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.)

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.