Last Mile Solutions - The pitch

Mass transit not convenient enough but hate driving in traffic? Try Last Mile Solutions.

Last Mile Solutions - The fun part

There is a fun combination of demand estimation and resource routing in this idea. What will the commuter demands be tomorrow and where are the best places to locate the cars throughout the day?

Last Mile Solutions - The growth potential

There are over 400,000 daily mass transit riders only counting BART. The roads likely bring another 200,000 people into San Francisco per day. If LMS were able to get 10% of the total commuters, that would be a profit of $60,000 per day or roughly $15 million per year. Expanding to other cities, this could grow by 10x to over $100 million a year.

Last Mile Solutions - The monetization

The pricing would be $12 per day (or $3 per day for self-driving cars) for cars where the longest trip is 1.5 miles, e.g., a 1.0 mile drive to the metro, ride the metro, and a 0.5 mile drive to work (and the reverse in the evening). For bikes, the cost would be $6 per day.

The car costs

Driving costs At a cost of $0.25 per mile for gas and wear and tear, and an average 4 miles per day per user, the total cost would be $1 per commuter per day.

Parking costs (city) In many cities it costs $15 per day for parking. It would only cost one fifth of that for the smart cars because of their size and that they can be perfectly packed with no need for isles. The result is $3 per day per car in a garage designed for Last Mile Solutions (LMS). LMS would also lease 2-4 spaces near most mass transit stops adding another $3 per day per car. (suburbs) Parking is the suburbs would be at least three times cheaper than in cities, so I expect the cost to be $1 per day per car. I think each car could serve 7 commuters per day. So the cost per commuter would be $1 per commuter per day.

Relocation costs (city) I expect city elves to use bikes to move cars around. I expect it to take 15 minutes to move a car from where it was left to where it is needed and get to another car. If each biker is paid $12 per hour, that’s $6 per commuter for the city-side of their commute. (suburbs) In the suburbs, it’s more realistic to use large trucks to move the cars around. That reduces the labor costs significantly. Being able to pick up and drop off four cars at a time helps to amortize the costs to $1.25 per car or $3 per commuter for the suburb-side of the commute.

Those costs add up to $11 per commuter per day, $9 of which is labor. Wow, that’s a lot. So, really for this idea to be viable, we need self-driving cars. With self-driving cars, the labor cost goes to zero, and the parking costs are reduced (just drive around to park further away where it’s cheaper, or even better, work as a taxi during the day). With self-driving car technology, the cost per commuter per day could be as low as $2.

Things look slightly less bleak for bikes, as there would be very little parking fees and bikes could be picked up and moved much more easily than cars, cutting the labor costs in half. So the total cost per commuter per day using bikes would be $5.  

Last Mile Solutions - The idea

The goal of Last Mile Solutions is to be the connection between the start and end of a journey and the mass transit system(s) that do the bulk of the transportation. There are two flavors of this idea: self-powered and motor-powered.

Self-powered

Each night before going to bed Alex schedules a bicycle to be waiting at his door when he leaves for work. The bike is dropped off the night before by an “elf.” The bike is unlocked from its mobile bike locker by Alex’s smartphone. He then bikes to a subway station, where he can lock up the bike. At the end of the subway ride, he unlocks another bike with his phone and bikes the last bit to work and locks it up outside.

Motor-powered

Like Alex, Alicia schedules transportation to be waiting for her in the morning (a smart car). Alicia drops the smart car off at the bus, which she takes the rest of the way to work.

The magic behind this idea is the Last Mile Solution Elves that move all the bikes and vehicles around town. For bikes, the Elves move bikes from people’s houses and their other destinations to the start points of other people’s trips. The bikes are dropped off with a heavy, but mobile, bike locker, which is unlocked via wifi when a user needs it. If a bike is dropped off near where someone will need it in the next few hours, then it’ll be left there. Also, elves will need to move bikes from one mass transit stop to another as needed by commuters. The bikes are moved by loading them into trunks and driving them to their destination. The elves will know where to distribute the bikes from a combination of the day’s user requests and previous user request patterns.

The same pattern would happen for the cars. The other difference is that the cars would need to be moved by elves who use bikes to get to the cars and then put the bike on the car or use a large truck that could hold 4 smart cars.

Last Mile Solutions - The motivation

Mass transportation systems have scales at which they operate efficiently, e.g., planes are best when traveling 400+ miles and subways and trains are best for 2-100 miles. There is a hole in this system at the shortest distances: transportation of 2 miles or less.

