Starting to think about Starting up

A log of all the things I think ‘they should start…’. The ideas that occur to me that I wonder why no one’s yet done. Some made sense at the time, others are probably rubbish, but there’s no harm in jotting it all down. And I think the idea of people putting ideas out there for anyone to use if they’ve inclination is quite interesting. So feel free to take one of you are ‘They’. And if you’re feeling particularly collaborative, get in touch and lets both be one of Them.

[katewards-blog]

Swiss Army iPhone Case?

A very simple and quick one here.

They should create an iPhone case out of the Swiss Army credit card product...

[katewards-blog]

Social Reading? - shared second screen style experience brought to books

They should extend the principles of social tv to social reading. Principally to books to start with. Now clearly it's not going to be centred around real time shared experiences - and I know that's one of the main attractions of second screen tv - but I think you'd make a virtue out of the delayed social commentary, embedding it into digital books so the reader stumbles on it like an Easter egg hunt as they make their way through the chapters. Take 'One Day' for example. Was it two summers ago everyone read and talked about that? I heard this sweet story of a girl who was on the tube reading it. Whilst on her daily commute she got to 'that bit' where Emma dies (apologies for the spoiler) and she quietly sheds a tear. It's a bit odd for her as its a very emotional experience but she's surrounded by a group of strangers with their heads down. But - in a very non creepy way apparently - there's this nice looking commuter who's sitting next to her. He's read it, and knows what her page has just divulged. And without any fan fare he just catches her eye and gives her an 'I know, sad isn't it' type look. And she's not alone. I really like this story. And theres got to be something in it right? This story's the exception but normally she's just gather herself and get over it alone. So let's play that scenario out with social reading. What if all her group of friends who'd read the book that summer had opened a shared copy of the digital file - because Kindle had given them the option to create a walled community around it. And as they made their way through they tagged things, added comments and pictures. Maybe even recommended a track to play whilst you are reading a chapter. Or suggested a link to watch a piece of content that explains a certain reference. Think of it like collectively creating a 'mark up' version of a Word doc, all highlighting and commenting and curating. But like with Word, you can turn it off and on when you want. So what actually happens is our girl on the tube activates the marked up version, and sees a ream of comments her friends left, and so shares the experience with them. Really you could extend this principle to other circles outside your own. Perhaps it would be fun to read Three Men and a Boat with Stephen Fry. And publishers could use the tool to offer up extra content on digital purchases, perhaps helping to promote books? Read Harry Potter with Daniel Radcliffe? School children could read their syllabus books over the summer holidays with their teachers comments and markups. In fact York Notes and other cheat sheets could make a killing from it. Plenty of avenues you could go down. But being absorbed in a novel and living out it's characters and contents in your head is still a very intimate experience - we share so many others I think it could be quite powerful to apply the technology we use to do so to reading.

[katewards-blog]

Work experience for workers? - schemes that help expose professionals to other professions

They should develop a programme that lets those already in a profession undergo work experience in other places of business - helping inform a lateral career move that a lot of people seem to extol as one of the principle freedoms of today's business generation. I know that there's still lots to be done to tighten up the guidance services and schemes offered to school and college leavers, and this should be a priority, but I'd say the market of career coaching - and as part of this the opportunity to try a job on for size through brief placements in the environment - shouldn't be an offering limited to those searching for their first job. These services should introduce a secondary platform that targets those already with a 'first' career stint under their belt, but with the ambition of starting up in a slightly new sector. I don't think it would be a hard sell to the organisations & corporates. You'd think that hiring those who've already verified their choice of move with first hand experience would be far more attractive for an employer? And I think there are plenty if platforms and tools - from mainstreams like LinkedIn to the niches of escapethecity - you could partner with or integrate to help import a community. I think the main risk in this venture is ensuring take up of the service by the candidate isn't too difficult. If your boss knows your heading for a sideways move, or if you've handed in your notice, are on sabbatical, or doing higher education, it's reasonably simple. It's harder if it's a secret plan but I guess if you're committed you might put some holiday days towards it? Still got to iron through that one, I'm sure there's a smarter approach here. But I do think it's an insight - almost unique to our generation - that more than ever moving laterally is acceptable and encouraged in your career, so surly there should be a form of career preview service that helps you shape that move?

[katewards-blog]

Leftovers lists? - a tool that suggests meals to make out of leftovers in your fridge

Pretty simple idea here (and most likely already done or underway) but there should be a very simple tool that calculates - knowing the leftover contents of your fridge/cupboards - a meal you can make with what you’ve got.

