... a "Jump to Conclusions" mat. You see, it would be this mat that you would put on the floor... and would have different conclusions written on it that you could jump to.
A social network for people who fly on airplanes regularly that helps people book seats next to each other so that they can enjoy a nice conversation rather than sitting in silence for the duration of the flight.
Along those lines I know there is a very lucrative black (maybe more gray) market in which people will pay big money to find out flight plans of important decision makers. People paid that money so they could try to buy a ticket in the seat next to said decision maker. You've then got X hours to work a pitch.
I know this happens to execs in pro sports a lot (people trying to get sponsorship, get the leagues using their products, etc) and I imagine it happens in other industries as well.
How you make a startup/product out of this I don't know but I thought it was an interesting tidbit to share.
Eugene O'Kelly told an example of this story in "Chasing Daylight": flying from NY to Australia, to fly next to the head of a bank whose account he was trying to win but was unable to schedule a call to talk to.
But that was mostly possible because he had built up a relationship with the banker's assistant.
Alternately, this could be a service the important decision maker signs up for, reserving the seat next to them and letting people vie to fill it. The IDM would be considered to be "donating their time" philanthropically.
I know you're joking around but I thought I'd answer anyway. The key aspect of flights is that your "victim" isn't going anywhere. He's stuck in that seat and can't escape nearly as easily as he could if you approached him in a cafe, museum, etc.
EG - Got a startup that'll need buy in from a major wireless carrier (you're gon' change the industry like the iPhone did!) but can't get attention from any of them? Imagine what you could work if you were sitting next to the CEO of Verizon, AT&T, or T-Mobile on a 6 hour flight. How much would you pay for the information to get you that seat?
This could help raise the popularity of private jets. And don't truly important decisionmakers travel with an entourage specifically to prevent these sorts of things?
That's a fair point, but it's also a little unfair IMO - on the stalkee. I can totally see the market but I would never want to corner someone like that for 6 hours. Plus, what if I snore on the flight and totally alienate the CEO? ;)
I think I'm posting all of my ideas that didn't make the cut. This one would be challenging unless you could directly book flights for people-- or at least change their seats. Also, you would need a large number of people to use it before it became useful since you're really working with a narrow population of people flying on a particular flight.
Important decision makers aren't always at the extreme top of the pyramid. There are plenty of people who have the power to help you that do not get their own Gulfstream (e.g., someone who can authorize a big contract for your firm, or at least fight on your behalf).
Not to mention you can totally do this in first class.
Every economic buyer flies first class or private aircraft. And the seat upgrades to first class certainly wouldn't be worth the money spent. Good points all around.
Having a captive audience is always nice, but I can see some privacy issues with this one :)
Also, it would require a lot of people working in concert to make this work, which suggests that if there is such a market right now it is organized by people with a lot of pull.
It takes two to sit in awkward silence for the duration of the flight.
I'm a pretty shy guy myself - but every time I've opened my mouth to start a conversation with my seat-mate, I've never been disappointed. One key realization in life is that the guy next to you is (in general) just as awkward and desiring of social contact as you.
In my experience socializing with a bunch of random people - even in the form of short, useless conversations - leads to cuties.
I have a no-iPod rule these days - I never listen to music on the go. Headphones-on is a great way to miss out on interesting people in life.
[edit] Also, this is in no way a comment on what you ought to be doing - but for myself I find that when I feel absolutely beat and just feel like crawling into a little corner and being alone, I do the opposite instead. I've never been disappointed. Instead of withdrawing into my own space I try to engage as many people as possible - and as a result end up more refreshed than I would've if I had sat for 3 hours in front of HN hitting Refresh.
>>Instead of withdrawing into my own space I try to engage as many people as possible - and as a result end up more refreshed
(Sniff, sniff... what is that weird smell? Ah! There is an extrovert on HN! Anyone got tar and feathers?)
I personally like people and get unhappy if I spend too much time alone. And yes, I might be in the wrong profession.
