Crowdsourcing hub for patent busting

Amazingly, there doesn't appear to be such a thing. It would feature:

1. Identification of patents

2. Delineation of the harm each patent had done

3. A central point for reporting/tracking prior art

4. A central forum for discussion and tracking of busting

You could have a kind of automagical PDF report generated on the fly for each patent, suitable for framing or providing the EFF or whatever. It would also be interesting to look at some kind of ontology for prior art. But the main thing would be to have a central place to track and discuss each patent, plus an RSS feed for patent abuse news.

I still can't believe this doesn't already exist.

Note: no business model on this except, possibly, geek-oriented advertising. (And we all know how effective that is this year.)

Darn it!

http://www.scantool.net/scan-tools/pc-based/obdlink-wifi.html

I'll say no more. It's not 100% what I was thinking - but close enough. There might still be a reason to build my version, but ... not as much of one, now. Except a lower price, maybe.

Translation portal portal

A reusable translation portal for agencies. Could incorporate any number of ancillary services, up to and including OpenLogos integration.

News event mapping

This is an idea from Amanda Hicks' blog at NPR: open-source tools can be used to map things for journalists. They're hard to use. Obvious solution: a Web service. The ???-profit part is unclear, but it deserves some thought.

CFO-in-a-box

Or even "management team in a box". Many startups are founded by people whose grasp of business is less than stellar. There are standard ways of doing lots of business, though, and those can be manipulated automatically.

So let's imagine something like Quickbooks that has actual CPAs built in - that is, you enter your business data, and the CPAs keep things on an even keel. Automated rules show you where there may be risk, and automated events tell you what to do, when - and if you have a question, you ask a human who's a certified accountant. Since your data is already in a standardized form, you pay a lot less (they're saving staff) for the same smart input.

The same could go for many business processes, but my sister is a CPA, so I have the expert on tap. If only I had the time to implement this.

Room-and-board-and-bandwidth startup hosting

Ever wanted to get a scrum team together for a week or a month or a year and crank something out with minimum outside distraction? Lease a vintage house with a meal service, WiFi, desks and conference areas, and go heads-down and crank it out. Lease for a fee or for equity. Throw in startup advising.

That's last year's idea. Never materialized, but I still think it would be a way to revitalize a certain lovely old neighborhood down on its luck.

Custom battle card printing service

My son found a Yu-Gi-Oh card customizer and has been making his own cards. Virtually, anyway. The generator end is easy, nearly a cookie-cutter ImageMagick app. The interesting idea comes from (1) providing a gallery interface and (2) being able to select groups of cards to be printed and mailed to you.

Obvious downside: copyright. Ah, well. It's still a good idea, and if you're not aiming for big money, it would be a fun project.

WiFi-enabled car computer readout

This is the one preoccupying me today. My service light is on in the van. It costs me $41 for a level-1 diagnostic (that means: plugging the scanner into the OBD-II plug, reading out the alarm, and resetting the flag). For $59 plus shipping, I can get an OBD2/USB converter, and my laptop can then use pyOBD to do that for free from then on. I see this as a no-brainer.

OK, but imagine this: the OBDuino project can put an Arduino board onto that port. And Arduino can support WiFi. So let's build that as a unit; when you get your car home, it handshakes with your home WiFi network and provides its interface as an HTTP service. Now you can run diagnostics - and other OBD-enabled things like mileage trends and so on - from the comfort of your desk. Not to mention detect when your car comes home (sky's the limit on that).

Total cost for a kit: probably around $50-75. Sale price? $150? Sounds worth it to me; I'd probably buy that right now.

There's some commercial product in Germany based kinda on this (with an in-car LED readout, which could be an add-on option), although it seems to be a kit, not a consumer item. I want a consumer item. The same guy has a list of OBD interface standards by model (the plug is standard, but there are five interface "standards", typical of the auto industry). Here's another (lacking current hosting). This would also be an interesting searchable database, actually: a data project. And another, for a commercially available tool.

Two open-source projects are OpenDiag and FreeDiag. Finally, Nerdkits has something.

That's my link dump for this idea so far. If you use this, tell me - I'll be your first customer. Next post will be a breakdown and research to-do.

Inaugural post

I'm getting so used to using blogs as note-taking tools (keeping my thoughts in the cloud, as it were) that I feel serious stress when there is a category of thoughts for which I don't have an appropriate blog.

So here's this one. Here's how I see it working: each tag will be a specific startup idea. As I develop an idea further (assuming I ever do) then subsequent tags start to look like sub-blogs. Now, I have a method to my madness: I want to identify common services or features that could be used to compose a startup without all the muss and fuss, and then work on those. Whether any actual startups happen is just about immaterial.

So. I hope you enjoy this.