mannequin, adorned with a fur-trimmed robe and a turban, Kempelen's "Turk" was seated behind a cabinet and toured Europe confounding such brilliant challengers as Benjamin Franklin and Napoleon Bonaparte. To persuade skeptical audiences, Kempelen would slide open the cabinet's doors to reveal the intricate set of gears, cogs and springs that powered his invention. He convinced them that he had built a machine that made decisions using artificial intelligence. What they did not know was the secret behind the Mechanical Turk: a human chess master cleverly concealed inside.

Today, we build complex software applications based on the things computers do well, such as storing and retrieving large amounts of information or rapidly performing calculations. However, humans still significantly outperform the most powerful computers at completing such simple tasks as identifying objects in photographs—something children can do even before they learn to speak.

When we think of interfaces between human beings and computers, we usually assume that the human being is the one requesting that a task be completed, and the computer is completing the task and providing the results. What if this process were reversed and a computer program could ask a human being to perform a task and return the results? What if it could coordinate many human beings to perform a task?

Amazon Mechanical Turk provides a web services API for computers to integrate "artificial artificial intelligence" directly into their processing by making requests of humans. Developers use the Amazon Mechanical Turk web service to submit tasks to the Amazon Mechanical Turk web site, approve completed tasks, and incorporate the answers into their software applications. To the application, the transaction looks very much like any remote procedure call: the application sends the request, and the service returns the results. Behind the scenes, a network of humans fuels this artificial artificial intelligence by coming to the web site, searching for and completing tasks, and receiving payment for their work.

All software developers need to do is write normal code. The pseudo-code below illustrates how simple this can be.

read (photo);
photoContainsHuman = callMechanicalTurk(photo);
if (photoContainsHuman == TRUE) {
acceptPhoto;
}
else {
rejectPhoto;
}

In a nutshell, Mturk is a way to give out tasks to the crowd and get the task done by a human. Typically, the task are too difficult for computer, but effortless for the human. The person accomplishing the task, gets paid. The Amazon's ecommerce system takes care of the trust, reputation, transaction etc.

Thus mturk can be used to give out work to housewifes, and the housewifes can do the task and get get paid, all risk free for both the work giver and the work doer.
Profit: The housewife of India are a talented lot. They give up pulme jobs to become housewife. They may be well qualified educationally. They can be meticulous in their work. Tapping this talent pool in a risk free way could be wonderful way to gain competitive advantage for businesses.

Electric Scooter Available in Chennai!

Idea:Electric Scooter/Bicycle is a reality in Chennai.
Execution: Sometime back I wrote about Electric Bike maker survival guide. When I went to a Motor Show at Chennai recently I came across an interesting company displaying electric scooters for sale. The bikes are called Petra and they are made by EPL Technologies Pvt Ltd( Ph +91-44-6453 3333) The bikes are pricey but it will fall whne there is enough demand( A scooty like version costs Rs 27,000 while a luna like version costs 22k and a electic bike like version costs 18K). If someone can bulk buy them, and make them available on short haul rent/lease, it will make them popular and because of the voluem effect bring down the prices and create a demand spiral.
Profit: Apart from attractive gains in running such an operation, the social goodwill earned will go a long way in boosting up the valuation of the leasing/operating company. With the economy very upbeat, I will not be surprised if someone is already thinking/executing this in stealth!


Photo Courtesy Snazzo

Making Text Link Ads Work With Blogger Beta

Idea:Text Link Ads as Feed for seamless integration with Blogger Beta
Execution: Slap Text Link Ads on your Blogger beta blogs. Earn extra ad revenue. Blogspot blogs were not able to host text link ads mainly due to lack of PHP or other language support needed for Text Link Ads to work. Adding a Javascript wrapper around the PHP code does not cut the ice. Javascript is not indexed by search engines so it is not much of use for TLA advertisers. But the Blogger Beta changes everything. In blogger beta there is a Feed widget that accepts any feed. I have converted my Text Link Ad offering(Inventory) into a RSS feed and plugged the RSS URL on to a Blogger Beta Feed widget, viola! Text Link Ads work in BlogSpot! Here is the Text Link Ads as Feed is simple script hack by me. I'd rate it as early beta. Feel free to get your TLA inventory converted into a feed. And start displaying TLA in your Blogger Beta site. Rake in extra cash through Text Link Monetization.

Profit: For a change, here is an idea that has some tangible benefits! So far all my ideas were featuring abstract profits. Here is something, that will put real cash in your pocket(paypal a/c :)) ) immediately.

PS: The feed widget has a limit that display only 5 results. If there is a good response to using the text link ad as feed service I'll come up with ways to fix it.