KookyPlan

You see a headline, it catches your interest, so you click on the link.  It takes you to a page, but they ask you to sign a subscription (for a fee) to read the rest of the story.  Errrrr.  Frustrating.

Imagine if there was a button you could click that would take you to “similar” (but free stories)… blogs, news articles, etc.

For example, visit a Wall Street Journal article, and find the headline available, but the content hidden.  Imagine if you wanted to learn about the topic, but didnt want to sign the subscription.  It would be great to see other similar stories, blogs around the net.

No, I dont think WSJ would put this link on their site, but perhaps a browser plugin would do the trick  (firefox, Internet explorer, chrome, etc).

To make $$ - maybe the provider of links could serve up their own ads along with the new content…

thoughts?  seen anything like this?

Brian D. Butler Innovation, idea for others, internet

I recently read an endorsement for a service called “Smart Links”…see article here

My innovation suggestion:  Imagine if the same tools could be extended to commentators… then, I might just comment referencing a book title, which could have a link, and if someone clicked on it, bought the book…then the commentator would benefit. (same dangers as outlined above would still apply)

Why I liked the platform:

Yes, its an advertising platform. But, its clever…and by embedding adverts into the text of what you write anyways… it might be a clever way to monetize blogs.

You know… at first, I wasnt impressed with “Smart Links” at all. I mean… why not just use an easier service like TechCrunch’s MashLogic which makes all phrases into linkes (wikipedia,etc)… but, then I saw this comment, and I realized the value….

Unlike MashLogic which might be really great for users experience, it doesnt help writers to monetize their blogs. This SmartLinks does. And, that makes it attractive for content contributors.

The danger is… that writers start changing the content in order to incorporate books, titles, and in the process steer away readers that become annoyed by product placement plugs.

My innovation suggestion:  Imagine if the same tools could be extended to commentators… then, I might just comment referencing a book title, which could have a link, and if someone clicked on it, bought the book…then the commentator would benefit. (same dangers as outlined above would still apply)

What do you think about my innovation suggestion?  Would you like to see this kind of dynamic linking in comments?  Would it encourage more discussion?  Or, would it corrupt the discussions with unnecessary static?  (note: blog administrators can screen blog comments, and delete comments they dont like)

Brian D. Butler Innovation, idea for others, internet blog, idea for others, Innovation, investment idea, smartlinks

I dont know how it happened, but I went from having no twitter accounts, to having three…all in the matter of a few months.  But, unfortunately for me…the system of twitter “account management” seems to be behind my speed of adopting new twitter accounts, and now Im in a bit of a mess….and struggling with how to manage, log in and update the various accounts.  There must be a better way, and hence…there must be an opportunity for some developer to develop and app to fill this need… (if you know of any, please let me know)

Here is what happened…

1. First of all, I started with my personal account: @briandbutler , and that was going along ok.  I was putting my personal thoughts, as well as my professional ones, and also posting my random innovation.
2. But, then I was invited to help setup @ForumNexus on twitter.  Yes, Im the country manager (Brazil) and also a teacher in this excellent program (shameless self plug
3. Then, I thought… oh, how about a separate twitter account for @kookyplan for discussions specifically related to KookyPlan, innovation, entrepreneurship, and an outlet for my ideas I want to share with others

Its all good… but, now… I need a twitter manager!

Here is my idea:

• Someone needs to come up with a way that I can log in with just my name, but then have access to all of my various accounts without needing to logout and re-log back in again.
• I need options, control, and an easy interface..

More (for advanced social media twitter users):

• For anyone that uses twitter as a central conduit to controls messages being sent over to other networks (to Facebook, Linkedin, Friendfeed, etc)….you might understand my problem here…
• Lets say I post this blog post.  Ok, I have it set up to automatically tell twitter about my posting.  Ok, and I have twitter set up to automatically tell Facebook, Friendfeed, etc.  Ok…all is working well… until… until I set up multiple twitter accounts.
• Then, with multiple twitter accounts, I have a problem… I can only choose one feed from twitter to feed into my other accounts (facebook, etc), so…. If I have my personal twitter account set up as my central “conduit”, but if Im posting in @kookyplan, then the message ends in twitter, and doesnt make it to my other sites… and the great “conduit” functionality of twitter is lost.
• What is needed:  twitter account management tools so that I can selectively choose which messages get sent on to which networks AT THE TIME of my original twitter message.
• A simple drop down menu to select which of my OTHER networks BEYOND twitter will receive this message that I am sending.
• But… for now….without tools to allow users to control which messages get sent where, its turing into a real time-management challenge for users with multiple accounts.

Please, someone out there… fix this!