But despite having quite a social personality, I get tired from being with people -- not energized, like you extroverts. A majority @HN probably are introverts.
(And no, I don't really know or care that much about pop psychology, but this is quite an obvious difference.)
I don't actually consider myself an extrovert. I was an extreme introvert in high school (hence why I'm a hacker now, I suppose), and even now I have default reactions to be introverted.
Hence why I suggested what I did :) When I'm tired from a long day of work, my brain tells me to go home and watch TV/surf the interwebs. I override this instinct and go and meet people - and generally do not ever regret it. I'm a closet extrovert? I don't know, I'm no psychologist.
I want to be left alone full-stop - but if the upthread idea was implemented right, that would help the situation, because you could seat people who don't want to talk next to each other, thus preventing the mismatch of a talker next to a non-talker.
Take down the oligopoly of the existing credit scoring companies by providing an open algorithm to determine scores. Change it as necessary. Educate people on how to improve the score. Provide the data to consumers for free, charge others (banks, mortgage companies, etc.) to use it.
Part of the problem with that is in reporting. The stuff that ends up on your credit report is only there because companies (credit cards, banks, collections agencies, etc.) report the information to the credit bureaus. Convincing those companies to also report to you -- especially given general corporate distrust for the "open source" concept -- would be a tough sell.
On the other hand, if there was a way you could gather all this information without relying on third parties to actively notify you... that would be both cool and incredibly frightening.
Personal Fabrication Machines. Not expensive/rare 3D printers though, there are over 1MM personal paper cutting machines like the CriCut and CraftRobo that have already been sold. They need good software to drive them. I think there is a tremendous market opportunity here and would be interested in any feedback people have.
There are some slides fleshing the concept out on this page:
How about a news site that actually helps reporters/ photographers/ editors collaborate to create news, instead of just aggregating/ ranking already written articles?
The basic blocks of the news stories is source material: photos, quotes, observations that can be submitted by anyone.
Every contributor (sources submitting photos/ quotes/ etc, writers, editors) and every component (the photos, the source material, the finished article) are rated, and feedback goes both ways.
So, the best sources/ writers/ editors eventually float to the top:
Add fins to catch the wind on the sides of airplane wheels so that the wheels automatically begin to spin on landing approaches. This should help by reducing the amount of rubber that is lost on landing and increase the useful lifespan of airplane tires.
I think the 747 actually has motors that spin the wheels up. The lateral slide is actually not a big issue, the landing gear on most larger aircraft are steerable to allow for that ("crab landing" I think it's called).
Another idea in the file right after that one was to put vacuum flasks into car engines to keep the fluids hot after the engine is turned off. In theory this would reduce emissions & engine wear by reducing the number of cold starts. Turns out the Prius has that already.
On the other hand a Boeing engineer came up with the idea of the little winglets you see on airliners now, Boeing passed on the idea so he took it outside and worked with a guy named Joe Clark. Their company (Aviation Partners) has done very well.
I think the takeaway is that as an outsider to one of these mature industries you may come up with new ideas but you're also at a significant disadvantage compared to insiders.
For the record my recollections of how aircraft landing gear works seem to be inaccurate (I just looked, could only find a reference for steerable gear on the B-52). For the spin-up idea I did find this though:
I knew someone who applied for a patent on that idea in the 1993-1995 time frame ( I can't place the year exactly ). I have no idea if they succeeded in getting a patent or getting it manufactured, but the guy had done enough research to find out it would not be useful to general aviation planes, because the tires on those planes are usually tossed due to UV sidewall damage before wearing out.
A friend of mine (PaulJ, co-founder of xs4all) came up with that long long ago, and had it researched. It turned out that the increase in weight because of the fins and the increased drag during landing would offset any savings.
Nice though, to see another example of people coming up with the same 'good' idea, one more reason to abolish patents.
Sounds cool until you consider that there is usually a crosswind component to every landing. (i.e. the rubber is being lost perpendicular to the tire rotation as well, and even if they were rotating this would still occur)
I wonder if the benefit would be enough regardless?
