KookyPlan

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

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

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

Business idea:   create a free daily newspaper for taxi drivers in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

Business model is simple, and clearly a money maker:  you target a newspaper specifically toward taxi drivers (of which there are 1000’s)…with articles clearly geared toward these readers… something about construction, bike lanes, the city, etc.  Ads could be for refrigerators, etc… all things a growing middle class Brazilian would want.  Distribution at taxi stands, or hotels.  In Brazil, Ive seen girls at stop signs handing out newspapers, so this would probably work well.

note:  taxi drivers spend most of their days reading newspapers & listening to the news on the radio… especially in traffic-congested cities like Sao Paulo where the cars are always stopped, and waiting for traffic to move (or passengers to get in).

While the idea my not have a high level of innovation, it surely is a money maker.  Could it scale up?  perhaps, if you could replicate the model in other mega-cities in Latin America…

good luck, and let me know if you have any success with this one….

Brian D. Butler idea for others, micro business idea for others, investment idea

Sand castle advertising

One idea that I thought was interesting comes from inspiration after reading a post from “SpringWise“, an excellent source for inspiration….(see original content below)

How it could work in Brasil:

I was thinking that a small, local advertising company could be set up in any of the numerous beach cities that scatter the Brazilian coast… and they could make advertising out of sand, on the beach each morning…before the herd of sun bathers and tourists arrive.

You could sell the advertising space to companies that want unique advertising (to reach tourists and locals rich enough to go to the beach during the day).  Use a graphic designer to design a logo.  More complex designs are more expensive.   Then, once the design / price is set…

Send out your team of sand-castle builders (no different than hiring workers to build custom furniture) with buckets of water and small plastic shovels…design, and take a photo.  Charge the company.

So as to not wear out your welcome by local authorities…just pick a different part of the beach, oh…and maybe do a free ad now and then for the local tourism market (put it up on line, make it fun).

Note:  in South Beach (Miami), there is a team of sandcastle builders that are actually a neat tourist attraction for the city.

Expand to cover all of Brazil…

For the true entrepreneur…here is what I would do…

Instead of just thinking one city…think of executing this model to cover all of Brazil.  Sell the ad designs to international brands that want to have their logos pop up all across the country…then use the internet +local teams to put sand-castle designs in Rio, Fortaleza, Recife, Salvador…and in smaller beach resort towns such as “Porto de Galinhas”, Pipa, etc…

Think big, and good luck…

Inspiration: from “SpringWise“

Realising that green concerns are here to stay, British media agency Curb offers nothing but low-impact advertising. Its clean advertising service (similar to Street Advertising Services and GreenGraffiti, which we featured earlier) uses rainwater to clean logos into grubby pavements, and has been joined by a four other services that are both novel and easy on the environment.

Curb creates sand sculptures of all sizes; burns patterns and logos into wood using magnifying glasses; and offers a ‘logrow’ service to cut logos as big as 30m wide into turf. Although each service is handcrafted, the agency is adamant that images are produced exactly as created digitally. Last but not least, graphics can be projected on falling sheets of water to create a memorable display. Household names have already used Curb’s services: Adidas was immortalised in grass, Volkswagen commissioned a sand sculpture and Barack Obama’s face was etched into wood.

We’re happy to see that ‘cleanvertising’ has been expanded into an entire portfolio of green(er) advertising options. Curb claim to be the world’s first and only media agency to be doing this exclusively. Which indicates that there’s space for others in different regions. Start blasting, sculpting, cutting and burning!  Website: www.mindthecurb.com

Brian D. Butler Advertising, Recife, Tourism, environment Advertising, branding, development, environment, investment idea, Marketing, Recife, springwise

Ok, maybe not the “best”, nor is it even “land” (yet)…but it would surely make one heck of an investment…

Im talking about the “land” over the ugly canals / rivers running through many Brazilian cities (such as Recife, where Im located).   Ok, so…its really just empty space right now…but with a little “out of the box” thinking…maybe really out of the box… you can see that empty space in the middle of the city could make for a really great investment.

Attributes:

1. (a) really cheap, and
2. (b) near heavily populated areas, and
3. (c) something the city would probably love to cover up (at least the tourism minister would!).
4. so…its cheap land, near populations, with a government that would love to bring in developers.  Thats a good combination.  But, would it work

For example..one block off the beach in “Boa Viagem” , there is a disgusting poo-river that separates the beach from the condos. Wow, thats the kind of “river” that scares away foreign tourists.  But, what could be done about it?  Burrying pipes under the ground would be too expensive….

But then I saw a solution….half way between downtown and the rich neighborhood of Piedade…there is a “Shell” gas station which was built on a covered island over the top of the creek.   You see…they built their business ontop of the river…giving them access to both main roads, and lots of available customers.  In addition, they cover up the ugly / stinky river of poop.  Great situation.  Win-win.

What could be built on this “cheap land”?

I’ll bet you that the “land” over the river is extremely cheap…if the right developer came along, they could buy up the rights…cover the creek just like Shell did, and put businesses there.

Just one block off of the beach, with rich condos on either side… it looks like a great investment to me.  You just need to figure out who put up the Shell station, and how they negotiated the land purchase / lease…and do the same.

Benefit to the city:  covering up the poop-river would increase the attractiveness for tourism.  Plus, by having a “bridge”, you would increase the value of the land on the other side, and would further the development of land across the river (if you had a nice/ easy way to cross the river to go to the beach…and didn’t have that stinky river there… the land would be more valuable, and more condos would be built, which means more taxes for the city, etc).

Hope someone tries this one…not just in Recife but anywhere.  Instead of seeing the river as an eye-sore…or as lost space…think of it as the cheapest “land” in Brazil…and go develop on top… good luck!

Links:

• Pernambuco
• Brazil real estate market

Brian D. Butler Pernambuco, Real Estate, Recife development, environment, investment idea, land, Pernambuco, Real Estate, Recife, river