How to kill a startup idea...
Don’t waste your valuable time. Ask the hard questions early.
We have WordsWithFriends, but when will I ever get to play Risk with Friends on my iPhone
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.
We need Netflix for the Lottery
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.
We need Netflix for the Lotto
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.
We need Netflix for the Lotto (cont.)
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.
We need a smarter supermarket (cont.)
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
We need a smarter supermarket (cont.)
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.
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We need a hair saloon.
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.
We need a smarter supermarket.
With a rising awareness in the quality and origins of our food, there is a clear and present need for innovation in the food distribution and sales industry. Everywhere from the farmer’s market to the Super Stop and Shop, we need to see some innovation.
From “Lost in the Supermarket” to The Omnivore’s Dilemma, we recognize the emotions and decisions that are wrapped up in the ubiquitous cultural experience of visiting the supermarket. For this installment of PSTI, we have the following two ideas courtesy of two contributors: Ray Magliozzi and Laura Hadden respectively.
Smart stickers for our fruits and vegetables (Ray Magliozzi)
What’s the one thing most produce has in common? Stickers.
Why don’t we create a sticker that changes color every day, triggered by the ethylene emission from our precious fruits and veggies. With a glance shoppers can easily see the freshness of their produce. Perhaps even more than the supermarket, farmer’s markets would benefit from this transparency for freshness.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
We have so many startups, but we need more crowd-ups.
The current state of affairs: Most of us already grasp the tremendous creative capacity of crowdsourcing through prominent projects like Wikipedia, Yelp, Mechanical Turk, Facebook, and many more. Meanwhile, we continue to champion the entrepreneurial spirit driving billion-dollar business people and the value they create for the world. As we imaginatively reinvent what’s possible in business, particularly with respect to technology startups, I suggest we look to a bygone—but far from obsolete—business model: the co-op.
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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.
