A Startup A Day

Here’s a quick exercise for you to try at home.  Invite 100 people with Web 2.0 startup ideas to come over to your house.  Ask everyone who is building a social network to walk out your front door.  Then ask everyone who is building a widget for a social network to walk out the back door.  Of the 10 people who are remaining, ask them what type of startup they are building.  I’ll bet $20 that it has something to do with music.

Of course I’m exaggerating, but there are a ton of music-centric sites out there today - which means there is a big opportunity to provide value-add services to these good.  A good example of this is a service that use with Windows Media Player that allows me to rip a CD to my computer, and then matches these files against an online database that automatically tags the ripped music with the name of the album, the artist, genre, etc… 

My idea is to create a service that takes this concept one step further - the ability to break a song down into its core components such as verse, chorus, bridge, etc..  The components could also be tagged to identify the “hook”, or the 30 second clip that is the most popular section of the song. 

Scenario #1 - Imagine a company that was building an app that pulled together pictures and music into a 30 second slideshow.  If a user uploaded their favorite song to use as the background, instead of pulling the first 30 seconds of the song, the app could automagically pick out the 30 second snippet that is the most interesting part of the song.  Or better yet, for a 2 minute slideshow, the user could choose to have 4 30-second clips of the most recognizable parts of the songs, as opposed to having one song used as the background for the full 2 minutes.  

Another use case might be for a service that allows users to send mixes of their favorite music for their friends.  Let’s say I create a mix with 10 songs - instead of sending my friend a 30-minute music file (OMG!  No way, I’m like totally ADD!), I can send them a 5 minute mix consisting of their favorite parts of the songs.  Users could also use this service as an add-on to iTunes (or iZunes) to create a fun dance mix for their next party.  That way, you can play songs like ‘American Pie’, get everyone to sing through the chorus, and then move on to the next song instead of making everyone stand around for the next 7 minutes trying to decide what to do during that not-fast-enough-to-really-dance-but-too-fast-for-slow-dancing section towards the end.

Last point - I’d argue to create a back-end service instead of a single application because A) there are so many players in this space - better to sell the pick-axes than go after the gold and B) lots of the big guys (especially the major record labels) are looking to buy their way into this space, and this service could make for a very appealing acquisition target.

It’s been a while, how does this thing work again?  Oh yeah, I ramble on about something pointless, then I continue to ramble on about a startup idea, and follow up with rambling written in italics for no apparent reason. 

Today’s idea spawns from a realization I had last week about the incredible wealth of information that I get out of the Email list I subscribed to from the Seattle Tech Startups group.  Local entrepreneurs post questions about typical startup stuff, and the community then throws back all kinds of valuable information and ideas. Over time the collective wisdom of the group has created a lot of value that is lost in the depths of countless Email inboxes.  Multiply that across all of the hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of public Email lists that are out there on every niche topic imaginable.  There’s so much untapped, unindexed, undervalued information out there - why not unlock it?

My idea is a site that takes the best information from public Email lists and organizes it by topic, location, and relevance.  Users could submit their favorite lists and tag it by topic and location, and the site would take the Emails from the list and convert them into a web-ready (and SEO-friendly) format.  Other users looking for information could either browse the content from the lists, or search for a specific topic. 

Additionally, users could rate the Emails and correlate rankings back to the authors of the mails.  This could then be used to build up an “authority ranking” for each author.  Over time, the site could incorporate semantic-web style natural language processing to pull all of the free-form data from the highest authority authors to create a structured site full of high-quality content.

If you’re in the area, come check out the Seattle Facebook Developers Garage on Monday May 5th.  My “A Startup A Week” team and I got chosen to present our little Facebook app we put together for the pilot episode!  Should be a great event.

Last year I posted an idea called “Screen Save the Planet” and made up some stats about how if Google changed their homepage background from white to black, it would save something like 40 trillion gallons of oil or something like that.  Well, looks like someone at the big G is finally listening to me - check out Google’s all-black homepage today!  It’s in support of “Earth Hour“, which encourages everyone to turn off your lights tonight for one hour.

 Of course, the irony of this whole thing (which an astute reader pointed out in the comments of my original post) is that modern computer screens use the same amount of energy regardless of the background color.  Still, it’s a great cause, and big props to Google for using their enormous influence to draw attention to a worthy cause.

Can you believe it’s been one year since I started this thing?  Wow, time flies.  Well, I started off with a goal of posting a new startup idea every single day.  365 days later and there are 116 ideas posted.  Sooooo…not quite every day, but all in all I’m kinda surprised I didn’t just give up after the first week. 