Some Assembly Required - The pitch

Don’t get frustrated with confusing and cryptic instructions for furniture assembly, there is a better way. Companies that partner with Some Assembly Required have products that tell you how to assemble them one step at a time, even telling you which of those two pieces that look nearly identical you want to use next!

Some Assembly Required - The fun part

Extensive testing with real people would be required to iterate on the design of the software. Small changes in assembly instructions and procedures could have significant impacts in construction time and frustration. Ironing out all of the problems and making a truly smooth assembly experience would be fun.

Some Assembly Required - The growth potential

If SAR partnered with IKEA (which has $35 billion a year in sales) it would have $700 million a year in revenue. There are many other companies that could be partnered with, which would make it possible to exceed one billion dollars in annual revenue.

Some Assembly Required - The monetization

Some Assembly Required (SAR) would work with furniture, electronics, and toy designers to put the RFID chips in their products, design the assembly instructions, and develop the software. SAR would take a percentage of revenue from the product, say 2%.

Some Assembly Required - The idea

Assembling furniture requires sorting dozens of pieces and fasteners, reading a 10+ page instruction manual, and incredible patience.  DIY assembly needs to move into the 21st century.

Instead of getting a manual with the furniture pieces, the consumer would get a RFID scanner that can connect to a smartphone or tablet. The RFID scanner and the companion app would be used to scan the embedded RFID chips in the different pieces.

The user would start by quickly running the scanner over all of the pieces in quick-scan mode. If any piece was missing it would be immediately clear (not a last minute surprise). Once the quick scan is finished, the app would instruct the user on the first pieces that are needed for assembly (with pictures). The user would then scan the pieces to verify they are the correct ones. Next, the app would describe how to combine the pieces together. This process would repeat throughout the assembly process.

It’s easy to see how this could make the frustrating process of furniture assembly much better, but it could also enable people to put together different products that would otherwise be too complex. This same idea could be applied to home assembly of some home electronics and children’s toys.  The task of assembling a toy that is made of 100 pieces is pretty daunting unless it’s made completely simple and straightforward.

Some Assembly Required - The motivation

Assembling furniture can be a pain. Trying to keep everything straight can be especially difficult when there are nearly identical pieces that serve different purposes. A little technology would go a long way to make this painful process easier.

Supporting artists - The pitch

If an artist’s music bring you entertainment for ten hours a month, it would be nice to give back. Supporting Artists makes it easy to do just that.

Supporting Artists - The fun part

Making a UI that makes it simple and engaging to analyze what music you’ve been listening too.

Supporting artists - The growth potential

I think there are at least a million people who would be willing to give a little back to artists. At $2 a month, that adds up to 24 million dollars a year in revenue.

Supporting artists - The idea

Buy a special set of headphones. These headphones listen to the music being played and match the songs to a database of music. At the end of each month, you are given a detailed summary of the music you listened to and options for giving money to some or all of those artists. Supporting Artists would also collect information about the wealth of bands and artists, so you can choose to support artists that aren’t already multi-millionaires.

Supporting Artists would make connections with bands and give donated money to them directly.

Supporting artists - The monetization

There would be a monthly subscription fee of $2 per account (up to 10 devices).  

Supporting artists - The motivation

We listen to music all the time. It’d be nice to track that and give back to the artists we listen to a lot and need the money.

Video Board Games - The pitch

Don’t fill up another closet with board games you only sort of like. Video Board Games allows you to play dozens of different games with the same board. It blends the best aspects of casual game apps (cheap and downloadable) and board games (tactile and fun to play with friends).

Video Board Games - The fun part

I think the hardware development for this project would be fun. How do you make a cost effective game board with programmable cards that works with a variety of games.

Video Board Games - The growth potential

I expect that if this caught on it could sell a 100 thousand units a year with ten games downloaded per unit. Using those growth numbers, the revenue would be $40 million per year and $10 million in profit.

Video Board Games - The monetization

There are a number of costs here, first of which is the board. I personally like the e-ink board idea, which would cost around $200. The cards, card programmer, and the dice would cost another $100, for a total production cost of $300. The product would be sold at near cost ($350). The other revenue source would be the games, which would go for $5 to $20 per game with an average of $10.  The revenue from the games would be split 50/50 with the creators. The user would be given the option to “return” the game within the first month if they don’t like it.

