Write ebooks for Kindle

Just .... just. 350,000 sales in two months at 99 cents. Given that I could do the ebook formatting/publishing, thereby even cutting out the grand....

You wonder. How easily could you write a metawriter?

Prototyping tool

Like Keynotopia, but ... in JS, using WWW::Publish specs internally, and with full file skeleton output.

Right-click JS on the elements of the screen to enter test data. How cool would that be? Drag and drop components, and boy howdy - Keynotopia has already got a neat list of components.

It would be so cool.

Categorized job ad aggregator

This should go onto sproggler, I guess...

Update: I should specify: categorized job ad aggregator that doesn't suck because there are plenty of the sucking kind.

Sailboat ad aggregator

Good domain (findasailboat.com) and it's something I need, anyway. How would one monetize that? Ads, anyway. Try to contact some sailboat sellers directly for ad placement, once there was a little traffic.

1. Find all the sailboat ad engines you can.

2. Write a scraper for each one.

3. Run the scraper periodically (say, daily).

4. Have various hit pages for the search engines, but provide an expert-level search.

5. A blog in conjunction, perhaps?

This would work for any vertical, really. There's probably a whole range of possible search topics that could be narrowed in this manner.

• http://www.piubarche.it/it/annunci/Barche_a_vela
• http://www.sailboatlistings.com/
• http://www.sailingtexas.com/cclassifiedslouisiana.html (seems out of date, but a great start)
• http://www.domesticsale.com/Classifieds/Recreational/Sail-Boat/
• http://motors.shop.ebay.com/Sailboats-/63728/i.html?_catref=1&_fln=1

Just a start.

Update October 2012: the domain's still available.  Just a thought here - the reason this would be useful is that existing sailboat engines are either not sailboat-specific, or crap in terms of the underlying database, or both.  If you just want to look for sailboats online, you're kinda out of luck.

So this would be pretty cool, and as I say, it's more or less a replicable domain-specific model.  If it works for sailboats, it would work for antique bottles. Or ... you know, whatever.  Like Techspex, which Nick replicated out to multiple tool types.

Porn

OK, OK, I know - it's just that porn always pays.

As you know, Bob, there is a vast amount of free porn on the Internet, and a vast number of aggregator sites for it. With few exceptions, they're horrible trash in terms of usability; the idea is to be as cheap as possible and push as much Javascript down your throat as possible.

Porn for geeks could be different. Similarity metrics, RSS feeds, I dunno - but the main thing is, a usable tool. We all know geeks consume porn. Monetization by sending people to the pay sites is also pretty standard. The question is: how do you stand out? I don't know. But here's a marker, just because.

Tutoring

Online or off. There's a lot you could do with social networking, possibly Facebook integration, real-life tutoring meetups, and so forth. I have a guy interested in developing this, so maybe this will be actual startup #1.

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.)