All right, so I have a confession to make.  I sort of had an ulterior motive for starting this blog.  Back in early ‘07, I hit upon one of those nagging little ideas that I just couldn’t shake.  The idea was to do an online video show, where each week we would start on Monday morning with a new idea for a startup, and we’d have until the end of the week to turn that vision into reality.  The show would be called “A Startup A Week”, and it would be a way to capture the excitement, fun, and drama of what really takes place during the whole startup creation process.

After a few weeks of having this idea churning in my head, I decided to pitch this idea to my manager here at Microsoft to get his thoughts.  He got it right away, and while I still had a ton of things on my plate to finish up for the year, he gave me the go-ahead to give it a shot and see what happens.  I knew it might be a while before I got a chance to actually get this thing off the ground, so in the meantime I decided to do a mini version of that idea - A Startup A Day.  One year ago I launched this blog, and I’m happy to announce that starting next week we’re going to launch the real thing, an online video show called A Startup A Week. 

We’re starting small with just one pilot episode, and who knows, it could be a complete fail and never even see the light of day.  But we’ve got an amazing developer and designer lined up to help out, along with my good buddy Kyle who graciously agreed to give up a majority of his week to help host, and our ultra-dedicated producer Stephen who cut short his European vacation to join us on this crazy project.  So at the very, very least - it’s going to be a heck of a lot of fun.

We’ve propped up a site at www.astartupaweek.com where we’ll be (hopefully) blogging about the project in real time, along with posting the completed videos.  Please swing by and check it out next week, I definitely would love to hear what you guys think.  Also, for some of you guys who have been reading this over the past year - thank you.  Thanks for all the support and comments and for keeping me motivated to post on days when I probably would have rather been watching TV.  You guys rock.

I’m watching “The Constant” episode of Lost.  For the third time.  This time through I caught that the call numbers on the back of the helicopter are 842.  Obsession?  Yeah, maybe just a bit…

Anyway, today’s idea is a retirement planning site with a bit of a twist.  Most retirement calculators ask for some basic information about your current salary, savings, and expected retirement income to provide a rough estimate of when you might be able to retire.  My idea takes this a bit further - you have the option to enter in your exact details for your salary, 401(k), IRA, etc., and also your target retirement income.  The site would crunch the numbers and give you an exact date that you would be able to retire.  

Over time, you could update your numbers to get a new retirement date.  Also, the site would provide suggestions to move your retirement date forward.  For example, by converting to a new CD or switching to a lower-rate credit card, you could change your retirement date from May 2nd, 2029 to November 18th, 2028.  By making your retirement more concrete, it would encourage people to be more pragmatic with their retirement choices. 

For anyone wondering why I’ve been such a slacker lately, it’s ’cause I’ve been working on this: www.innovateon.com 

Now that we’re past launch and things are slowing down a bit, hopefully I’ll be able to start posting some new ideas again.  Anyway, check out the site and let me know what you think.

As you may have heard, MySpace has launched their developer platform a little while back. Surprisingly, I’ve seen little-to-no buzz about this, which is great news for all the independent social app developers out there.  Why?

• In spite of their tremendous growth, MySpace is still over four times as large as Facebook.
• Many successful Facebook developers cited “Launching within the first week of the platform” as one of the reasons their apps took off.
• As confirmed in the comments of my last post (thanks, Ben!), MySpace will not be supporting a version of the Facebook APIs, which lessens the chance that every successful Facebook app will instantly be ported over to MySpace right off the bat.
• MySpace needs to win the hearts and minds of the social app developer community, and differentiate themselves from F8.  One way to do that?  Through a robust developer revenue share program. 
• MySpace is a different audience than Facebook, which means that an app that is successful on Facebook won’t necessarily take hold on MySpace, and vice versa. That opens the door wide open for a whole new class of apps to take hold.

Seriously, this could be pretty huge.  And the best part is that the barrier to entry is so freakin’ low, you don’t need to borrow money or quit your job to become a full-time entrepreneur to build out the next killer app.  Just a little time, some basic coding knowledge, and an idea.  Ask your wife for the first, hit up MySpace for the second, and I’ll take a shot at helping you out with the third.  Just a quick aside, some of these ideas are likely already on Facebook - probably best to do a little due diligence to make sure you’re not going to rip off anyone too badly…

1. Celebrity Soulmate

Take a simple 10-question quiz to find out who your Celebrity Soulmate is.  Display your celebrity match on your profile and invite your friends to discover who their celebrity soulmate is.  Bonus: send your enemies a fake celebrity soulmate invitation - no matter how they answer, they always end up with the dude from the Dell commercials.

