I had been listening recently to an album for about a week or so that I thought my brother and sister-in-law would like. I had the album in MP3 format but I thought that if I sent it to them digitally, they might listen to it in a few weeks or months, with some prompting [...]

It appears that there is no free to use website for gauging the balance of public opinion – good to or bad – for a specified keyword or phrase. This keyword could be a product, brand, country, website, whatever. Now I did find that a company called SkyGrid does offer a similar service but it [...]

I have written here before about evaluating business ideas. Now I don’t know about you but I find that I am continually adjusting and fine-tuning my methods and criteria for assessing mine and other people’s ideas. Recently I read about YouNoodle – a controversial startup that allegedly claims to be able to predict the success [...]

One idea that has bounced in and out of my head for a couple of years now is to give website publishers and bloggers the ability to show in a widget, photos of people mentioned on a web page or blog post. In its simplest form, the widget could have an admin interface that would [...]

Much is often made of how Google could improve search results (or do a lot of evil) by learning from our search histories. Since there are a lot of valid privacy concerns with that approach, I think Google could still improve results considerably by learning from a user’s result-clicks within a search session. As an [...]

Most air travellers travel with hold baggage pieces well within the allowed limits but many others travel with excess baggage – typically on international, long-haul flights. I haven’t done much detailed research on revenues from excess baggage charges but my guess is that they are substantial. My idea is for a web-based system that allows [...]

A recent post about social objects by Hugh Macleod of The Gaping Void got me thinking about what opportunities might lie in making otherwise solitary online activities into social ones. This led me to think about how a previous idea that I posted could significantly increase the viral coefficient of search. You may want to [...]

Music monetisation was one of my top technology segments ripe for innovation in 2008. Whilst there have been some signs of change in this space recently, it surprises me that no one appears to be doing what I am proposing here – at least not that I know of and not in the way I [...]

There are probably more 2008 prediction posts in the blogosphere right now than we need, so rather than add another, I thought I might outline a few areas that I think are ripe for innovation in 2008 and beyond. So here goes … Website Monetisation As I have posted before, I think that the advertising [...]

Lately I have been thinking of learning Ruby, Python or similar to develop working prototypes of some of my ideas. It occurs to me that it would be a good idea for someone to offer a training course in programming where the student brings an idea that they want to implement and over the duration of the [...]