reverse textbook

one liner: offer a service that organizes all the concepts you need to know to understand a specific topic.

In our day and age, it really is impossible to understand everything in the world, it usually works much better if you only pick things up as you go. But in order to understand a high level concept, there are often prerequisites before you can understand the deeper stuff. The only good reference materials are usually textbooks and textbooks that are often pretty annoyingly big. You don't want to go through the whole physics book if you only want to understand how circuits work. It may require some knowledge about trigonometry and complex numbers, but you will probably not use differential equations. Trying to look up all these things gets quite annoying. It would be much better if you can have a customized "textbook" that isn't about a broad subject, like "physics," but all the information about a particular subject, like "microprocessor fabrication".

The service should be able to start with the topic that you do want to understand, and figure out all the necessary information that you would need to understand the topic completely. To implement it, it will be written like any textbook (probably like wikipedia) but with extra information about dependencies. When a user finds a topic to understand, the service will start with a common knowledge assumed that the user has, and build up lessons to work up to the topic. If the assumptions are wrong, the user can skip a topic or go into more fundamental topics.

I really think this is necessary, because there are a lot of smart educated people that want to learn about certain topics but get frustrated when they realize how hard it is to find a reliable source that you can understand. People shouldn't feel embarassed that they do not understand any given topic -- science is wayy to complicated for any one person to understand. Besides, a need based education will show people the practicality of the skills they are learning, rather than memorizing millions of equations that they will never use.

finance management software on your cell phone

one liner: record receipts with a cell phone camera and use location, time information to make a record of spendings.

I think financial management could be improved significantly with portable electronics. Finance is all about planning -- I'm going to put x amount into the bank to save up for y, I'm going to use z dollars in groceries this month. With any plan, there's always the review to see if you met the goals that you set out for -- Last month, I spent too much on eating out, so this month I'm going to have to try extra hard to cook for myself. When you are reviewing habits, it would help a great deal if you can have as much information as possible, organized as well as possible. It would be great to see how much money you have spent on weekends as opposed to weekdays, or how much you spend on entertainment compared to food.

With a cell phone, you can figure out a lot of things about what a person is doing, and deduce what the person is spending the money on. If a person is at a clothing store, chances are the person is spending money on clothes, and not on food. There can be many ways of getting the financial information all in one location -- you could take a picture of all the receipts that you spent money on, or match up the time on the credit card bill.

One of the benefits is that when you have all this information in one place, you can get instant feedback on your spending. Did you pay more money than you planned on a suit? Well, you will have to either have to take that money from the money you were going to use to buy a present for your friend or from money to buy video games.

mobile taxi service

one liner: offer a one-touch app to call for a taxi

The basic service will provide an application where pressing a button will send the gps location of the user to the local taxi service and call for a cab. Preferably taxi companies would be able to respond to the particular phone with an update for the amount of time it would take for the taxi to arrive.

There can be a lot of incentives that could go along with it. It can offer 1/2 off discounts to certain partnership malls or other services. It can offer to sync up with your schedule, so the taxi would be outside waiting for you when you are done with your meting and such.

drum where you go

one liner: make a portable drum kit by using accelerometers and sensors connected to a portable device

so I was doing air drumming today cuz I was bored. and I realized that most of the motions can be detected by a device you wear... nike already have sensors in shoes, and they wirelessly transmit the info to a handheld device. Hand motions can be sensed by acclerometers put in watches or cell phones attached to the arm. It really wouldn't be too hard to have a portable device that combines all these information to produce real sound (either on the device or on a better speaker).

I am a huge fan of being able to play music everywhere you go. With a portable computing device like a cell phone, you can do stuff like having an autotune microphone, karaoke machine, or portable musical devices right on your cell phone.

Karaoke never got big in the states for some reason, but in asian countries, going to karaoke is just as common as going to the movies for entertainment. I'd think that these types of music games/activities would have a huge market that could use some more innovation.

cell phone, where are thou?

one liner: have the cell phone email you its gps location when it's running short of juice.

I just got woken up by my obnoxious cell phone cuz it was running low of power. It's like ridiculous how long it can keep beeping loudly when it claims it's low on power.

Anyways, so to tell me that it's low on power without being obnoxious is to email me when it's low on power. And just in case I forgot where the cell phone is, turn on the gps and tell me where you are exactly, then go to low power mode. I can still call the phone if I reallly need it to ring.

printer for cellphones

one liner: make a printer for cell phones by exposing polaroid pictures to the cellphone display

I think I saw like a tiny version of polaroid cameras where the polaroid is like a little sticker that you can just stick anywhere. It'll be really useful if you can just find and print out figures from google and stick it on stuff.

typically other methods of printing require a lot of moving parts and possibly heat to finalize the printed material. This method would allow printing with the minimum amount of extra parts.

not sure if the contrast on the cell phone display is good enough for this though, it may take some experimenting to see how it works

web 2.0 top 10 list

one liner: web 2.0 creation of top 10 list

A list will have a name and the categories it belongs to.
Each item in the list will have a name, multiple descritions and rating.
The discriptions of the items on the list will have ratings.

The order of the list will be decided through ratings. The description of each item will be the highest rated description.

Product Review Website

one liner: a website with superior product reviews and ratings by offering coupons for helpful reviews.

Reviewing a product well isn't an easy job, you need to have some kind of expertise in the area, you need to know other products in the market, and you need to be able to communicate your feelings about the product in a clear manner. Just look at movie critics, game review magazines, zagat guides, etc. There are millions of people who make their living off of reviewing different kinds of products.

Many restaurants pay bloggers to review their food and make posts of it, but when reading any of those things, you can't help but question whether they really like the restaurant or they just got paid a lot to like it. It's an inherent paradox in product review -- people base their judgment on independant reviewers, but reviewers make their money from companies that make the product they review, which makes them biased. It would be much better if the reward system is fully disclosed or controlled.

But what is interesting is that these kinds of reviews can be analyzed statistically. There are plenty of signs that would tell if the review is really accurate or not. If people who expected a 5-star hotel, but only got a 2-star service, the probability of them complaining is very high. So it is completely feasible to find out how good the rating is by product sales, amount of use of the product, amount of complaints, etc. Reviewers that have both popularity and accurate ratings are the most valuable for a product review website, and it would be profitable to the website to provide such people some kind of compensation, whether it is a free product to let the reviewer review or a monetary compensation.