Although I've often wished such a thing existed, you run into a significant set of problems with accuracy. For example, the Mormons are big on genealogy; many of them are extremely reliable sources, but many are not--e.g., their genealogy files contain "Noah" and similar figures.
On the other hand, if the information is accurate, it raises major privacy concerns. Most reliable sources will not display the backgrounds of living people to the general public. If this were world-write, what's to stop someone from adding my grandparents, parents (thereby giving away my mother's maiden name), and myself without my knowledge? I might not want pieces of this information known--for example, if I were 1/8 $RACE and I lived in an area with a strong prejudice against $RACE, I would not want that fact known. I might not even be aware of this lineage myself--it could come as a real surprise, and possibly an unpleasant one.
Using your mother's maiden name as a secret should have died out a long time ago. Public geneaology is an argument against it, not the other way 'round.
Unfortunately, some places still either require this information, or treat it as some sort of reasonable evidence for your identity.
My solution is to give my provider's my mother's maiden name when required, but to deliberately misspell it. This solves the first problem but not the second.
The only time I can say that we 'scored' we weren't so much concentrating on 'being a startup' or 'making it big', we were trying to solve a relatively simple problem (how to put live video on the internet) in the simplest possible way (1 click download and launch).
Nothing else I ever did before or after came close, but if there is one lesson to take away from that whole period it is keep it as simple as you can.
Several times I have needed to get product X, be it a hammer, sandals etc. but have no idea where to get it locally. Do I have to take the bus to center, or is it sold in some of the smaller shops around me? One weekend we spent hours looking for sandals. At least here local shops don't list specific items they have on their websites.
I imagine this would work by people contributing product info from shops as they visit them, perhaps snapping pics of aisles with their iPhones, and then having a separate group of people tagging the products they see in the photos.
There's a much simpler way: an iPhone app that would let you take pictures of UPC barcodes, and would upload the UPC + GPS to a database (which would look up the UPC with the central UPC service to find out what it means.) it would also let you enter a quantitative capacity (not how much there is at the moment, but rather how much the shelf looks like it was spaced to hold.) Searching could be done from the same app or on the web, and the indexers rewarded with discounts—on the specific things they're indexing—for previously unindexed (UPC, GPS) tuples.
I would have loved to have that last week when I was in Baltimore and looking for a RJ-45 crimper. You might be able to convince store owners to enter their inventory if it then showed up in Google searches (it would drive more customers their way).
a website that allow FOSS community to pay up developers based on community request. basic goal : to speed up FOSS development.
i.e: let just say that user A want to donate $100 to pay any developer to create a 3D driver for X card. Later, user B want it to and increase the pot $150, and so on, and so on. At some time, some developers take a request and developing it, publish it and take the money. As a profit, 5% of the pot will be taken by the website.
So this website basically functioned as a mediator between FOSS user and FOSS developer.
I posted a quite similar idea (though mine had some charity donation aspects too it) here some time ago and the final consensus was that in an ideal world it would be great.
But in actually fact it wouldn't get much by the way of serious pledges and it probably is more off putting for the developers.
(I still think it is a good idea though; and sorry cant find a link to the old thread)
This is a nice way to speed up development. The Haiku community already has something like this in place, with bounties at HaikuWare.com and an annual Haiku Code Drive (which is similar to GSoC).
A touchscreen computer designed specifically for the kitchen, meant to be mounted on the fridge or on the wall. Inventories food via bar-code scanner, and/or image recognition. Massive crowd-sourced recipe database that checks against fridge/pantry contents, and displays cooking instructions, or reads them aloud. Throw in some timers and a media player for good measure, sync via Wi-Fi, etc.
It's what I'd be working on if I wasn't so busy with my main idea. :)
Monitors usage and reports grocery list based on projected consumption.
Provides coupons for purchased items. Or competitor brands.
Social ranking system for recipes. As well as flavor profile so that people who prefer similar recipes as you affect a recipes rank more then someone with opposing tastes.
