Social games have been around for a long time. Senet, Backgammon, and Chess represent some of the earliest multi-player games. Since the 1950s, games have merged tactical combat with creative story-telling and a uniquely social element with the likes of Dungeon and Dragons and Risk.
Just like “Words with Friends,” more and more traditional games will migrate to the Internet so we can play them with anyone anywhere, sort of like this:
In Risk, a game of strategy and negotiation, the goal is to obtain world domination by taking over all six continents and eliminating all other players (the game is usually played by two to six people). Players take turns placing armies, attacking others’ holdings while fortifying their own. With the recent introduction of group chat features on many smart phones and the rise of mobile gaming, it’s about time that this popular game be formatted for online and mobile play in the same vein as Words with Friends. Playing Risk together with friends, you can strategize, make alliances, and track your dominance without armies or dice.
Because of IP laws, it would be impossible to copy the entire Risk board and gameplay, but there is little preventing a 21st century update with new territories. That said, perhaps it’s not long before Parker Brothers and other game-makers get involved in the online space, as evidenced by a recent partnership between Mattel and THQ.
Of course, I also have a vested interest in game development (primarily a crowdsourced approach) with 21st Century Tag. The web makes life playable; we make it fun.
A penny here, a penny there: Everyone likes lottery tickets; they make great stocking stuffers, right? Exactly. Everyone likes the small thrill of taking a chance at winning big. But some people—by and large, lower-income people—take this thrill more often than the more affluent, spending more money (and greater proportions of their own income) on the lottery. In Massachusetts, this trend plays out linearly as you move down the income scale across communities: according to a Federal Reserve Bank of Boston memo, “each $10,000 decrease in median household income for a Publice Use Microdata Areas corresponds, on average, to a 0.4 percentage point increase in the share of total area income spent on lotteries.” As many state lotteries contribute significant sums to state coffers, the lottery’s “taxing” of the poor could even be seen as a vital policy issue. Why do lower-income folks buy more lotto tickets than their richer counterparts? Incentives play a role, certainly, but cultural norms do as well. Middle class people gamble; yet when it comes to the lottery, they sense a certain stigma.
Attribution: Erik Michaels-Ober
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Lottery hedge funds: The Netflix revolution now carries on to the lottery. The middle—or shall we say, investing—class can take portions out of innumerable investment funds, or even savings accounts, and put them a lottery hedge fund, which plays the odds on contests in all fifty states. Playing the lotto becomes just like any other financial decision, made from the privacy and comfort of one’s home (or screen). As you increase your group buying power, you mitigate your risk and increase the likelihood of winning. Any risk you run in one contest is cushioned by collateral in countless others. And as your checking account and phone grow closer together, you have little burdens on communicating with the company or receiving notice of your winnings via SMS.
Attribution: Erik Michaels-Ober
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Implementation: This lotto hedge fund would earn a profit on small markups on all purchases, transaction fees, and interest on money in its accounts. Following the insight of the Toronto-based quant profiled in Wired’s story, elite clients might even pay more for a more labor-intensive hack on the tickets. Legal problems could follow, however. For example, certain tickets can only be bought in person (with cash only), but you could operate the business as a bank with buying representatives in every state. This ambitious venture would also require a huge influx of cash to start, but the profits could be large. Inevitably a state might try to stop the company’s activities, so a crack legal team might be an important asset for what would surely be an interesting legal battle.
Attribution: Erik Michaels-Ober
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Death has always been a mystery. The souls of the deceased have been thought to exist on mountaintops, in oceans, in the earth, and in the sky. But in an age when we live so much of our lives on the internet, shouldn’t there be some kind of home for the dead in the online world?
There should be an online private social network for recently deceased loved ones. Each page could be almost like a crowd-sourced eulogy, doing for the obituary pages what Craigslist did to classifies. On a dynamic webpage, friends and family could share memories, photos, stories, or videos. Together they would create a virtual collage of their living relationships with the deceased. Although they may seem macabre, some names for this service could be DeadBook, iMemoriam, or, my favorite, Youlogy.
A Youlogy page could be similar to a Facebook page in its variety of content (videos, short messages, photos, etc.) But it would also be similar to the private social network Path, which is a private journal shared only with close friends. Emulating the Path app would also make it easy for anyone in your close circle to share their memories on Youlogy to create a shared narrative of a loved one’s life.
Variations on this idea have been tried, but none is comprehensive or simple. Actual Facebook memorial pages seem a bit creepy and misplaced in the social network of the living. Virtual Memorials allows users to create an online memorial website, but it costs $55. Memory-Of allows users to create a memorial website (for private viewers) and even publish a memorial book. Other websites, like Much Loved and Last Memories offer similar services, but without the same sense of depth or breadth as Youlogy would.
This website/app would essentially create a new kind of afterlife in the online world. The Youlogy page could be constantly revised, new memories could be added, and new stories told. The dead wouldn’t actually be gone, because they would still be alive in the minds of their friends. This website would be an active reflection of our enduring memory which will never get lost.
Some final words for reflection from author Don Delillo
In the altered shelves, the ambient roar, in the plain and heartless fact of their decline, they try to work their way through confusion. But in the end it doesn’t matter what they see or think they see. The terminals are equipped with holographic scanners, which decode the binary secret of every item, infallibly. This is the language of waves and radiation, or how the dead speak to the living. And this is where we wait together, regardless of our age, our carts stocked with brightly colored goods.
~Don Delillo’s White Noise
The Smart Super Market (Laura Hadden)
Like the shopping mall, why don’t supermarkets open their distribution to third party vendors. In short, we need to integrate the locally grown produce and food production into the mainstream of our food distribution system. That way, anyone from your local farmer to cordon bleu chef to make delectable treats for a mass market.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Title: Why would you ever go to a hair salon when you could saddle up to the Hair Saloon?
The Facts: Hair salons and barbershops are communal environments—gathering places for people to socialize and catch up. Nevertheless, an afternoon waiting for a spiffy haircut can sometimes seem interminable. In short, why not combine the best of the salon with the fun of a bar?
The Hair Saloon: It could be a single sex, or even better, a coed establishment with a diverse array of hairstyles along with cocktails to choose from. Imagine how much more fun it would be to get a haircut with a mojito in hand or a hot shave with a Guinness. Plus, those slightly crooked sideburns won’t be nearly as troublesome after a few Jack and Cokes.
In all likelihood, you will also find yourself inclined to stick around to mingle with your finely quaffed (and tipsy) companions.
If you like the idea (and have even a little entrepreneurial spirit), we suggest that you steal this superb idea before someone else beats you to it.
Citation: Andy Coletta
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
I have a hunch the military didn’t necessarily steal my idea, but there’s no harm noting the last paragraph of this post.
My name is Andrew Magliozzi, and I am a serial entrepreneur at Veritas Tutors & FinalsClub.org. Because I need another company like a hole in the head, I have decided to share any other entrepreneurial ideas I have as Intellectual Public Property. If I don't have the capacity to bring all these ideas into reality, hopefully someone else does.
loading tweets…
Top
