Chemistry battle card game

Point 1: People evolved to commit a database of around 150 records to memory (among other things)[citation needed]. This was good for remembering local plants, or the people in your village, and now it's what makes it fun to collect baseball cards or play Pokemon.

Point 2: Supernormal stimuli drive evolved behavior to excessive extreme. Ask Zynga about this; gamification is the extraction of our community/economic stimuli to drive activities that aren't fun, but do pay Zynga.

Point 3: WildChord is harnessing gamification to teach you to play the guitar. And make them money, but I don't begrudge them that - the point is they're using supernormal stimuli and the mechanisms we're discovering lately to use them in order to reach goals set by the user, not just by the game maker.

Point 4: There are databases that are very useful to know.

Total: Chemistry battle cards for the win.

Now off to find out what I can about the design of battle card games. The name: 化学 (Kagaku). I'll bet you can even guess what that means.

(Elementeo is a competitor, kinda.)

17 Jedi mind tricks

Persuasion techniques. Worth reading!

Copywriting

Here are some ebooks on effective copywriting.

Startup ideas Giftrocket would be willing to pay for

[here][hnn] - tl;dr:

• Software that shows videos of real users using our site
• Yelp for business services
• UI wrapper around PayPal
• iPhone code editor with Github/Heroku integration
• Zerocater for startup swag

I like the Yelp for business services, myself. I want to do that.

Google Code Search

Code Search is shutting down. That leaves a vacuum. 'nuff said. [hnn]

Better filleritem.com

Filleritem.com is a neat idea: if you need to add 52 cents worth of stuff to your Amazon order to qualify for free shipping, it will give you a list of things that are 52 cents and qualify for free shipping.

Google dinged it because each page essentially consists of a hundred affiliate links and nothing else.

You could do better, though - because none of the stuff is stuff you really need. So you could just as easily just put together a random list of items that total the amount you need to hit - much shorter list! And if you don't like the list - get another one. Randomly!

The key: each list is much shorter. Heck, you could even do that in the browser in Javascript, actually.

This is doable.

Sims Social bot

OK, so the monetization strategy for Sims Social (thanks to tim rogers) is basically to pay them not to have to play the game.

Maybe it would be cooler if you could buy a bot to play it for you, perhaps on your screen saver while you were gone at night...