Video Board Games - The idea

To make board games easier to collect and try out, they should be more like video games. For that to happen the game board and cards would need to be able to change for each game.

The board

There are two ways to make a board that can change for different games. First, you can make the board a screen. The screen could either be a touch LCD screen (imagine a big iPad) or touch e-ink. I like e-ink more of the two because game boards are usually fairly static, which is what e-ink excels at. It’s even more enticing since color e-ink is almost ready. The board would have a microprocessor and be able to keep score and adapt to keep track of state as the game goes along.

The other way to make the board is with a pico projector with a camera. This would be functionally similar to the touch LCD screen. The biggest benefit is that it could create boards of many different sizes including ones much larger than possible using an LCD or e-ink screen.

The cards

Small e-ink screens could be used as the cards. They would be stacked into a card programmer at the beginning of the game which would program each of the cards with an image. The cards wouldn’t need batteries as the card programmer could power the cards as it changes them.

The pieces

The product would come with a variety of standard pieces including colored player pieces, development pieces (colored by player colors) and resources (colored by non-player colors). If the user happens to have a MakerBot, then they also have the option of printing any game-specific pieces.

The dice

Throwing dice is much more satisfying than pressing a button and having digital dice shown. Throwing dice makes one feel like they have control over the outcome much more than pressing a button. The dice that come in the package will be special dice. These dice will have gyroscopes that can tell which way they landed and a radio chip to pass that information onto the game board.

Developers would buy development kits (at cost). They would develop their games and post them to the game store. Users would browse games in the store and download them into the board.

Video Board Games - The motivation

Board games are starting to make a comeback thanks in part to Wil Wheaton. A big downside to board games is that building a collection takes up a lot of space and finding good games can be hit or miss and expensive.

Rapid Home Construction - The pitch

Heating and cooling bills got you down? Let Rapid Home Construction build your next house. You could go from a virtual tour of a house to be custom-made for you to living in your new home within a month. Best of all, you’ll never have to pay more than $120 per month in utilities in the next twenty years!

Rapid Home Construction - The fun part

I like the idea of designing software to make the architect more efficient at making stable, long-lasting houses that are extremely energy efficient.

Rapid Home Construction - The growth potential

If this became popular it could replace many existing homes maybe even at rate of 10,000 a year. That would amount to $2 billion a year in revenue.

Rapid Home Construction - The monetization

These houses could be sold like normal houses, where a buyer purchases a plot and pays for the house. An interesting alternative is to have a cost sharing scheme that would decrease the up-front price of the house for the buyer. The buyer would agree to buy the house for a reduced price and pay $120 a month in utilities (heating, cooling, water) to the construction company over the next twenty years (assuming that a similarly sized house would have to pay $220 a month on average). The actual cost of providing the utilities would be only $20 per month.

Both parties benefit from this arrangement: the buyer get utilities at $100 less a month than their neighbors and the construction company gets to cut almost $25,000 off its selling price while still making the same amount of profit. It also incentivises the construction company to make the most well-constructed house possible because they would be guaranteeing a relatively low utility cost.  I imagine that the houses would sell for $200,000 (including the $25k discount).

Rapid Home Construction - The idea

I see two problems with modern housing. First, we’re fundamentally constructing houses the same way we’ve been doing it for at least 50 or 100 years. We can build a computer chip with billions of transistors (each only a few dozen atoms long) for a hundred bucks. Yet, building a house still involves going to the hardware store and buying lumber and nails. Second, houses are not designed to be taken apart, and yet, the median house age is 36 years.

The way forward is to continue to move in the direction of prefab houses and modular home construction but with an emphasis on energy-saving homes made of reusable materials. The trend is to build modules of the house in a controlled environment (i.e. a factory) where everything can be measured, cut, and constructed accurately. But, the materials used now are fundamentally the same: wood and drywall. These should be replaced with better materials like insulating concrete foam (ICF) and steel (at least for exterior walls).

My vision is that architects could design houses using modern materials and custom CAD software. The goal of the software would be to take the burden off of the architect to calculate the structural and energy efficiency properties of the house and let the architect focus on the design. The software would also determine how best to make the house into modules as well as keep track of what level of LEED certification the house is on track to receive.

Once the building is designed, virtual tours would be rendered for potential buyers. After a copy of the house is ordered, a team of skilled laborers would construct all of the pieces using high precision tools. The pieces would then be built in about a week and then shipped to the construction site. The assembly would only take another week as very little would need to be done on-site.

