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 out hard-earned cash to buy them. My thinking was that gadget stores didn’t lend themselves very well to ‘test driving’ their wares and that a lot more people might buy an item if they could try it first. I thought that as an option, one could take out an extended trial - i.e. pay more to take a gadget home for a period of time, with due precautions, security and insurance in place of course.

Web 2.0 version: Well, how about if as a gadget owner you could offer it up for would-be owners to try and earn a commission for doing so - more if the punter ends up buying the product?

2. Language Practice Makes Perfect - A friend once mentioned that she would consider paying someone speak Polish to them, i.e. practice her Polish. She had learnt it as a child but as everyone knows the key to mastering a language is practice. So my idea was to have a dedicated set of people to take phone calls from people who wanted to practice their language skills.

Web 2.0 version: No surprises here I suppose, throw the whole thing to the public so that people form social networks around languages and can thereby help each other. You could even enable people to charge for their time. I did a quick search and found language-buddy.com offers something similar, but the site does not look very Web 2.0 - not that that is some sort of sin or anything.

3. Car Delivery Network - In the U.K. at least, it is not uncommon for cars to be cheaper outside the main cities like London. The farther from these cities the cheaper, generally. It is also the case that a lot of people are not willing or easily able to travel long distances to find a bargain for a car. So I figured that there was an opportunity for a service that would help people in the main cities to check out cars, test drive, purchase and deliver cars that the city people find in remote locations via online or print media.

Web 2.0 version: Make a social network of it. Rather than hire people to do the checking and delivery of cars, let people find others in the location of the cars and request assistance from them, for a fee of course. Trust will obviously be a big issue here as would the expertise required to check out cars. A reputation system would therefore be needed and one would expect people with a background in autos (mechanics etc) to do better than others on the site.

So, do you have any old business ideas that Web 2.0 could put even the tiniest of shines on?