Archive for the 'Great Ideas' Category

Venture Altruist Idea – Turning Resumes into a rich content experience with YouTube

Published on July 19, 2011 in Great Ideas and Venture Altruist. Closed

I’m not too sure if this has been done, but I’ve seen those choose your own adventure stories on YouTube and thought, why aren’t resumes like this? Resumes are broken up into three main parts:

1 – Skills. Can’t these be verified on the fly with third parties using web services? No more trusting if this guy really has an MCSE, it’s endorsed by Microsoft.

2 – Experience. We have written word references, but video references could take that to another level.

3 – Personality. Trying to fit someone’s personality into the medium of a two page reference is impossible.

Not too sure how this idea should develop, but there you go none the less!

Venture Altruist idea – Making Resthomes an amazing experience – like business class on an airline!

Published on July 15, 2011 in Great Ideas and Venture Altruist. Closed

Why are resthomes like second class hospitals? Old people are stuck at these places, but yet these places are designed to look like public bus terminals. My great idea is to make them like business class lounges and the business class section of an airline. Imagine this, a lounge with funky colours, different zones, and in each zone there are business class seats with iPads built into them, with a full entertainment experience, and ottomans, with the zones that allow people to fall asleep or have private areas between two people, the quality of experience will be amazing, and allow people to enjoy themselves as they relax and love life, and allow them to feel like normal people having a quality experience.

Venture Altruist idea – the gamification of life, rewarding people with badges for everyday things!

Published on July 15, 2011 in Great Ideas and Venture Altruist. Closed

I was going to keep this idea to myself, but I already see it out in the wild, so I’ll spill the beans.

Imagine Xbox achievements, but for your life. In the same manner that you can get Boy Scouts badges for real life achievements, this would be the digital equivilent.

But to make this truly successful, open up the badge creation to everyone using a Facebook application, so anyone could create a badge. I started working on this at http://apps.facebook.com/lifebadge, but I haven’t progressed past the post a badge to a profile yet.

I imagine that badges fall into three natural categories – work, leisure, and pleasure. Work badges are achievements gained at work, and could be third party endorsed. This is how the company makes money, by charging third parties to endorce that certain badges have their approval. For instance, a person could create a Microsoft Certified Professional badge and add it to their profile. But then Microsoft could pay to connect over web services and endorce a particular badge. This badge would then carry the most weighting and would appear at the top of any search listings, and would cancel any one badge with a similar name.

Leisure badges are those which you’d share with your general friends, and may or may not be verified. Such as you changing the oil in your car, becoming a black belt in Karate, or climbing Mount Everest.

Pleasure badges are those which have no verification and you’d only share with your inner circle. Things such as I’ve kissed twins, played strip poker, or had a naked party.

And that’s all fine and good. But the real strength of the idea comes from the fact that badges are actually aspects of one’s identity. If you collate enough of these badges about a person, then you pretty much have verified their identity in the community. This is seperate from their legal identity, but that in itself can be a badge, a verified real name endorced by a central government organisation. So then your profile of badges becomes your default online identity, that has a a fine grained list of badges that you can choose to share with quite specific people.

An example of this would be to get a bank loan. You may call up the credit score company and get them to give you a credit score. This then appears as a badge on your profile once you choose to display it. This badge is your information, and you control who sees it. But you cannot change it, since the information is endorced by a third party. Then you go to the bank and ask for a mortgage. They ask to see your credit score badge. You’re free to show it or not show it, that’s your choice. Of course, if you don’t, then they won’t give you a mortgage.

What happens if your credit score goes down? I thought this information was mine, and others cannot change it without my knowledge? Well that’s true, if your score goes down, the credit score company must be able to update that score, but they still need your permission to do so. If you choose not to however, then the badge becomes stale and is greyed out. You can still display it of course, but it is no longer endorced by the credit score company, and should not be relied upon as valid information anymore.

The beauty of this system is that privacy and making money is built in right from the beginning!

Venture Altruist idea – A community recipe site where people +1 their favourite ingredients! A Wikipedia for Recipes with voting!