One thing that would be important is lego-like construction. This clearly makes assembly quick, but it could also make easy work of disassembly. Once a house has outlived its usefulness, it should be taken apart (not torn down). If the primary materials were ICF and steel, they would be recycled and nearly nothing would go into a landfill. If the foundation didn’t need to be remade, another house could be built there using the reprocessed recycled materials.

Rapid Home Construction - The motivation

The housing needs of a society change over time. Right now, there is much more demand for small houses than the mega mansions that were built over the last ten to fifteen years. It’s a huge waste to tear down a large house, throw all of the materials into a landfill, and start again with fresh materials.

Village in Crisis - The pitch

Instead of doing in-app purchasing for a virtual cow, what if you could help buy someone a real cow or save a life with a mosquito net while leveling up your city? That’s what you’ll do when you play Village in Crisis.

Village in Crisis - The fun part

Warm feelings about saving people aren’t enough to get people coming back to a game. This would need to be genuinely addictive like farmville. A key factor could be how much fun the mini-games are. If it’s actually fun to make money for charities, it would make the process much easier. I don’t think this would catch on if the mini-games were very boring.

Village in Crisis - The growth potential

If Village in Crisis could find cost effective charities, it could have one user day save a person day in another country. This means that if Village in Crisis grew to be as popular as Farmville (which had 8 million daily actives and 40 million monthly actives) it would save around 20 million quality adjusted years of life every year.

Village in Crisis - The monetization

This could be made as a for-profit game, but it feels better as a non-profit.  The non-profit would generate revenue from the micro-payments and the ‘mini-games.’ I expect $0.25 of value would be generated per user per day. Using the most cost effective ways of improving quality lives, this could amount half to one life-years per user per year (see about mosquito nets and deworming).

Village in Crisis - The idea

We care about things that impact our everyday lives. We spend money to alleviate common annoyances and give to charities that directly impact us and those around us, e.g., donating to breast cancer if a family member is a survivor. There is immense suffering in the world and the vast majority happens far from us (citizens of the US). We don’t see child soldiers or the women who are sold into the sex trade or whole villages suffering from dengue fever. Out of sight, out of mind.

The challenge is to bring the suffering to the attention of average Americans. Shoving it in people’s faces doesn’t work, they’ll just avoid it. It has to be made palatable and actionable.

Here is where farmville comes in. The solution is to create a game where players are like mayors/local non-profit leads of a city. They get to see a (watered down) version of what it might be like to live in a developing country including its trials. The job of the player is to keep the citizens happy and healthy.  This is no easy task in these simulated cities as public utilities are either nonexistent or dilapidated. The player must rely on non-profits for help. For a non-profit to help, the user needs to give a micropayment or play a ‘mini-game.’ These mini-games would be things that actually have economic value: watch a trailer, fill out a survey, or solve simple mechanical turk-like tasks. The player wouldn’t have to use micro-payments to succeed in the game, but they would have to ‘make money’ somehow for the city.

Once the city’s citizens are happy and healthy, the mayor moves onto the next city. This would be a collaborative game so several people can be helping the same city. After playing the game for weeks, players can check to see what their game playing has bought for real people: mosquito nets, clean water, goats, etc. This can be tracked by the number of quality adjusted years of life given to real people. That would be the game leaderboard. There would be a nearly 1-to-1 relationship between how a player does in the game and how many adjusted years of life they’ve added.

The game could also expose people to regional conflict and problems. If an issue is happening in reality it could make its way into the game and suggest the user call their congressman or senator.

Village in Crisis - The motivation

People like playing sim games. There is something addictive about games like Farmville, and micropayments in these games can quickly add up to real money. At the same time, we should be paying more attention to farmers in developing countries than to our virtual farmers.

Smart Microwave - The pitch

Stop standing over your microwave, watching, stirring, changing settings, and guessing. Upgrade to a microwave with some brains. Smart Microwave only needs you to tell it how hot you want your food and it’ll take care of the rest.

Smart Microwave - The fun part

Making this thing smart is the fun part. How well could a microwave do at figuring out what food has been placed in it and how that needs to be cooked? Are all of the sensors necessary or are more needed? Could adding a moisture sensor let the microwave better estimate what it’s cooking or when it has dried the food out?