I think you’d really root the offering in the ‘leftovers’ category to manage expectations - it wouldn’t be about using an app to explore your inner gastro in the kitchen. It’s just a very low-effort practical tool that helps you get creative when there’s not much to get creative with.

The interesting part is how you register what leftovers you have - it would be nice if it offered up some photo based google googles style one-hit recognition. Equally if you partnered with supermarkets it could be a case of scanning barcodes.

Probably lends itself to a neat visual devise where - though accessing camera function over your fridge - a demonstration of the appetising end result maps itself over your half empty shelves.

This is the point in the piece where I’d like to mull over an example user journey but unfortunately my lack of kitchen flair (and thus quite desperate need of this tool) prohibits me from taking it much further.

[katewards-blog]

Rent a PA? - a network of personal assistants who charge by assignment

There should be an online network of high quality personal assistants - PAs - that you can rent the assistance of for a one off assignment or take out a membership for.

Membership would probably let you chose from packages that tier differnet amounts of assigments per month. Bronze is 5 assignable a month, silver is 10 etc.

Much like Lovefilm let's you pick how many DVDs you want on order.

And you'd catagorise the nature of the assignment type, assigning a scale of hours allocated/scope of work. Example categories being something like 'Entertainment' 'Travel' 'Hosting' 'Holiday' 'Gifting' etc. 

The site interface should be very simple, again like Lovefilm. Perhaps you'd use a modern, graphic take on the old school filofax. But you'd also want to ensure you publicised how highly trained the PAs were, and personalise the service, putting pictures up etc to ensure as personal experience as possible. 

So - an example. You are organising a hen do for a friend and you rent a PA for a one off assignment: dinner out for 20 on X date, an activity in the afternoon, and a central club guest list. Probably with helpful things like transport to and from each location so no one has to drive. Now the PA might even suggest helpful extras like a personalised Tshirts (god forbid) or party favours. You get the idea.

Another example of membership usage. Someone who can't justify paying for a full time PA on retainer but find themselves travelling for personal reasons every 6 weeks or so. Being time poor, they take out a monthly membership which rids them of the pain, paperwork and organisation required to sort flights, accommodation and transfers, so regularly in their schedule.

No more e.gs needed, you get the idea. But I recon there's something in this one. 

[katewards-blog]

The Season Stocked - a store that sells summer clothes until the end of the summer?

They should open a high street shop that resists the mid season change-over and continues stocking seasonal clothing lines all the way through the season. This one really isn't rocket science but I'm surprised no one's trialled it yet. Theres a strong insight there, and an unmet demand. When it turns hot, you head out to buy summer clothes. So why do the fashion lines change over to autumn/winter mid way through the summer (and visa versa during winter) - leaving only odd sized sale 'last season' clothes on the racks? It just shouldn't be so hard for people to buy swim suits in early September. And no one wants to be confronted with woollen jumpers and dark navy jeans when there's a freak heat wave (freak for London) in mid August.

[katewards-blog]

Letting each Check In be a recommendation?

They should create a tool that lets you go to an area and navigate it using all the check ins your friends have lodged.

Each one is registered to something, a comment, a shop or restaurant, a picture, a song.

And each one is therefore essentially a recommendation.

Pool these together - each Facebook post that's linked to a place, every cafe logged through FourSquare, all those tagged Instagram and Twitter photos, the Tweets that have are location enabled, even when you've registered listening to a track on Spotify in an area - and layer them over the local area map. 

Imagine getting to Kings Cross for the first time in a while and having an index of things your friends have done, liked, shot, listened to, eaten or drank at, to chose from. A ready made social guidebook. 

You'd want the interface to be really beautiful for this one I think. Not minimalist, but something that displays all the content - minimised of course - as a collective of Pins dropped onto the various roads and streets where cool stuff has taken place.

AR would of course be a great feature. 

Perhaps it sits as an optional layer on top of Google Map - Satellite view, Street view, and My Friends' Content view. 

[katewards-blog]

Games4Life? - post Olympics social enterprise with sports

There should be - following the national slump that will inevitably take place post Olympics - a marked, and very well publicised, surge in sporting social enterprise.

I wonder if the best way to do this is to organise and pool all the initiatives under one very loose brand, much like Change4Life, where resources and equities are made available to help ventures kick start, and display a stamp of approval, but it's decentralised enough for those participating to control the reigns. God perhaps it's even a government subsidiary, Games4Life? 