2. I Never

I’ve you’ve never heard of the game “I Never”, take a drink and visit this link.  This would be pretty basic to implement - you ask a question to all of your friends, and only by answering the question yourself would you get to see how the rest of your friends answered.  You could also include profile photos of other random people who have answered the same as you have.  Along with the basic “I have” or “I have never” binary choices, each question could have comments to allow you to weasel out of any seemingly exotic situation (”You know, because it’s YOUR dog, get it?“)

3. Troops

Here’s the pitch: To show support for our troops in Iraq, let’s try to get every single MySpace profile to feature a “Support Our Troops” icon (flag, yellow ribbon, eagle with a machine gun in it’s talons, etc..).  Once you install the icon on your profile page, you’d get a little graph on the canvas page showing how many of your friends are also supporting the troops (and, of course, an easy way to send them in invite to boost your percentage).  Imagine the pride that a soldier who logged onto MySpace would feel upon seeing the nation’s consolidated support spread across the entire MySpace community.

 4. Fake Scrabulous

Create a Scrabbulous clone with a twist - when you send out an invite to a friend, they always seem to get the “bad luck” of having the following letters: Q X W V W Z V.  Of course, it will be doubly frustrating when you are constantly scoring 7-letter “bingos“, which is insanely easy given that you can choose any letters you want. 

 5. Most Likely To

Which of your friends is most likely to become president?  Most likely to eat a dozen tacos in less than 30 minutes?  Most likely to marry a taxidermist?  Fill out a ten-question quiz by choosing an candidate from within your friends list.  Of course, each friend that you picked would get a little notice: “Your friend Hillary thought you were most likely to…(click here to install this app to find out)”

  6. Mexico

For Mexican-Americans (or any ethnicity), a way to display cultural heritage and network with other MySpacers who also have similar backgrounds.  Load up the app, stick a pin in a map to indicate your birthplace, and get a list of all of the other MySpacers from the same area, listed in order of current geological closeness.

7. Religion

Share your faith and find others who share your same ideals and background.  Choose a religious image or inspirational passage to display on your profile.  Choose your favorite religious music, movies, or books and get matched up with others who share your same tastes.  Single?  Browse other eligible bachelor/bachelorettes in your town, and if you find a potential soulmate, send them a electronic token of your admiration (only $5 for a dozen roses!).

I’ve got a few spare cycles this weekend and might take a crack at getting one of these ideas off the ground - any advice for which one I should choose?  I’ve got one in mind, but I’d definitely like to hear what you think before I get started tomorrow afternoon.  The ideal app for me is simple to build, highly viral, and very easy to maintain over time.  Revenue potential?  At this point it’s a nice to have - the idea here is really more to try this thing out, learn something new, and have a little fun.

Sorry for being so quiet lately - I’m about a week away from relaunching our site here at work, which means crazy long hours of bug bashing and copy editing.  If anyone ever wants to know about the proper way to refer to specific Microsoft products, just give me a call.  Complicated stuff.

 Anyway, I have a list of 10 MySpace apps that is about halfway finished and should be posted shortly, but in the meantime, I wanted to let you all know about a new site that was launched by my sometimes-co-contributor Colin called BitLesson.  The concept is based on one of my favorite ideas from the past few months - More Smarter.  It’s off to a great start, definitely stop by and let Colin know what you think.

Now here’s the news I’ve been waiting for since the Great OpenSocial Hypestorm of ‘07.  A Facebook-like developer platform for MySpace?  Sounds good to me.  It’ll be interesting to see if they only use the OpenSocial APIs or if they also include a Facebook API close (similar to what Bebo did).  So why does this matter if MySpace is dead and Facebook is the #1 social network on the block?  Check this out - pretty surprising, no?

Anyway, I signed up and will let y’all know how it looks.  One of my (too) many side projects is a little football-meets-Pokeman social app, MySpace would definitely be an interesting platform to get some early traction on… 

Only four more days until the season premiere of Lost.  My predictions?  Kate is pregnant with Sawyer’s baby, Mikhail isn’t really dead, and after ever episode people are going to rush online to cleverly complain that “this is the episode that Lost has finally jumped the shark“.  I, for one, cannot wait.

Today’s idea is based on the simple fact that the role of designer and developer is becoming more and more blurred as designers move online and developers finally get Steve Job’s memo on the importance of good design.  My idea is a dual website called “D4D”.  One side is a set of tutorials about learning design that is geared towards developers (Design 4 Devs).  The other side is a set of tutorials about learning web development that is geared towards designers (Dev 4 Designers). 

If you think about it, if you’re writing a book about development techniques, who is your target audience?  Developers, of course.  So you target your writing style towards technical readers with a development or engineering background.  However, designers have such a different background and mindset than developers, so it seems like there’s an opportunity to instead target the design community with a series of artfully-designed development tutorials.  And conversely, the design articles could explore the mathematical side of design (color theory, for example) and focus on the technical aspects of aesthetics that would appeal to your everyday developer.  Along with building out the website and generating advertising revenue, this could also become a solid brand that could expand offline into a series of instructional books.

Look who’s back!  Steve was the original inspiration for this blog back in the day, great to have him back in the game.