More businesses should be open 24 hours. Why? Definitely a contrarian idea. Nobody thinks having a business open all the time is a good idea because everyone’s asleep, right? However, this creates a market opportunity with almost no competition. There are a lot of people who are up at weird hours doing all kinds of things. There are whole cities like Las Vegas which are built on the notion. What if you could come up with a concept which fit that late night crowd, that wasn’t being served, and you took it to sleepy America. You could create a sensation sweeping the nation. 😉

Local Austin businesses like Epoch, Bennu, Magnolia Cafe, and Kerbey Lane are capitalizing on this idea. Based upon my experience in the late night hours at the coffee shops, I’d say they are doing quite well serving this underserved market (namely, students who need to study with regular caffeine injections and snacks).

Known Implementations:

• convenience stores
• coffeehouses
• diners

Are there others? Are there underserved constituencies that have a different sleep schedule than most people? How large is the population of people with alternative schedules?

First thought was … there’s so much great content out there, I’d love it if someone would make it podcast ready. Sure, I can turn on Text-to-Speech on my Mac and grab out an audio file of a particular work…hey, blog posts even…but then you have the small problem of copyright. It would be neat to create a whole model around paying publishers for their original content and whenever a derivative work is created, they somehow get a kickback. Maybe that’s bigger than I’d want to bite off…but maybe someone does. Secondly, having Fred (or his female counterpart) read a title might be good for a few laughs, but consuming a whole book that may just may be a path to insanity.

So in trying to solve these two problems (copyright and automation), I had the thought…

What if we created a marketplace where, Mechanical Turk style, people do readings (dramatic, humorous, straight-laced…whatever) of public domain works. The payment would come from people paying pennies for these enjoyable readings of old works, the marketplace would keep a small percentage, and the readers would be incentivized to record themselves as they would take a piece of every download. Maybe whole books are too long. Perhaps break it down by chapter.

That’s it in a nutshell.

Now think about this for a minute…you’re in high school and you have to read…I dunno…Grapes of Wrath or something….where Steinbeck goes on for 2 pages about dust. Would you rather read those two pages or would you rather have some bored high school kid from Anytown, USA looking to make a little money on the side do a dramatic reading of those two pages for you?

Thoughts? 🙂

This just in from Willie Abrams:

Known Implementations: None

Related:

• LibriVox (seems to be pretty much what I am describing, but without the commercial aspect)

We’re often confronted with people who are asking for money at the corner of an intersection. Personally, while I feel bad for the person, I am reluctant to give them straight cash because a) I don’t know that they will use it for food or something else that they really need rather than alcohol and b) I don’t want to encourage them to stand on corners asking for money. I have no idea what someone who does that kind of thing makes in a day. Probably many factors come into play in that equation.

Some people offer up straight food or drink and that is good if the person is really hungry or thirsty at that moment. Of course, the less perishable the gift is, the better.

In thinking about possible alternatives to the problem, I came up with the idea of forming a non-profit whose whole goal is to raise money to help the homeless, but also actually help the homeless too. You include the homeless person in the loop more tightly by giving them gift cards, which are redeemable at any participating homeless shelters in the metro area which the non-profit is serving.

Here’s how it would work. You hear about this program and think it’s a great idea. You go to giftcardsforthehomeless.com (ok, that’s not a real domain) and you make a $20 donation. A set of gift cards is then sent to this caring soul in the mail. They throw a few of these cards into their purse or wallet and the next time someone asks them for money and they determine they want to help them out, they hand them a gift card. They explain that they can take it to any of the homeless shelters on the back of the card to get extra stuff. When they exchange the gift card for stuff at the shelter, the shelter then has a touchpoint to try to help that person. The collected card would then be “turned in” to the non-profit, in exchange for a cash donation to help cover the cost of the extra help they are giving.

This is cool for a number of reasons…here are a few that quickly come to mind:

• The card is portable so they can easily stuff it away in their pocket or bag and take it with them for later when they are needing some help.
• You’re giving them something of value to them but without the risk that they’ll burn your dollars on a couple of 40s. This will help those of us who don’t feel quite right giving straight cash.
• Having the card encourages them to seek help from an organization set up to help people in their situation.
• The card is something tangible for them to hold onto and not spend immediately. Saving money when you’re in dire straits must be incredibly difficult to do. Perhaps having a gift card would be easier to hold onto.

Perhaps you can think of other reasons why it’s good or bad? Does anyone know of programs out there today that work like this? How do you handle homeless folks who approach you for money, either while you’re in your car or walking down the street downtown?

If you have feedback on the idea, please let me know in the comments.

Known Implementations: None.