Smart Microwave - The growth potential

I expect that in the US alone,100,000 of these could sell per year, which would be a 100 million dollars in revenue per year.

Smart Microwave - The monetization

This product would be sold to customers on a per unit basis. The price would be significantly higher than cheap microwaves at $1,000. But, it could pay for itself over its lifetime in time saved. It would make watching the microwave to make sure it doesn’t boil over or burn your food a thing of the past.

Smart Microwave - The idea

Microwaves are fundamentally stupid. The user basically has two knobs: time and intensity. The user also need to know their food and their microwave well enough to know how best to heat the food. The modern microwave is no smarter than a light switch with a dimmer.

The solution is to give the microwave some brains, or in lieu of that, some sensors. Smart Microwave would have four types of sensors: distance sensor, thermal, visible (camera), and a chemical sensor. The main goal of the Smart Microwave would be to get food to the desired temperature as measured with the thermal sensor.  The distance sensor would be used to make a 3d map of the food. The food’s color and temperature would be overlaid on that 3d map. The color and shape would allow the microwave to make a guess at what it’s trying to heat. Color change in food is sometimes unexpected and can mean something is about to burn. In these cases the microwave would know it almost went too far or used too high of an intensity. The chemical sensor would primarily be used to sense when something is starting to burn. If it were cheap and easy, more flexible sensors could be used to ‘smell’ the food to get a better idea of how to heat it.

There would also be a weight sensor on the spinning plate to weigh the item. The plate could also move in more than just the smooth motion of normal microwaves. By using some jerky motion, it would be possible to determine if the item being heating is a liquid or generally gelatinous. This could come in handy if the microwave is thawing a liquid. It would be an unpleasant surprise to find a bit of ice left in a bowl of mostly warm soup.

As creative as people are, they aren’t that creative about what they put into the microwave. The majority of the uses would fall into 5 to 20 categories. If would be easy enough to build models for these use cases ahead of time. All the user should need to do is say how hot they want their food: thawed, warm, hot, or very hot. If the microwave underheated or overheated, it would be easy for the user to give feedback and the microwave would learn (and upload the lesson for other microwaves to learn too).

Smart Microwave - The motivation

Microwave ovens are a great example of how design can improve over time. If you have the opportunity to use a microwave from the 1960’s, it’s worth it. The interface was so completely unintuitive that you probably won’t be able to figure it out in your first twenty guesses. The interface steadily improved over next 40 years, but it has stagnated recently. Designers now have a pretty good idea of how people use (or have been trained to use) microwaves. My question is: can we do better?

Shame These Apps - The pitch

Does your flashlight app really need to know your exact location, all of your contacts, and have the ability to send that data anywhere on the internet at a moments notice? Of course not! Shame These Apps will tell you will tell you which apps are good and which ones are sketchy.

Shame These Apps - The fun part

There is clearly some cool computer security work that could be done in this project. For me, the most interesting part is the categorization and determining automatically what the minimal permissions are.

Shame These Apps - The growth potential

If Shame These Apps sold for $1 in each store and it actually gained popularity, it could make a few million dollars a year.

Shame These Apps - The monetization

There would be two sources of revenue. First, Shame These Apps would itself be an app. Second, if there are several ‘good’ apps in a category, then one of them can pay to be ‘promoted.’

Shame These Apps - The idea

Many apps in these app stores are borderline spyware. Most users of these app stores don’t realize what these apps can do with the permissions they have. What’s important is education, and maybe a little shaming.

The solution is to make a database of all of these apps. Each app with be compared with the most similar apps and the minimum necessary permissions will be determined. For the most popular apps, a by-hand approach can be taken.

To determine which apps are actually spyware, android emulators would download the apps with test e-mail addresses and contacts. If the email addresses started getting spam mail, it would be clear who the culprit is. It should also be possible to sniff the traffic coming out of the app to see what’s being sent back to the app’s servers. If the app developer doesn’t use encryption, it should be possible to do statistical analysis of the contents of the packets and see under different emulated conditions if addresses, geo info, and other phone info are harvested.

Though I’m mostly focused on how to find the bad apples, the good ones are also important. For every app category that has competition, the apps that don’t ask for unnecessary permissions would be offered as alternatives to the possibly more popular but scammy apps.

Shame These Apps - The motivation

The Apple AppStore and Google Play have become huge marketplaces for apps, and both are likely to have over one million apps by the end of the year.  Unfortunately, many of those apps ask for permissions that they don’t really need. For example, when I search for “flashlight” in the Play Store, 9 out of the top 10 most popular apps ask for permissions they shouldn’t need including access to my contacts, system properties, internet access, and fine-grain location information.