While I might be one of the few people so far that have opened up not just one, but three twitter accounts…its clear to me that others will surely find this same challenge in the future.  For example, I was recently reading that Fred Wilson, a VC and principal of Union Square Ventures was setting up a twitter account at both his personal (@fredwilson) and professional (@avc) accounts.  He must be encountering the same type of challenges I am (and maybe thought of better solutions that I have).

There must be someone out there working on an “account management” system for Twitter.  If not… I suggest you get working…

Note:  this blog post will be automatically broadcast to my @kookyplan twitter account…but, if I want anyone from my other networks to hear about it, I will need to go in manually and re-twitt that same message on my personal @briandbutler account (log out, log back in)…man, its not worth the trouble!

if you know any existing solutions to this mess… please post your thought in the comments section of this blog…

Brian D. Butler Innovation, idea for others, internet facebook, Innovation, internet, twitter

It seems obvious once you think of it… why not add a “click to call” button, and enable telephone calls on Facebook?  Think of overlaying Skype on top of Facebook…

Why does Facebook need this?  Well, because they are losing money on a massive scale:  see our KookyPlan report here (needs updating, I know):  http://kookyplan.pbworks.com/facebook

Think about how silly the current system is… Lets say you use facebook to reconnect with old friends (as most people do), but then when you find your old high school buddies, the best that Facebook has to offer is a “wall” in which you can post messages, or “chat” to kind of talk with each other.

But, why not enable voice?

Think about the possibilities…Facebook transforming itself into a massive online phone book with all of your favorite friends a click away.  Then, like Skype, they could charge for calls to land lines (like “Skype-out”, which actually makes money).

Then, get this on your cell phone… and look out all competitors, this could be the voice-provider of the future….

any thoughts?

Brian D. Butler Innovation, idea for others, internet business model, facebook, skype, telecom

This is clever:  to discover new talent the Founders Fund (with TechCrunch) has created a strategy of granting money to an entrepreneur…  and then having that entrepreneur turn around and act as a mini-VC and invest in another entrepreneur.

They start by picking 12 top entrepreneurs (with a successful track record) to grant them the money, and then give the entrepreneur the choice of which startup gets funded.  Clever. Very clever!

They leverage the collective intelligence of successful entrepreneurs to pick who they think will be successful in the future.  With very little money committed, the original investors leverage the collective knowledge of entrepreneurs to uncover hiding, up-and-coming talent.  This might be one of the best deal-flow schemes Ive ever heard about!  Great funding innovation…

Take a look below.  What I find clever about this one is that they turn over the screening and investment selection process over to entrepreneurs (the community), and ask them to pick future winners.

News from TechCrunch…

I’m very pleased to announce a new startup investment program today called The TechFellow Awards in partnership with Founders Fund. The goal is to honor technology innovators and stoke new investment in great early stage ideas.  The TechFellow Awards program will grant at least twelve fellows $25,000 each to invest in an early stage startup of their choice. Founders Fund will invest an additional $25,000 alongside those investments and request an additional right to invest another $250,000 when the company raises its next round of financing. In all, Founders Fund expects to devote more around $3.6 million to the program

The fellows will have few restrictions on the companies they invest in. The fellows will be selected from four categories of experts: engineering leadership, product design and marketing, general management and disruptive innovation.  read more from http://www.techfellow.com/

My thoughts:  would this model of distributed investment decision making work well in other markets? with bigger money involved? what are the limitations? risks?

Brian D. Butler Investment, Venture Capital, financial innovation financial innovation, Investment, investment idea, VC, Venture Capital

Why not have an iPhone app that turns your iPhone into a mouse that can run your laptop?   Just put your iPhone down next to the laptop and scroll, scroll on the touch-screen to move from page to page….and to move the cursor around…just move the iPhone left right, across the table.

Seems simple enough..and one less device to carry on business trips!

Note: I found out later that an iPhone app to work as a “mouse” does exist (thanks Adam :-)… but it only works so far as a touch-screen function…where the operator utilizes the movement of their finger to control the cursor.  Not bad, but… its not quite there.  The idea is to use the cell phone in the same way as your mouse… you are missing the ability to take advantage of the movement of the phone to mimic the functionality of the traditional mouse.

If this technology were to become mainstream.. what would that mean for all the “mouse”-makers out there? mmmm… not looking good… you might want to start re-tooling your factories to make iPhones !  While I dont see how an iPhone app like this can make money by itself, it is interesting to see how one simple innovation can put an industry out of business…

lesson: watch out for disruptive innovations!