Published on July 14, 2011 in Great Ideas and Venture Altruist. Closed

OK, so here’s my venture altruist idea for today, a community recipe  site where people upvote or downvote their changes to the recipe, one ingredient at a time. Think Wikipedia for recipes!

Venture Altruist – A Reputation Sharemarket

Published on July 10, 2011 in Great Ideas and Venture Altruist. Closed

One of the Venture Altruist ideas in Accelerando by Charles Stross is a Reputation Sharemarket. This is a great idea, and something I’d like to see in place. Imagine all the people around you having a reputation share value, or score. The higher the reputation, the more likely this person is a good person to deal with. And because this information is public, there’s an automatic feedback mechanism for people to increase their reputation, by doing good deeds. Eventually, it will be difficult to deal with people with poor reputations, giving those people an incentive to become more reputable.

Virgin Australia opens itself up to re-intermediation though iPads to rent at airports!

Published on July 10, 2011 in Great Ideas and Venture Altruist. Closed

So Virgin Australia and a lot of other low cost airlines allow you to rent an entertainment device for your flight. This is in contrast to say Air New Zealand which has in seat entertainment. This opens up low cost airlines to competition from a company at an airport that would rent iPads or other entertainment devices for a nominal fee, and then have them returned at the other airport, say the Auckland to Sydney route.

This is a business opportunity for someone interested in loading an iPad full of fun games and content, charging people a nominal fee to rent it, say $20 NZD for three hours. You could get $60NZD a day, or $21,900 a year (365 days a year). Break even would be @ 40 flights, or two weeks.

I want to be a Venture Altruist – here’s how I’ll do it.

Published on July 10, 2011 in Great Ideas and Venture Altruist. Closed

I want to be a Venture Altruist. If you don’t know what they are, it’s someone who goes around providing improvements to people, companies, organisations, making everyone else rich, for no fee. In return, I build social capital, which I can then spend on helping more people become rich for free.

Why? Because I’m an ideas guy, not an implementation guy. Other people can implement, they can have the riches of their success. But I love to look at a problem, and show people how to fix that.

Great ideas – conference rooms

Published on March 7, 2011 in Great Ideas and Observations from the Web. Closed Tags: , , .

I’m going to add blog post every now and then with good ideas about a forced topic, and today it’s conference rooms.

First I’ve noticed is making sure that the projector screen is sufficiently dark. Maybe lights could be closer to people in terms of where there heads are so light doesn’t spill out and affect the projector.

I think when something is projected onto a screen, the area of attention is minor, and a lot on the screen is just wasted real estate on context. So if we focus on just the interesting part of the screen and zoom in on that, then people with poor eyesight can see what’s happening.

I think presentations that go over an hour should be broken up. No one can concentrate for that long. Maybe 25 minutes and then a five minute break, enforced by a health and safety policy. I wonder whether it would be more productive.

A surefire way to let business drive IT projects

Published on March 2, 2011 in Business, Career Development, Development, E-Commerce and Great Ideas. Closed Tags: , .

I’ve been thinking a bit about good methods to help the business (referred to as anyone that’s not IT) drive IT projects.

So far the method I’ve observed goes along the lines of:

1. Define the problem. Sounds like an obvious step, but in IT we’re all too keen to jump to solutions. A problem isn’t that we need an ERP or a CRM system, any more than not having a hamburger is a problem. The real problem is you’re hungry. Or for the first two examples, you want to manage the resources of an organisation efficiently, or you want to track all your interactions with your customers across multiple communication channels and plan marketing campaigns.

With the problem defined we can move on to…

2. Goals. Goals are visionary statements that frame any potential solution. Think of them as solution boundaries, where the solution must sit inside. A solution scope I guess. One could be more concise information for managers. These goals are intangible and immeasurable in the sense that it’s difficult to know if you’ve achieved them, but without them your solution might not fit into the strategic direction of the enterprise. No point coming up with a mobile solution if there’s no need for it.

