Email authentication by phone

You run a forum. Someone signs up on your forum. Are they going to post spam?

There’s been a variety of ways to try and prevent bots (and humans) from posting spam to forums. One of the leading methods is a captcha, which has you enter in some text that has been distorted in an image (e.g. http://www.recaptcha.net/). But that tends to be insufficient because (a) many captchas are solvable by computers and (b) it’s easy to find people willing to enter thousands of captchas for mere pennies.

The main issue seems to be that there’s no way to identify someone as a single individual and blacklist them if they do bad things.

But these days, at least in the United States, most people have access to a phone (mobile or otherwise). What if there was a service that tied email addresses to phones, and you could ask that service if the email address is associated with a spammer or mark them as a spammer? Phones aren’t exactly cheap, so simply getting new phone numbers all the time isn’t a possibility for most people. You spam, you get your email address blacklisted, and the phone number along with it.

This interface portion would be a breeze to build. The trick would be in scaling, and finding your initial customers (as always).

Wordpress was able to launch Akismet (blog comment spam detection service) because they already had a gigantic stream of comments flowing through wordpress.com. You’d need, or want, something on a similar scale for this to work.

And much like Akismet, you could pay for it in a similar way (by usage).

Auto-discounting rewards system

Groupon has been a great way for some businesses to get more customers in the door. In the business owner is smart, they can leverage those customers to earn more money by getting new, repeat customers and upselling the grouponers.

But what about your existing customers? Some people are regulars, some come once and never return, some are in the middle. Could you get those folks in the middle to return more frequently?

What if you had a rewards system that figured this out for you? Instead of offering coupons to everyone, offer them to those most likely to make a return visit based on a discount. In fact, ideally you want to get everyone to buy your product at the most they’d be willing to pay. What if your rewards system could automatically offer exactly the right discount at the right frequency to get everyone to come to your business as frequently as possible?

I think you could figure out how to get people in the door at the maximum price they’d be willing to pay by starting at the current offered price and then offering discounts at progressively larger amounts over time (10% off, 20%, 30%, etc. over a series of weeks or months).

Nice part is you wouldn’t have to offer a giant bulk discount to everyone. You could discount people individually at exactly the discount they need to come to your store.

I just added my last post into the queue (it’s the post you would’ve seen yesterday). That’s all the ideas I had stored up. I’ll keep adding more to this blog on a regular basis, but it won’t be a marathon run of a-post-a-day like it was for the last couple of weeks. Probably something more along the lines of a post or two a week.

Hopefully you’re enjoying the blog. If so, leave a comment or shoot me a message.

Scheduled phone calls

You have people you know you should call on a regular basis (Mom and Dad, brothers and sisters, friends, etc.) but you don’t do it. And because you know you should do it (and don’t) you feel guilty about it. Horrible! No one likes guilt.

Here’s my solution: Scheduled phone calls. Use a web interface to set up people/phone numbers you want to call. Maybe you want to call your parents every Sunday. Maybe you want to make sure you call your brother on his birthday. Whatever it is, enter the date/time/schedule and number to be called and the app will make it happen.

When the appropriate time arrives the app will call you, and when you answer it will tell you that it’s going to place a call to someone for you unless you opt out. And perhaps you could specify that that particular instant isn’t a good time, so call me back in an hour or tomorrow or whatever.

No more guilt about not calling people. No more living in fear that you’ve forgotten to call someone on a special occasion.

Thanks to I Will Teach You To Be Rich for inspiring the automation idea.

Eighth Sleeve Undershirts

Here’s an idea that’s not a web app, and not even technology related. But I want it and I can’t find it anywhere, so here goes.

I want one-eighth (1/8) sleeve undershirts. If you consider that most t-shirts have one-quarter sleeves, then it’s something in between that and a muscle shirt (no sleeves).

Why would I want undershirts with such short sleeves? Let me tell you. I like wearing t-shirts, but I also like wearing an undershirt beneath it. I have a couple reasons for wearing the undershirt:

1. I like tucking the undershirt into my pants and leaving my t-shirt untucked. I don’t like tucking my t-shirt into my pants and I don’t like the feeling of not having anything tucked into my pants (I’m weird like that).

2. The deodorant I wear leaves white marks at the armpit location over time. If I wear an undershirt, it leaves marks on the undershirt instead of my t-shirt, and thus my t-shirts last longer. (I don’t mind replacing undershirts on a regular basis)

The undershirt with quarter sleeves eliminates those problems, but it introduces another one: sometimes the undershirt sleeves are longer than the t-shirt sleeves. I hate that! And I can solve that problem by getting muscle shirts, but then I have the deodorant problem.

Thus, the eighth sleeve undershirt. I can tuck it into my pants, it catches deodorant, and it doesn’t have sleeves that are longer than a standard t-shirt’s sleeves. I would buy these if someone made them, but I haven’t found anyone that does. If you know of any place that sells them please shoot me a note.

