if error = True:: July 2009

Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Learning partners -- social network for collaboration

one liner: offer a social network for people that would like to learn a new skill that offers suggestions for people to learn or work with.

When you are learning a new skill or learning about a new subject, it is very hard to do on your own. This is one of the advantages of being in a college environment, where you have classmates where you can form study groups with people in your dorm when an exam comes up. When you have a question, you can ask your study buddy. Studying with someone else would also help give you motivation to continue with your commitment. It is also a great way of making friends with someone... small talk only gets you so far. Matchmaking online (as far as I know) has been limited to dating, but there should be ways of extending it to other fields.

One natural area where this would help would be a language exchange, where two people that are good in two separate languages can help each other get better at each other's language. English learning makes is a very large market in asian countries. There would definitely be ways of monetising it.

For implementation, there are many considerations, but many things can be copied (or learned) from the online dating websites. It should be the easiest to integrate with facebook where people already have their information and their network of people. I think there will be a significant portion of people that will use the service as a way of meeting the opposite gender, but I'm not sure how that will affect the service.
This is still a brainstorm in progress.....

I just read an interesting piece on how to get learn things well, maybe it will be able to connect with this idea.

Thursday, July 16, 2009

Activity suggesting software

one liner: make a software that would recommend activities to do (for work or entertainment)
-or the integration of scheduling software with product searches.

Before I go into the details, this idea came up when I was thinking about how else to do advertising in the future. Advertising is THE way of making money online, all other options aren't really turning out to be great business plans. In general, I do not agree with the assumption that money making businesses are inherently unconscienable. In a perfect world, money would represent the value that a business offers, and advertising offers a lot of value to the world. Annoying advertisement and false advertising do not add value in the big picture of things.

During the course of the week, there are times where I find myself wondering what to do. I have lists of TODO for home, and for work, but I don't really have a habit of going to those when I have free time. It would be nice if a schedule / daily planner would be able to suggest things to do next. For work, it would grab your todo list, and your boss's todo list, and you coworkers todo list, and combine them in a way that would maximize productivity. For entertainment, when it sees that I have some time off, it could look at my history and suggest activities for me to do. If I want to do something with my friends, it could look at their iteneraries and offer suggestions as well. Here is where the revenue would come in for this idea. Depending on who I was with, what time of day it is, or a bunch of other factors, it would be able to tell me that there is a sale at so and so place, or new movies that came out that I want to watch, or that there is a new game that came out. Companies would be able to have targeted advertisement for people that want to do certain things.

I can plan to hang out with a few friends, and the software could be able to suggest restaurants to go to, or things to do. On the advertising side, companies could develop activities for people to do, and advertise it to the people who are interested.

Since we are often defined by the things we do, I hope that such a software would help us to become who we want to be.