Can send pre-order for packaging to local grocer or order hard to get items from the web.
Can be integrated with a personal chef service to allow them to know what you have on site.
I have a million more on this one. If anyone does this let me know. I would love to chat about my ideas no strings attached.
An online dating site that uses collaborative filtering on large datasets of people (perhaps Facebook as a dataset). Then inform potential couples when they are physically close to each other via cell phone/geolocation.
I've been thinking about something like this for the last few months. I think the mobile element is a great idea, and a very nice ice breaker - "Hey there, I'm Trent415 and superdate.com said you and I have a lot in common." Plus, you could determine if there was a mutual friend close by to introduce you. I also think there needs to be a wed based version that isn't location based, but I do like the mobile idea a lot.
I think the problem with dating sites at the moment is that they make it easy to lie. If you've ever used Match.com, or something similar, the dates tend to end up poorly because one person who claimed to be into music listens to the radio on the way to work, while the other person who claims to be into music has a Masters from the Royal Academy of Music, has played in professional symphonies and spends eight hours a day practicing. Also, that is NOT and athletic build.
Now, if you monitoring their streams (Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, whatever), you could determine what they liked, where they went and who they knew. I suspect this is way better way to form meaningful connections (it's how I found the love of my life). And if you're just looking for a random hookup there's always craigslist.
I've been looking for a co-founder for the Y Combintor summer 2010 session - http://ineedacofounder.wordpress.com - so if you're interested hit me back and maybe we could team up.
http://thread.com/ is also in this space, though in a different fashion. It integrates with Facebook to get info, but appears that it also limits you to requesting dates within your social graph (friends of friends of friends, etc).
I like http://ge.la.to and their take on this better than Thread, but I'm not entirely confident in their execution. Several aspects of the site didn't work for me and I think the need to fine tune their data mining algorithms. A profile's most recently/often talked about topics should not include "ff" and "rt" from Twitter. ;)
The concept of monitoring social site streams for dating/authenticity purposes reminds me of a site I heard about recently, http://ge.la.to/
There are many sites struggling to gain traction in mobile aspects of dating, and the problem is likely that it's difficult to get a critical mass of users set up before using the feature is appealing.
Regardless, I'm not aware of anyone who has put all this together successfully. Dating (in many aspects, but surely online) has shown itself to be a tough nut to crack.
Yeah, I've looked at ge.la.to, and it's kind of similar with what I have in mind, although they don't really seem to do a lot of stream analysis (I could be wrong on this).
You're completely right, it's a hard nut to crack, and gaining traction will be tricky, which is why I'd probably just start in a few major cities first, or maybe just go after one vertical - think JDate but maybe for the younger/tech crowd.
Actually, I think that one of the big problems with dating businesses is that if you're doing a great job you actually loose customers. This may be why no one does a very good job of it.
No, more like attacking the online dating site from a different perspective. More like "increasing the probability of chance encounters with likely mates". It's not unsolicited because both people have to agree to meet on the cell phone notification.
This may be the answer to RFS1: what will replace the newspaper industry? People won't pay for content anymore, but perhaps they'll pay for a personalized service to sift through content.
I know reading recommendations have been tried several times, like at reddit. But perhaps you can get a leg up if you get more data on the user - twitter, delicious, etc.
A web application where people can go online and post events they saw taking place and/or ask if other people saw such events. I wagered the biggest draw would be people trying to find out more information on crimes and you could possibly partner with local law enforcement like CitySourced is trying to partner with local government.
"My car was stolen today outside of 7-11 between 3 and 3:15. Black dodge truck. Did anyone see anything?" It would be community driven and targeted at locals. I imagined the draw to get people to participate would be to help "clean up" the community. Imagine a centralized resource for people to post about what they saw on 9/11 - assuming the government wouldn't shut you down.
UFO's sightings, missing pets, amber alerts could be other such usages.
Thoughts? I'm seriously considering developing this if it's well received.