Brian D. Butler Innovation, iPhone, idea for others, internet idea for others, iPhone, technology

Ive recently been writing emails to people in Brazil, and while my spoken Portuguese is decent (hold the laughter please :-), I struggle with formal written Portuguese.   One option is to use google translate, but as most people are aware, this software seems to do a good job, but often loses the meaning of the text in the translation (or even sometimes changes the meaning completely).  Most of the times, however, the software does a decent job in giving the reader a “rough-guideline” to the general meaning of the text.  If only there were a way to warn readers ahead of time that this document had been translated (and therefore please forgive the grammar errors)…

So, I got to thinking… why not have a button that could be inserted into the top of each of my emails… and with a drop down menu, the reader could choose which language THEY wanted the text translated into… that way, I could just write in English, and the reader, if they couldn’t understand the original…they could use google translate to get the rough meaning.  Then, the writer could use their best language to make sure the document said exactly what they wanted it to say, and the reader could read it in their own language, but there would be less fear of sending emails with bad grammar in foreign languages.

Brilliant solution, right?  All we need is someone to design the software, and find a way to embed this button on the top of all of my emails with some code…mmmm…

or, my wife suggested…why not just hand-write out a note at the top saying that the original text was written in English, and was translated by Google, and if there is any confusion to please call…

I dont know which was the better solution, but it got me thinking of how sometimes the easiest/ cheapest / fastest solution to implement is right there, but in an engineers fascination with new technology its sometimes the last solution we think of.  Sure, by taking the simple solution there may not be a brand new company that will be born, nor will paradigms be shifted, or markets be created…but problems will be solved cheaply, easily and will little time wasted.

Now, all of my portuguese emails start with:

** Este email foi originalmente escrito em inglês e traduzido para português pelo Google translator e revisado por uma pessoa que não é fluente ainda em português (estou estudando muito) :-)  Se alguma parte não fizer muito sentido, por favor reverta ao texto original em inglês no final do email, ou entre em contato comigo para maiores esclarecimentos.

Hopefully, some other engineer will read this note, and will get to work designing my drop-down-button-for-emails idea… and hopefully they will sell this software company to Google, so I can use it with gmail!

note, these products come close…

• Online Email translator from wordlingo
• let me know if you find any other tools…post in comments below, or in our wiki…

Brian D. Butler Innovation, idea for others, internet idea for others, investment idea, language, translate

just wondering…

have you ever heard of any company / software that could link together what a person does on a wiki (like wikipedia ) with their reputation on Linkedin / facebook (or twitter/friendfeed, etc)?

people generally find no attraction to contributing to wiki’s, because its very difficult to generate social reputation for your content in a document that has mixed authors.  But, what if those comments on wikipedia that you put there could automatically be posted on your blog? or notified in social accounts?

that might shift people toward contributing more to community-driven documents…if people from THEIR community could know what they were writing!

One idea… could it work with Facebook connect developer platform?  thoughts? comments?  (seen anything like this?)

note:  kookyplan, the wiki for entrepreneurs welcomes any software designer who wants to work with us to give this one a try

cheers, B

Brian D. Butler Innovation, internet idea for others, investment idea, kookyplan, wiki

• waiting for MSU game tonight… #
• we’re #2, we’re #2, we’re #2 !!! #
• working on http://is.gd/riIV #
• @artfulmark thanks for tweeting about the KookyPlan wiki! cheers! in reply to artfulmark #
• arrived in Recife, Brazil…setting up apartment #
• most (but not all) of my old tweets (twitter posts) are missing… twitter says they are working to bring them back… what happened? why? #
• learning about “hashmarks” in twitter… #pirates example #
• guess ill use #kookyplan for talking about kookyplan, and #globotrends for talking about globotrends… lets see how it works… #
• setting up WhyBrasil group on Linkedin: http://tinyurl.com/cof9ct #

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Brian D. Butler Uncategorized twitter

the trouble with “advanced twitter search” & with “google alerts” & with “company buzz” from Linkedin (and others)…. is that none of them tell me is someone uses TinyURL to link to my blog / wiki… so, if someone uses Twitter, and mentions my site, but doesnt write out “kookyplan” in the message, I never know that they did so.  The only way for me to know… is by looking in my google analytics…where it tells me specifically the source for my traffice …and there i can see the @tonyrobbins or others that mention my site. 

But, as the web goes mobile, and as people use the short codes more and more for linking…This seems like a critical overlook / weakness of the sites that help me monitor social activity. 

Isn’t there a way to fix this?  If a startup could be the one to do so…. maybe it would make you stand out & help attract funding…. good luck…

cheers, B

Brian D. Butler Innovation, idea for others idea for others, reputation, social media, twitter