Today I’m Feeling…

Alexithymia is a personality trait whereby you find it difficult to identify and describe feelings, you have a lack of imagination/dreams, and you have an extremely logical thinking style. It makes you seem rather robotic, in other words.

I’ve long known that I was suffering from the symptoms of alexithymia, but it wasn’t until recently that I learned there was a term for it (thanks to my wife for finding it). And while I haven’t been diagnosed as having it, I have a strong suspicion that I am alexithymic.

I think one of the main causes of my having difficulty talking about feelings is that I never do it. Or, when I do, it’s rather basic: I can identify happy, sad, and angry. It’s not as though I don’t have feelings though, I do, I just have trouble explaining them.

I was thinking that it would be helpful if I tried to talk about how I’m feeling on a regular basis. Perhaps daily. And have you ever seen those black and white emotions/faces worksheets? Here’s an example. Those could help in the emotion identification process.

I’m thinking what would be helpful is a simple way to pick a face/emotion and write something about it. Daily. Like 750words combined with emotion selection. Default to making it a private thing, but allow people to share within a community if they so desire. It could be powerful.

Oh, and: Today I’m Feeling… Frustrated. Darned 401k’s aren’t as easy to transfer as you’d think.

Create albums from Facebook photos

I should note that I’m referring to physical, printed photo albums. :-)

I like photo albums (I have an awesome one of wedding photos that I love) but I don’t have any of photos I’ve taken myself. And I’ve noticed that usually other people don’t either. I think there are a couple of reasons for that:

• Photo albums take a while to produce
• They don’t look very good

If you try to use photos from cell phones they can come off looking kind of grainy, and you probably don’t have nearly as many photos using a digital camera as you do your cell phone. And then there’s the hassle of figuring out which photos you want to use for the album, uploading them to some site which makes albums, arranging the photos, etc.

We can simplify parts of this though. What if we imported your photos from sites like Flickr and Facebook? They’re already grouped into albums, and they might be tagged making it easier to filter photos down to just the ones you want. And because the photos don’t look terribly good on their own, why don’t we apply some Instagram-like filters to the images to make them look better? And we already know when the photos were taken or uploaded, so we can sort them and/or group them by date. Basically, apply automation to eliminate or reduce the amount of time it takes to produce an album.

I think there’s a big opportunity here if you could pull it off.

Search engine for home improvement parts

One of the joys of home ownership is that shit breaks and it’s your job to fix it. Handle comes off of the sliding glass door? You get to fix it. Towel bar falls out of the wall? You get to fix that too. Bathroom fan stops working? Yep, that’s also yours to fix.

Sometimes in order to do the repair you need a very specific part. For example, when my bathroom fan stopped working I needed a Broan 688-K. After a bit of Googling I was able to find a replacement part, but I don’t really know if I paid the best price or if there were other vendors for that part out there.

There’s a site called Octopart which is a search engine for electronic parts. What I need is a search engine for home improvement parts. Probably a bit harder to accomplish, but your customer base is also going to be a lot larger. Thankfully the fine folks at Octopart created a service called ThriftDB which provides an API to use the same search engine they’re using at Octopart. So if you can find a way to get the catalogs of all of the possible parts used in homes then you’d have a nice backend that you could plug them into.

P.S. ThriftDB is the backend I’m planning to use for my video game merchandise site if it takes off.

Voice-to-text as a service

I think there’s a hole in the platform-as-a-service (PAAS) market for a voice-to-text (VTT) service. Lots of companies use VTT technology, but I’m not aware of any company that voices on providing VTT as it’s core competency.

You’d be joining the ranks of companies like Amazon (Amazon Web Services, Twilio, Heroku, and others.

To start, all you’d need to do is set up an incredibly simple API, hook into an existing VTT engine, and return the result lighting-quick. If you could get traction though then you could start working on better implementations of existing engines or create your own. Even Google’s VTT engine, which has a ton of example data from when they ran their 411 service and now with Google Voice, still has a long way to go. There is a lot of room for someone to do it better.

Tutorial videos for using apps/websites

As someone who uses computers every day for hours on end, I often forget what it’s like to only use computers on a recreational basis and not know all of their inner workings. Stuff that comes easily to me (how do I set up Word so that it’s split up into four quarter-page sized parts?) isn’t so obvious to someone who hasn’t spent as many hours at it.

It’s trivially easy to create tutorial videos showing how to do common things though. There’s all sorts of screen capturing software, and once you’ve shot a couple dozen tutorial videos you’ll be able to breeze through creating new ones.

And it’s not hard to find topics either; people have already asked on the internet in many cases. Searching through places like Yahoo Answers You can find all sorts of questions about Microsoft Word, Excel, Windows, Facebook, or any other commonly used app/website.

There are a multitude of ways to generate income too. The most obvious being ads, but there’s probably also a business in selling videos a la carte or through a subscription service. Provide introductory videos for free, sell the more advanced ones.

And videos are great for SEO purposes. They can show up at the very top of search results and you can use video sitemaps to make sure they’re indexed by the Googles.

If you’re good at teaching people, and you enjoy it, there is a lot of money to be made here.