I tried a separate post of this but didnt get much response. So round two:
In short, more and more people are going to college which makes getting into "top" colleges harder. I know there has been a lot of discussion as to the worth of the college degree these days, but regardless, I think the overwhelming majority of people still believe you should go to the best (highest ranked? best fit? whatever) college you can. The site hopes to "level the playing field" by connecting students with private college counselors at various price points in various locations. Ideally, I would like to include calendaring, planning, and video conference/recording functionality.
I think there are a lot of revenue streams available both provider and student side. I think the most viable is to have a counselor list their normal price, gross it up say 10% and take 15% of the proceeds of the transaction. That way the provider gets most of what s/he wants and the student pays a little more for the added convenience.
I agree that most small stores could benefit from a "just-in-time" inventory system, but I'm not sure it could be styled after Walmart's. The key to their success is the massive quantities they move, as well as their network of delivery trucks. Essentially each semi is treated as a mobile warehouse stocked with a variety of carefully picked products. So instead of having cash tied up in inventory that may or may not sell, any one store can pull items from a truck as soon as they are sold off the retail floor.
As an example, I work at a "mom n pop" style mattress store that has 19 locations throughout the Midwest. We essentially have one main warehouse and two delivery trucks to cover the entire state of Illinois. Wednesday is the only day of the week that I can get any kind of inventory, and even then I'm unlikely to get everything I requested.
With that being said, I do believe that a simple web interface that could track the flow of our inventory through our network of stores could greatly improve efficiency. Even though every individual item is carefully tracked manually, I still have no easy way of identifying where I could potentially pull a particular model or size from to serve my customers. To find that information, I have to literally get on the phone and call each store individually to inquire about what they have. An automated system would certainly be welcomed, the question is only how. Could be a hard sell to a company that still relys on dial-up and fax machines...
Mobile app where you snap pictures/video of issues around your community (graffiti, broken streetlights, potholes, etc.) and upload to a site. Users can search by geo and vote on the ones they want to see fixed first. Local government subscribes to a reporting engine/workflow service that allows them to slice data and work more closely with their citizens in improving their locality.
A super-simple way to email groups. Something where someone can easily subscribe and unsubscribe. Something that doesn't require signing up for an account, but only add an email address.
Concept:
Go to www.saturdaymorningrunninggroup.emailgroups.com
The webpage will have a box to easily add your email address.
To email the group, you send an email to saturdaymorningrunninggroup@emailgroups.com and it is broadcast to everyone on the list.
What's to stop a spammer from joining said group and emailing everyone about a great deal in country X to export 1 million dollars? I don't think the concept is without merit, I do like it to an extent - just wondering how you would manage it?
I want to start a job search site that allows for rich profiles that can subtly communicate someone's design sense, style and personality.
You would have the option of uploading various formats and building a portfolio of your work. This could be a suite of screenshots, embedded videos, or other such work that would allow employers to get a sense of what it is you do and how you do it instead f just matching keywords.
The closest thing I have seen to this is (was) SnapTalent - and their fate is largely why I am not working on this already. They did not have the necessary understanding of the HR industry and neither do I - but I think there's a definite need for this type of service. I'm sick of trying to represent myself in plain text - I don't think or work in plain text.
Some of the ideas are more whimsical than others, but the halfbakery [1] has existed for quite a while.
"The Halfbakery is a communal database of original, fictitious inventions, edited by its users. It was created by people who like to speculate, both as a form of satire and as a form of creative expression."
The issue with that site is that it lives up to it's name. I think you'd need to launch any real idea site from a forum like HN. It's the people submitting and evaluating the idea that will make it work.
What if we made a site where ideas could be posted, along with the likely resources required (programmers, marketers etc.) and interested parties could sign on to them. An idea which garnered a full group could spin off into a project/company. The site wouldn't make money but would be valuable for the participants, and would be fitting as a derivative of YC, which finds companies from the very beginning.
1) You apply for the position you want. If a project needs a JS guy, and you're a JS guy, you apply for that position.