Mole Tracker - The pitch

Tracking the health of moles is too stressful and too expensive. With mole tracker it’s a simple quick experience with instant results. It’s saves doctor’s time and patients’ stress.

Mole Tracker - The fun part

The hardware design would be fun, but I’m more interested in the classification problem. Given the features of a mole, what is the probability that it is malignant? What’s nice is that it could train on data from biopsies and historical data about moles not needing to be biopsied within the following few years.

Mole Tracker - The growth potential

There are around 10,000 dermatologists in the US. If one of these devices is needed for every 5 dermatologists and needs replacing every 5 years, that amounts to $800,000 a year in revenue per year. If this went global, the revenue could be around $10 million a year.

Mole Tracker - The monetization

The hardware and the software to interpret the results would be sold as a package and be designed to integrate well with existing medical care software. The system could reduce the need to have as many dermatologists (or let them see more patients). I think this could reduce the amount of time it takes to evaluate a patient by about 10 minutes and only take 1 minute. In a dermatology department with 5 doctors this could save 4 hours of doctor time a day. Over a year that adds up to $50,000 (assuming $50 an hour for a doctor’s time). I think the device would sell for only $50,000 and last around 5 years. The amount of savings is $200,000 over the life of the device.

Mole Tracker - The idea

Instead of having to see a dermatologist, it would make more sense to have a patient’s body scanned for moles, the location of the moles noted, and detailed pictures taken. This could be done by having a Microsoft Kinect sensor and a camera mounted on a motorized arm that moves around the patient's body, while they hold an awkward TSA-like stance. The pictures of the moles would be stored with relative body coordinates so they could be overlayed on a digital manikin (so no sensitive area photos are stored).

The moles then could be analyzed for features that are known to be correlated with melanoma. One of the most important things is that any year-over-year change can easily be tracked with these images, which is important because change/growth is the best indicator of a problem. Another thing this system could do is advise which moles should be watched more carefully in the future and perhaps even give an estimate for how long before another scan may be needed.

Mole Tracker - The motivation

Skin cancer is a scary thing. For many fair-skinned people, doctors recommend having their moles checked for concerning signs yearly or every few years. One of the signs that something is wrong is changes in a mole. Unfortunately, most people don’t remember exactly what their moles looked like a few years ago.

City Hopper Airlines - The pitch

Air travel is unnecessarily stressful. You have to plan to get to the airport two or three hours before your flight and end up waiting by the gate all because you can’t afford to miss the flight.

Relax, with City Hopper you don’t have to worry if you arrive half an hour early or late. City Hopper is constantly running flights between pairs of cities, so it’s not a big deal to miss a flight. In fact, you don’t even get a seat assignment until you are ready to fly.

City Hopper Airlines - The growth potential

The airline industry is a huge. For example, Delta last year had tens of billions in revenue. City Hopper Airlines could grow to be about ¼ the size of Delta.

City Hopper Airlines - The fun part

The are two fun challenges with City Hopper. First, City Hopper must find ways to reduce waste in the travel process. For example, the way we seat people on the plane is inefficient. If you line people up in an intelligent fashion, then you could board more quickly and get everyone on their way.

The second challenge is to design the monetization scheme such that all of the incentives are aligned properly and there are no ways to ‘game’ the system. The motivation for this idea is that air travel really isn’t economic sometimes.

City Hopper Airlines - The monetization

This is an airline, so the revenue is from ticket sales and perhaps a few upgrades. City Hopper would be a high-end, but densely packed airline. If a flight isn’t full, people can pay extra to have an empty seat next to them and even more for an empty row. This allows for a way to partially recoup some money on a less than full flight.

City Hopper Airlines - The idea

Having a locked-in time for take-off that you purchase weeks or months in advance of your travel date can be inconvenient.  If there are frequent flights between two places, such as SFO and LAX, the seats travelling between these destinations could be reimagined as a market, and plane travel could more easily fit your schedule or you could save some money on flights.

You would first reserve a time window of a few hours for take-off of your flight. Several hours before that time window, an app on your phone or an email would ask you if you still plan to fly at that time. You could then head to the airport whenever is most convenient for you that day, knowing that if you arrive outside of your reserved window, you may have to pay extra to get onto a flight that is leaving at that time.  On your way to the airport, your phone updates City Hopper with your location. When you get to the terminal, your phone lets you know which flights are coming up if there would be any additional costs or any rebates for those flights.

