How to find start-up ideas

How to find start-up ideas: "

Chris Dixon had an interesting post a while ago about how to find start-up ideas. The advice boiled down to keeping a spreadsheet of ideas and talking to lots of smart people (entrepreneurs, potential customers, VCs, people at big companies). It’s good advice. Paul Graham also wrote in 2008 about startup ideas he’d like to fund.

Here’s another way to come up with startup ideas: walk around your house or apartment, and look for “hot spots.” A hotspot can be an area of high information density, clutter, stress, disorganization, or any place that has a suboptimal solution. Then think about a web or cloud solution to that hot spot. Let’s take a look at a few examples:

Music CDs -> iTunes, Amazon MP3 store, doubleTwist, MP3tunes, etc.

Bookshelf -> Amazon, Kindle, iBooks

Stereo system -> Sonos, Squeezebox, Rhapsody, Pandora, last.fm, Spotify, Grooveshark, MOG, Rdio, etc.

External hard drives -> Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), Pogoplug

Okay, those all seem simple or obvious, right? Let’s go a little deeper. What would you do with this pile of business cards?

Pile of business cards -> CloudContacts

Here are a few more that come to mind:

Bank statements -> Mint

Photo Albums -> ScanCafe

Bathroom scale -> Withings

Pedometer -> Fitbit

Phone -> Google Voice, Twilio, Ribbit, Rebtel

Camera -> EyeFi

Stack of video games -> Steam, OnLive

DVD player -> Roku, Netflix Instant movies

Treadmill or Elliptical machine -> Nike+ shoe sensor, LoseIt! iPhone app, CardioTrainer app for Android, Fitbit

Pen -> Livescribe

All of these take a hotspot in your home and inject a cloud or web element to make life easier, more efficient or better. So what happens when you look at a pile of manuals, or receipts? Your alarm clock? Those “Learning Japanese” CDs? A stack of take-out menus? A stack of cookbooks? A hard drive full of MP3s that are disorganized? A hard drive that doesn’t have a back-up copy? An out-of-date programming book? A box full of videotapes? All those back issues of magazines? A blank wall, with no posters or other decoration? Stuff in your garage that you’ve been meaning to sell or give away? Your wallet?

Ideas are sitting all around where you live. If you have a small snag, irritation, or hotspot in your life, probably a lot of other people do too. You can make it easier to organize something (can you convert something physical to digital and store it in the cloud?). You can sell niche versions of a product (e.g. Threadless for T-shirts), you can let people make something that they couldn’t make before (CafePress for T-shirts, LuLu for books), you can pool people with similar interests (a blog like Craftzine, or a forum for book lovers or body builders), you can review products in a particular space, you can teach someone to do something. You can become a well-known expert in something and then sell your time or expertise as a consultant. You can make a free version of something useful or fun, then sell more features or consult on more involved cases. You can do meta versions of lots of these, e.g. Etsy is a marketplace for people who like to buy and sell custom crafted objects.

I’ll stop with a story. I have a friend at Google who is really good at noticing things that annoy him. While walking from his car to his desk in the morning, he can easily find six things that irritate him because they should be improved. I’m not recommending that you make yourself more irritable, but I am saying that if you notice all the times you run across something that can be improved, those are opportunities. And I think one of the easy methods of spotting start-up ideas is looking around where you live and how you spend your time. Find the hotspots in your own life and you might identify some great products or services to build.

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Climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro

Climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro: "

I’m leaving Tuesday to try to climb Mount Kilimanjaro. If you want to show your support, please donate at charity:water. Anyone who wants to give is welcome.

Mt. Kilimanjaro is the highest mountain in Africa, at 19,340 feet (5895 meters). It’s hard to climb Kilimanjaro, mainly because of the altitude. I’ll be completely without internet access for a few weeks. Don’t expect any blog comments or email replies for the first half of August–right now, I’m not even planning to bring my laptop. Not to worry, the webspam team itself will keep chugging away: reading spam reports, improving algorithms, and stopping spam.

I’ve been doing practice hikes with the three friends that I’m going with. Here’s a few camping tips that I’ve picked up:

- Headband lights sound silly, but they work really well. And if you get one with a red light, the bugs bother you less.

- But it’s important to know where your headband light is, or you’ll just be feeling around in the dark.

- Chocolate bars and pepperoni sticks make nice treats after a full day of hiking.

- OFF! (the insect repellent) is sticky.

- You can pick up Neutrogena sunblock at your local drug store. It works well, and is a lot less oily than some sunblock.

As you can tell, a lot of hiking/camping for me is focused on food and water, plus minimizing how oily/sticky I get.

If you’ve got Kilimanjaro advice or a clean water story to share, I’d love to hear it. In the mean time, please donate to charity:water and let’s get more clean water to more people!

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Switching between dev and beta Chrome channels on Linux

Switching between dev and beta Chrome channels on Linux: "

If you’re on Linux (say Ubuntu 10.04, also known as Lucid Lynx), you can switch between the developer (dev) and beta channels of Chrome like this:

Switch from Beta to Dev:

sudo apt-get install google-chrome-unstable

Switch from Dev to Beta:

sudo apt-get install google-chrome-beta

That’s easier for me than going back for the .deb file and doing something with it.

Also, if you want to check whether a new dev version of Chrome is out, you can just repeat the same command:

sudo apt-get install google-chrome-unstable

and if there’s no new version, you’ll get something like this back:

Reading package lists… Done

Building dependency tree

Reading state information… Done

google-chrome-unstable is already the newest version.

0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.

I figured I’d document this in case I needed to remember how to do it in the future.

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California Governor Election 2010: Meg Whitman (R) Taked Lead Over Jerry Brown (D), 48% to 40%

California Governor Election 2010: Meg Whitman (R) Taked Lead Over Jerry Brown (D), 48% to 40%: "

There has been a reversal of fortunes in the polling data in the California Governors race for 2010. Early this month, Democrat Jerry Brown had a 2% point lead over Republican Meg Whitman. However, according to the most recent Rasmussen poll Whitman (R) has a 48% to 40% lead over Brown (D).

The tie is broken for now, with Republican Meg Whitman, coming off last weekend’s state GOP Convention, moving out to her best showing yet in the race to be the next governor of California.

The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey of Likely Voters in California finds Whitman earning 48% support, while Democrat Jerry Brown picks up 40% of the vote. Six percent (6%) prefer some other candidate in the race, and six percent (6%) are undecided.

With leaners, the Whitman goes over the 50% threshold:

When leaners are included in the new totals, Whitman posts a 51% to 43% lead over Brown. Leaners are those who initially indicate no preference for either of the candidates but answer a follow-up question and say they are leaning towards a particular candidate.

Where could the advantage for Whitman be coming from, Independents.

Ninety percent (90%) of California Republicans support Whitman, while Brown gets 75% of the vote from Democrats in the state. Voters not affiliated with either party prefer the Republican by 10 points.

Whitman is viewed Very Favorably by 19% of California voters and Very Unfavorably by 25%.

Twenty-five percent (25%) have a Very Favorable view of Brown, a longtime political figure in the state and former governor. However, 38% regard him Very Unfavorably.

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