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.