The key idea here is that you can arrive at the airport any time and the cost to get onto the next flight to your destination depends on how many other people are also trying to get onto that flight. So if there are more people at the terminal than there are seats on the plane, then those who are in a hurry could potentially pay extra to get onto the next flight. If other people are willing to wait, then they could get a partial refund on their tickets. One could also get a partial refund if they arrive in time for flights outside of their time window that are not full. You could see these potentially-underbooked flights and the discount to take them in the City Hopper app.  If you do not choose to pay extra to leave sooner or get money back to leave later (or much earlier), then you will be placed on a flight by the end of your reserved time window for the base price that you already paid.

City Hopper would be an airline that runs many small flights between cities that are 300 to 600 miles apart. Having many flights makes it possible for people to take a half hour or hour delay in their travel instead of two or three hours.

If allowable by the air traffic control, having small flights would allow for the flexibility to leave a little earlier or later than initially planned. An important consequence is that there is no need build in buffer time where resources are idle. If the plane is ready early, fly earlier.

City Hopper Airlines - The motivation

Air travel sucks. You have to plan to get to the airport far in advance of your flight to account for lines to check bags and get through security. It’s also not easy to catch an earlier or later flight if you want to adjust your schedule.

Unique Ts - The pitch

Have an idea for a shirt but don’t know how it will look? Want to make a personalized shirt for someone but don’t want to buy thirty of them? Let UniqueTs print your custom-made shirt just for you.

Unique Ts - The fun part

The fun part is making a printer design that is fast, reliable and fairly low cost. The printer needs to be able to complete a shirt with minimal intervention (loading and unloading the shirt). Ideally, the printer would be self cleaning, so the paint doesn’t dry in the syringes. Lastly, the printer needs to be fairly durable. The printer is going to have a lot of moving parts, thus a lot of things that could break. Part of being reliable is maintaining it’s printing accuracy, which could also be a challenge.  

Unique Ts - The growth potential

It’s hard to estimate the growth potential of UniqueTs. I wasn't able to find any good statistics about t-shirt sales. It’s also not really an existing market. If this really took off, it could be a novelty craze where people would design their own shirt and order them. At $20 a shirt, there could be hundreds of thousands of shirts sold per year. So about a few million dollars a year in revenue.

Unique Ts - The monetization

The way UniqueTs would make money is by charging about $20 to $30 for shirts. Therefore, the per shirt costs would need to be much less than that to make profit.

Unique Ts - The idea

Silk screening is economical if you only want one or two colors and are going to make hundreds of shirts. There is a large overhead cost that makes it expensive to make only a few shirts.

To solve this, we need a process optimized to make only a few shirts for less than what it would cost to do with silk screening. The solution is something closer to a normal printer. The design I’m imagining is a row of a few hundred small syringe-like injectors over the working surface. These syringes would be filled with paint by other syringes, which gets the paints from the paint cans. After the row of syringes are filled they would be lowered to the surface of the shirt and plungers would push the paint onto the shirt.

After putting the first row of paint on the shirt, the syringes lift and move over to a bucket where water is run through the syringes to clear out the paint. Next comes the drying of the syringes, then finally they are ready to be loaded with another round of paint.

Users would upload images to UniqueTs. They would then get to choose how many colors they want and see what the shirt would look like. After manual review (to keep out really messed up stuff) the image would be sent to the printer.

There would probably be some concern about copyright infringement, but it might be possible to get around that by requiring that the user verify that they are not infringing any copyrights.

There would also be a limit of how many copies could be made. For larger orders, UniqueTs would refer the user to partner t-shirt printers.

Unique Ts - The motivation

Making custom T shirts kinda sucks. It’s really not economical to make only one. You need to make the image, you need to cut the vinyl, then you need to transfer the vinyl onto the silk screen. Only then do you get to make the (one color) t-shirt, and it becomes much more time-consuming if you want to use several colors. Using the normal screen printing process, it could cost 40 dollars in labor alone.

Community Bonds - The pitch

Don’t let the free market hold you back, if your community needs something, take it into your own hands and make a community bond.

Community Bonds - The growth potential

I think that there could be a community bond of about a million dollars for every 100,000 people per year. By taking a 10% cut, that would be $300 million a year in revenue.