Updates:
A similar concept (using food gift cards instead of money), but without the shelter part from Ian Warshak:

I would like a basic Mac app (let’s call it ‘Squeaky’) which automatically keeps my desktop clean via some simple, configurable rules. If I start with a clean desktop, after a week of working, my desktop looks like this:

I’d like to be able to automagically sort files into folders by File Name Pattern, Kind, Date Created, and Date Modified. An example might be to grab all the image files on my Desktop and store them in a folder called Images. These would be swept automatically at some interval (configurable).

I’ve registered a domain for the application: squeakyapp.com (as in squeaky clean), but I am of course open to some other name for the app. My original codename for the project is ‘crap app’, so perhaps that would work.

I’d also like a manual cleanup option which would let me sweep all files into a file named Stuff-. This would be especially handy when I’m about to give a presentation and put my laptop on the big screen. 🙂 Sometimes though, I just want a clean desktop to think more clearly. It’d be neat if I could ‘press a button’ and voila, clean desk.

I figure this would be worth at least $10 to people who need it, perhaps more if it was well done.

Known Implementations:

• Hazel ($21.95) [I think this probably does much more than what I’m asking for, and as such, the cost is more than I would expect. However, it’s the best thing that I know of to solve the problem.]
• Clean (command line utility by Ross Andrews)

Please let me know if you know of other existing solutions or if you would like to create this application. My computer and my brain would thank you greatly if you could help keep my Desktop squeaky clean.

There’s been a lot of talk lately about the iPhone, AT&T vs. Verizon coverage maps, and dropped calls. I have certainly experienced dropped calls here in Austin during the holidays. I was even contacted by an AT&T Social Media Manager (ATTNicole) to get more details about my dropped calls. This is nice and I’m glad she is asking. But I thought to myself, what we really need is a web site which delivers this info to the cell phone companies en masse.

A site like Time Capsule Dead, but for dropped calls.

Initially, it’d be a database app with the following fields:

Carrier:
Date/Time:
City:
Nearest Intersection:
Phone Hardware:
Firmware Version:

The data could be collected, aggregated by geographic location (city, or even mapping the intersection) to help find hotspots of FAIL for a particular carrier, time of day, and location.

What say you?

Known Implementations:

Mark The Spot (AT&T only, data not public) (hat tip: @maczter)

Related:

OpenSignalsMaps (Mashable article) [added 2/14/2011]

Gizmodo article about Mark The Spot (hat tip: @maczter)

Sensorly – an app which collects phone data and builds real coverage maps from its users’ phones (hat tip: @lennysan)

(photo courtesy of Cosmic Kitty)

I think someone should number the local businesses for a given market area. Or perhaps, you focus on a thinner slice like Restaurants. The objective of this would be to provide a very easy to remember number to use to look up information about a local business. Find a decent short domain that has to do with local or location (haven’t really looked much at this yet, I just had the idea this morning while walking the dog). Something like goloc.al would be good, although I’m not Albanian. At the site, it’d be easy to peck in the number and get more info, kind of like those real state signs with a short code and a phone number.

Give each business a short number and offer them a simple way to print up laptop stickers, bumper stickers, small signs, etc., with their logo and their “golocal number” (for lack of a better term). Here in Austin, maybe BuildASign and Go Local Austin could deliver some parts of this. Although, Go Local Austin is focused on locally owned businesses only and this idea would be generally applicable to all businesses in the market.

You could limit it to 1000 businesses per market so that the numbers were always 3-digit (super easy to remember). Four digit numbers are easy to remember as well, but to create some exclusivity and a “rush to register”, you could limit the size of it. So, let’s say you’re a local business like Tacodeli and you decide to sign on to the program. goloc.al would print up some “I LOVE Tacodeli” stickers with their logo and a reference number and give these to Tacodeli. They would then hand them out to their repeat customers and biggest fans. Perhaps goloc.al could hold contests where users take pictures of their own stickers or signs they’ve spotted out in the wild.

(please forgive my lack of graphical prowess)

The web site would provide a basic page about the business and could provide all of the usual info: hours, location, map. A coupon should be made available from time to time for site users. Of course, the site could also offer search and roll up the businesses into markets. Here, it’s probably very similar to sites like Yelp or Citysearch. You may figure out a way to differentiate here, but I don’t know what it is right now.

You could also provide an SMS service to respond based on the number and market you’re in. Text to “12345” –> “austin 372” to look up business #372 in the city of Austin to get more info (such as hours & a map link, etc.)

The primary benefit of this numbering approach is the simplicity of just needing to remember one number. Not every local business is going to have a good web site/domain and some don’t even have one at all. This is one value which Citysearch and similar services offer is to give local business a “place on the web” when they may not have the wherewithal or inclination to create their own site. This could provide that feature, but with the added marketing benefit of an easy to remember number. This also means that the Citysearch’s of the world could use some variant of this idea to drive more traffic to their site.

Known Implementations: None.