Products people wish existed

Neat list.  I see a couple of interesting ones.

LCI Linux sysadmin certification

OK, so here's a set of skills I'd like to acquire: LPI certification. I've been half-assing sysadmin work since the 90's, and I suspect I actually know most of this stuff - but you know, it's all kinda vague.

Spaced repetition (earlier) would be perfect, here, and could also be formatted like an exam simulator (see which).  Questions could identify weak spots and indicate places where tutorial help is needed, and that brings in topic trees and gamification of tutorials (earlier). [IBM developerWorks has some tutorials to start from.]

To all that, add the fact (HNN, WSJ) and you have a compelling story.  Only thing missing is the money. Here are my top-of-head notions:

• Ads (duh) and donations
• Sell books on-site, sell ... other things on-site (i.e. better ads)
• In-depth things paid?  (I don't see how this wouldn't just be arbitrary)
• Sell the tutorial service for other subject matter.
• Offer corporate groups as a thing.

That's what I can think of immediately.  But this is a good overall thing to consider writing.

Cookie cutter for local retail

AlterNet thinks the days of big-box retail in America are drawing to a close, with K-Mart closing 200 stores and Radio Shack 500 in the near future.  If chains die, then local retail will have to return to the towns that big boxes sterilized - AlterNet sees that as young people opening up in currently vacant Main Street store fronts.

Could be.  I'll bite.  And those young people will need informational resources and a network for organization.  It's the 21st-century equivalent of a chain store; all the benefits of a chain without the soullless scale.

Coffee

Puerto Rican coffee is the coffee served at the Vatican.  Puerto Rican coffee was quite popular in Europe in the 19th century, until Hurricane San Ciriaco killed 3500 people on the island in 1899 and destroyed essentially all agriculture extant.

Shade-grown coffee is organically grown and environmentally extremely friendly; coffee bushes naturally prefer shade.  But shade-grown coffee consists of bushes scattered through the understudy of tropical rainforest.  It must be harvested by hand, so labor-intensive a process that it can only be done in the Third World for any price bearable for mass export.  This is the reason that Puerto Rican coffee never managed to rebuild after 1899.  Recent price supports by the government have only supported a switch to sun-grown coffee - an effort that has not been successful.

The technology isn't here yet, but robotic management of coffee (and other plants) in the forest understudy could possibly be cheaper than human labor, perhaps bringing Puerto Rican shade-grown coffee into a bearable price range - Puerto Rico does have a fairly well-developed technical sector that could provide maintenance and operating labor for robotic harvesters.

Longer-term, but in the end all the real money is from use of the land.

Three Jaguars

The Three Jaguars is a Web comic about how one artist runs her business, based on some LiveJournal posts she's made over the past couple of years.  It's utterly charming.

And rife with insight; here is her presentation of the roles each of the three subpersonalities plays in her life.

This is useful stuff!

What will users STOP doing?

An interesting and oft-neglected aspect of conceptualizing a product for yourself and for the prospective user: what will users stop doing when they start using it?

Storytelling

Storytelling engages the listener's brain to an extent unmatched by other forms of information.  We are storytelling animals.  This has a direct effect on business management and marketing.

Crisis management

Here's an interesting article about crisis management - when there's a true crisis, you need to drop procedure for the duration and move into emergency mode.  This is an interesting insight about how businesses actually sometimes need to work.

Workflow lets you keep your processes working to the extent truly required, so that's good.  But workflow should probably take crises into consideration as well.  Anyway, read it.