2) To keep people from applying for every single JS position available, there is a $100, sign on fee. This fee is kept in escrow, and if you are not selected as the JS guy, it's returned to you. Until a decision is made, it's out of your account, so you can't apply to 100 projects at once.
3) Once your application is accepted, and you become the JS guy, you lose your $100 permanently, and are possibly asked for more money as well. At completion of this transaction, you are now "one of the founders". You now review resumes of other applicants, and vote on them. Applicant with the most votes becomes "the mechanical engineer guy", for example, and he buys in to the company, and helps vote for the next guys, and so on.
I am working on the exact same thing and have a cool domain to go with it. Sounds like you are much farther along than I am - would you like to talk about combining our resources/ideas? Steve.Johnson.Public@gmail.com
I have always wanted to create a widget that would go into a dishwasher and change color after the cycle was completed. This way, you would always know if the dishes were clean :-)
It might work based on heat (drying cycle) or via a reaction with soap.
Hmmm. My wife is always asking "are the dishes in the dishwasher clean or dirty?" Maybe I'll build one of these when I'm bored and want something to do. Shouldn't take more than a lazy Saturday morning to do.
Most people think they're good drivers, even bad ones (thanks, Dunning-Kruger!)
I'd like to see a rating and ranking system for drivers. A console in your car with a big red button-- when someone around you is driving recklessly, you target them and punch the red button... they rack up demerits (or frowny faces or whatever) and they can go to a site to see how they rank up, and how people think they drive.
Not that it's feasible or anything, but I'd love for somebody to do this; there are people in dire need of this service (myself possibly included).
I thought of something like this based on license plates a while back. Drivers would send messages (kudos or kurses?) to a license plate's inbox. Anyone could check the inbox, but you'd have to know the plate.
I think it'd have to do speech recognition though, because texting-while-driving would probably be irresponsible to encourage.
I couldn't figure out how to make it practical or monetizable, but it'd be fun to have something to scream at while driving now and then :)
I'd love something with a Yelp-esque interface that allows me to search for any product, whether grocery item or gadget, or whatever. e.g. "I wonder what people think of the Blueberry Stonybrook yoghurt?".
Previously it wouldn't be that compelling, but with mobile computing being what it is now, it could be very helpful.
An unmonetized (account holders accumulate credit(s) per textbook(s) already traded/donated) college textbook exchange hub.
Kind of like a distributed library of users holding textbooks for a finite period of time until it is eventually re-queued for someone else to checkout. Payment for textbooks exchanged are abstracted as credits according to some scraped average.
What about some sort of design feature that led to the cars being able to stack and support each other, preferably with out external equipment. I think if you could fit 4 cars in a standard parking spot (side by side + vertical), you'd have a compelling offering.for urban environments
Software to help take an ebay business to the next level:
- seamlessly manage both prospects and customers,
- dead-simple accounting
- some wizard-based basic analytics to figure out which products/customers represent your best shot of making profit.
- A mobile app that tells the user what is the best plan based on his calls profile and current network, etc
- a Google-calendar like app where advertising is time-based, like events, sports, TV shows, etc
A web/mobile app that will allow users to request information (text, audio clip, photo or video clip) from each other, anonymously and in real-time, based on their global location. Human Powered Search?
If it's completely free it will indeed not make you a lot of money, but what you could consider is to limit the number of validations an IP can make in a certain window of time.
Virtual Bank Account numbers so you don't have to update every bill pay/direct deposit when you change banks. Also allows you to add multiple bank accounts behind it.
My assumption is that it won't involve paypal. :-)
Seriously though, that's the difference - some way to avoid the third party lock in that paypal forces, replacing it with a simple: "money from my account into your account" method.
You guys know that in Europe this is common? It's called a "bank transfer" and it is trivial to do, just need people's bank account and routing number and yes, people do hand it out. Many (most? all?) bank websites support it.
We have newly-arrived Europeans working at our US office that cannot believe people still write cheques here.
I'm still frustrated by how far behind we (North Americans) are in terms of payments. What ever happened to using debit cards online? I find promise in email money transfers. But it's still a closed circle. Canadian banks only allow it among Canadian banks.
