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 [...]

I travelled to Botswana this week for work and all through the last couple of weeks in the run up to the trip, I received tons of emails and documents relating to the trip, which I filed away but was too busy to read. None of it needed immediate attention but I knew I had to [...]

I read reports here and here last week of two facial recognition startups – Mugr and Eyealike. The consensus in the blogosphere seemed to be that the demo applications put out by both companies were frivolous. Here is an idea for an application that may be just as frivolous but that could potentially do very well on a platform [...]

How about this for a business idea that captures users’ intent and therefore enables highly targeted advertising? A web application that allows a user to broadcast a brief RFI (Request For Information) to all or selected companies in one or more categories, as well as to their customers. Besides advertising, additional revenue would come from premium [...]

There are a number of fairly new web applications out there that have caught my attention. Each of them appears to be very useful in its own right but in my opinion if they were all combined into one super product, the whole could indeed be much greater than the sum of the parts. The [...]

Clues: people I meet, mobile phones, twitter, crossed paths, social network, offline or online, exchange

A recent problem with my headphones got me wondering why online videos like those on YouTube do not have subtitles like many programmes on TV. One answer is that the commercial case is clear on TV – subtitling firms provide the service to TV stations for a fee. On the net the videos are mostly user [...]

I see two fundamental problems with companies that I call startups for startups (SFSs), i.e. startups like Cambrian House, Cofoundr, Spigit, Startup Addicts etc that exist apparently to help other startups or people with ideas for startups. Typically, these companies (usually websites) enable their members to post business ideas online and have other members comment on [...]

A few months ago I responded to a question on LinkedIn about expectations/visions for the future. One of the points in my vision was for us to be able to do the following directly on our living room TV sets:

Find content that people in our social entertainment networks are watching or have recommended.
Search for and [...]

The other day, I stumbled upon a few of my old ideas that were dumb at the time I conceived them, but which when viewed with a web 2.0 lens appeared, well – a little less dumb.
1. Gadget Test Drives - my vision was for some very large physical facility where gadget lovers could go to try gadgets before shelling [...]