Community Bonds - The fun part

I would enjoy making a product that gets people together to work towards a common cause. This needs to be able to be easily shared and spread through email, social networks, and even fliers and other ways of communication.

Community Bonds - The monetization

There are two monetization models. The first is that Community Bonds takes a 10% cut of the bonds raised. The second model is for Community Bonds to be the bank and make the loans. This could cut out a middle man and because the risk would be low, the interest rate could also be low and profit could still be made.

Community Bonds - The idea

Members of a neighborhood or community don’t have direct control over the businesses that are nearby. Sometimes there is a pent up demand for a good or service in a neighborhood. For example, people cite “food deserts” in inner cities. But it doesn’t just happen to inner cities, the suburbs can have the same problems. The primary problem is a disconnect between the desires of the people and the supply from the market. The solution is to show those desires and force the market to react to them. The way this would happen is through a community bond.

Members of a neighborhood would come together and say they want a business that currently isn’t in their neighborhood. They would all put money forward to prove their interest. This money would serve as part of the loan to open the business in the neighborhood. Let’s go through a couple of examples.

High-end Baby Store

There is a neighborhood that wants a store to buy organic and fairtrade clothing and toys for their babies. They start a campaign on the community bonds website. Five hundred members of the community put in $200 each, which they will get back in goods if a store moves in or will be refunded if not. That money is put into the bond (a total of $100,000). Community Bonds then searches for high-end baby stores that may want to expand into the neighborhood and local entrepreneurs who would want to start their own high-end baby store. Community Bonds then works with local banks to get a low interest loan for the business that makes the best proposal.  The loan would phase in as the community members take their money out by purchasing baby things on their $200 credit. From the bank’s point of view, this is a very low risk business, people have expressed demand for the store and there are several months of sales guaranteed. The only concern that the bank could have is that the demand might dry up quickly. To ease that concern, members of the community are only allowed to get back at most $20 a month through purchases.

Local Organic Food

The problem of satisfying demand is easier the more direct it is. The further up the supply chain you need to go to satisfy the demand, the worse the free market does. For example, a community might not have access to local organic produce, not because of the climate, but because the land is used for other purposes. In this case, the community would again raise money from citizens who promise to buy produce once it’s available. Community Bonds would work to find farmers who wanted to move into the area to grow crops as well as land that would be good for the farmers. Community Bonds would then work with the banks to get the farmers’ loans for the land. There would again be a voucher system where the bonds are paid back as customers bought produce.

For larger changes, there would be national campaigns, where tens of millions could be be put into bonds.

Community Bonds - The motivation

Sometimes communities don’t have things they need or really want, such as a close grocery store or a baby store. The ‘free market’ doesn’t perfectly allocate scarce resources as it should.

House Basketball - The pitch

Turn the odds against the house with House Basketball.

House basketball - The fun part

The computer vision part is pretty interesting because it involves reconstructing the players’ positions and could move into understanding how posture conveys feeling. The analysis of the computer vision data would also be quite interesting.

House Basketball - The growth potential

I don’t think this has much growth potential in terms of number of clients. The best way to get growth is to move into doing this computer vision and analysis for other sports. It could grow to be a multi-million dollars per year business.

House basketball - The monetization

This is a product whose value decreases with the number of people who use it, so it really may be limited to a few dozen people. It might be best to set this up as a revenue share plan, which makes more sense than charging $100,000 for a piece of software.

House basketball - The idea

Most gamblers often only have data on the wins and losses and score differentials of the teams that they bet on.  There’s much more data available that could improve betting strategies and outcomes including point-by-point summaries of the game. That is what professional gamblers currently have access to, but there’s even more out there if you know how to use computer vision. With a few different camera feeds, it’s possible to reconstruct every player's exact position on the field at every second. These can help answer how many contested shots a star player has been making and how much his teammates have been giving good picks or dribble penetration before kicking it back to the star. With more advanced computer vision, you could see how players’ posture changes when they are up or down and whether they slow down when they are behind by a lot.

With the data the software makes available, it could be possible to accurately determine tendencies of the coaches, such as when they make tactical mistakes and whether they know how to recover when an opponent spots a weakness in their defence. The data could also figure out when refs make mistakes. This could be useful if a ref tends to call a lot of charges and one of the star players for the upcoming game pushes the envelope with charging. There are many small but important things this software would help uncover.