In Italy that, trust me, is not the best place to do business in the world, normal bank accounts with home banking can be used to transfer money among individuals just paying 50 cents for the transaction. The donwside is that it takes 3 days for the transfer to complete.
Here in Europe this is the most common way to exchange money. I perform at least 5/6 transfers every month as individual, and many more with my company.
We have these things called "credit cards" where you are protected from fraud, typically get a certain percentage award through a marketing tie-in, and get to earn interest on the monthly float.
They have credit cards over there too you know :-)
Many people object to being in debt in principle. Yes, yes, I know you can pay off the balance every month, but clearly most people don't, otherwise credit cards would not be in business.
Also, for small-time ebay sellers and the like, the overhead in accepting credit cards is non-trivial.
I think the difference is that these would be web applications. Imagine a big, UMLish parts bin of controllers and models that you drag between to create relationships, sourced from an online db. Once you're done, it gives you the skeletons of the views and you drag-and-drop them to 'beauty.'
The mini pitch: “Buy and sell work online.”
What it is: You know all those job boards you see littered around the web? This is a job board flipped on its head. Think of it as a “work wanted” board. Instead of employers posting job offers, this is a place for service providers to post requests for work.
How it works: Designers, developers, writers, and anyone else wanting work can post their request, together with the percentage or fixed fee they’d pay to someone providing a lead.
Why it’s hot: More people than ever are turning to the web as a source of work. Sometimes it’s very hard to find it, or very time-consuming to browse offers and make pitches. Wouldn’t it be great if people could find work for you? And imagine getting paid just for referring someone you know who needs a new website or logo design.
Where the money is: Take a commission when work is successfully placed, or charge a monthly fee to either buy requests or see contact details.
2. Live Auction Sites
The mini pitch: “Buy it now on steroids.”
What it is: Online auction sites are great, but few of them capture the same adrenalin rush and buzz that you get from a real auction room. I think there’s still space for a well-executed live auction site that makes listing and bidding super-simple.
How it works: Imagine a list of iPhones for sale — you can only bid on the one at the top, and it’s only available for minutes instead of days. Bids are live and backed by escrow, and when the top item’s been sold, the ones below float upwards and a new item becomes active and open to bids.
Why it’s hot: As a seller, it’s becoming increasingly complicated to list things online, generate buzz, and make a quick sale. A simple live online auction site could solve all that.
Where the money is: Make it free to list and just charge a commission for successful sales. You need to think carefully about how you’ll guarantee that all bids (and items!) are genuine. This could be by asking users to deposit funds into their account prior to bidding, or some other way.
3. Website Sales
The mini pitch: “The place to buy and sell websites.”
What it is: If you’ve got an established website to sell, where do you go? There is still no clear-cut market leader in this field. What’s stopping you from filling that gap?
How it works: List your website for sale at either a flat fee or auction rate. Include screenshots, traffic, pagerank and earnings info and watch the money roll in!
Why it’s hot: Domain name sales are big business. But selling a website for what it’s really worth, or buying an online property in a trusted way is still rather tricky.
Where the money is: Take a commission from successful sales in return for offering escrow and listing services, or charge for each listing.
Just as a reminder, universities outside the US don't get .edu addresses (for example, mine is just a .bc.ca adddress.) This may or may not be your intended effect.
both the "locals" and "students" plan can easily be handled by a narrowed search in elance. Its simply a missing feature. If there are enough buyers that want this search aspect, it will appear very quickly.
This is the best idea of the bunch. Instead of playing up the whole "American" angle it could be based on proximity (thereby working for the world). I'm sure the big boys have tools like this (zip code search), but as you suggested it would be a requirement and the whole push of the site would be to find someone local.
Something like the robotic vacum cleaner (I think it was called "Roomba" ??) except instead of vaccuming, it will steam clean. Also, instead of doing it all day willy-nilly, it will only activate when it senses your poorly-trained or bad dog soils the carpet when you are at work.
