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.