3. Business objectives. These are finite measurable objectives that sum up how we know the problem has been solved in concrete terms. 100% of senior management reports come from the data warehouse. Customers will be able to purchase items from mobile devices. All absolutely measurable. No ambiguity, not for the business who can say that these objectives if met will meet the current needs of the business, nor for IT and the vendors who have no wriggle room in terms of what they’re delivering at the other side. As you can see, scope at this point if already defined, and while things could change within the boundary, if work doesn’t directly support the solving of the objective then it shouldn’t be in the project.

4. Functional use cases. The creation of these further tighten your scope and clarify exactly how people, process, and technology will change to meet the business objectives. Simple use case diagrams are great for communicating with the business the functions and processes within the solution, and we haven’t even talked any technology yet. After all, the solution could be solved by just a process change. Once all the functional use cases required to meet the business objective have been agreed to by the business, the scope is effectively defined. Then these use cases in the diagram can each be turned into fully dressed use cases with the standard process, exceptions, inputs and outputs, and all information a good use case should have. An example could be Load Information or Create Campaign.

5. Business requirements. With our functionality defined and processes sorted, we can think about what technological requirements are required to achieve the use cases. Creating a campaign will require software that has the ability to create a campaign. But we’re not focusing on a specific technology, and so the business requirements must be technology agnostic, and not just written as a laundry list of features of a particular software suite you have in mind. Because that would still be jumping to a solution ahead of time.

6. Solutions architecture. This really defines the non functional requirements of the solution, and is likely to start formulating a solution to meet the objectives. This would include aspects of solution analysis and design, and takes in the input of business requirements and comes up with a solution design. Sure some of the implementation gaps may not be filed, but by this point in time a solution had now been defined and can be traced all the way back to the problem.

From here there’s the normal software implementation life cycle, including change and release management procedures. By following this process we can ensure that we’re solving business problems in a clearly defined traceable manner that the business can understand and accept.

How Air New Zealand is taking on the Low Cost Carrier by … becoming one?

Published on May 5, 2010 in Airline Innovation and Great Ideas. Closed Tags: , , .

From http://www.airnz.co.nz

Air New Zealand is taking Low Cost Carriers like Jetstar and Pacific Blue head on by … emulating them. They’re now offering a full range of service from:

  • Seat
  • Seat + Bag
  • The Works
  • Works Deluxe

Let’s explore these options in more detail.

Seat and Seat + Bag compete head on with Low Cost Carriers. We’ve all seen seat only deals on Jetstar. Well, this is the same thing. Great for people who don’t have checked in luggage and who don’t mind purchasing food on the plane. Same with Seat + Bag. These services provide a subsection of entertainment (not movies though), and Tea, Coffee, and Water for free. You don’t get to choose your seat either.

A Seat only fare between Christchurch New Zealand and Sydney Australia is only … $34 NZD. That’s fantastic. There are airport charges and taxes (equal to $55 NZD) on top of that, but still, $34 NZD to the airline for the flight, amazing.

The Works provides Movies, Meals, and a Seat Request. This is for $30 NZD more than the Seat + Bag option. Since these are for short haul flights only, spending $30 for a meal and a movie doesn’t seem like amazing value for money, if you can hold on for three hours to Sydney.

Finally, Works Deluxe adds another 23KG checked bag, Premium check-in, and lounge access where available for another $100 NZD on top of The Works. With the extra bag costing $20, really you’re getting premium check-in and lounge access for $80. Do note that some airports such as Wellington International Airport offer lounge access for $30NZD, so you’d have to ask yourself is premium check-in worth the extra $50?

However, for some people it will be, as will picking a movie and their seat. And to differentiate their product in such a clear easy manner is great innovation from Air New Zealand, well done! And especially for people who may say, sure, I’ll head over on a Seat only deal, but once I’ve got the souvenirs I’ll come back on a Seat + Bag deal, I think that’s wonderful flexibility.

Ultimately travellers are becoming more knowledgeable and understanding of what they want from an airline, and considering the fundamental similarity of the product between carriers, this type of differentiation is the best method for Air New Zealand to stand out from the pack.