Would maybe you'd create a brand that appears to be a visual and tonal cousin of our London 2012 Olympics beast? A heritage or a legacy piece, adopting the same look and feel, the colours, shapes and type face that we've become so familiar with. 

I think you'd want to see a lot of it live, or at least organised, online. RaceOnline2012 is a good example of this done well. Working with corporate partners to make tools and facilities available at a grass roots level. 

It's a hell of a huge undertaking, but I suspect it's almost an essential; positive new news for the media to help sustain (or avoid the anticlimax and comedown that follows) the heady successes of Super Saturday and the Great Britain Gold Rush. 

Would love to hear anyone else's thoughts. And I shall keep mulling over this one too. 

[katewards-blog]

A tool that helps you put spare time to good use?

They should create a tool helps people with time to kill to put it to good use.

Capitolising on the down time between meetings, when the train's been delayed, the tube's stopped and the bus is stuck in traffic. Obviously you browse and text and tweet and watch, but be nice to add another option to that suite of time wasters. Which does a little more good.

I think there'd be 2 ways you could apply this.

The first is by making the output altruistic. Offering a network through which people can be tasked to something useful for others. 

I guess you'd organise it by people's skill set. So maybe there's a circle for electrical experts, where they'r asked to respond to questions in some form of wiki forum in their down time between jobs. Maybe a circle for creatives. So a small business can put a brief up for some copy and if you're feeling inclined a copywriter has a stab. 

You could also organise it as a collective, tasking the group with something universal, a weekly or monthly challenge. 

Obviously you could work int a location based element, bringing tasks into the real world. 

And you'd also want it to always perform smart diary synchs. So you get an alert when it know's you've a 30 min wait at the airport, or that your meeting finishes an hour before the next train out of Slough, and the collective offers up smart spare time solution. 

The second take on this is that rather than a 'do good collective' the tool offers YOU personally useful or entertaining diversions that fit the place, time and frame of mind you are in.

All the same functions would apply - location based, diary synched, but it would use additional data (normal online footprints) to suggest that perfect time killer.

A 40 min podcast you might like to listen to on your 45 min train ride into London that's on that article you read about that morning on your iPad. A new website you might like to browse for 20 mins that's got offers on sofas that you were looking at earlier. 

[katewards-blog]

Where Am I Allowed to Park Right Now? - an app that calculates all the parking restrictions that apply to you

Another very simple one but I'm pretty sure it doesn't exist.

There are apps that claim to log empty parking spaces. And apps that tell you where there are pay and display bays.

But they should make a one stop shop that knows where you are, what res permit you hold, what time of day it is (thus calculating what restrictions apply to you) and basically does all the hard work, so you just get told 'these are the streets you can park in right now'.

The answer would calculate what yellow lines, res permits, open free non res permits and pay and display bays were in your zone and your time restriction.

And it would map this out using some simple colour coded layer on a map. .

Be quite nice actually to map it over street view to help you navigate. And design the build so it can easily be imported onto other sites as a tool. Would be great if the standard 'Where are we/How to find us' tabs of corporate and tourist pages would carry the facility underneath their obligatory Google Map location jpeg.  

Surely all the data is out there. It's just too laborious to wade through apps like Park-Up London and figure out when the time/date restrictions end and what does and doesn't apply to you. 

[katewards-blog]

Continue the Party? - an app that lets you know what's still open around you

They should create a location based app that shows you what bars and clubs are still open in your area, how long they're open for, where they are and how much it costs on the door.Hopefully putting an end to all those times when last order sounds and everyone spills out on the street to while away up to an hour figuring out where to next (and inevitably loosing about half your gang in the process). 

You'd make it super simple. Drunk proof even.

Paired back interface with an oversized one-click lozenge that hones in on your location and displays the bars and clubs open around you, tells you how late they are open, how much they cost and maps them out.

Nice to have an AR feature so it's more fun when you navigate your way to the next spot. 

Screams out for partnerships. Maybe it's sponsored by Hailo - you'd integrate some 'Or head home now' tab that calls a licensed cab to your location. 

And definitely needs some form of social funcitonality, so you can see what other after hours haunts everyone is is considering. Although I'm kind of going off FourSquare these days.  

I guess the challenge is compiling the info but I'm guessing it's a big data scraping job (ugly ugly phrase) and a layer on google maps? (yet again exposing my incredibly un-impressive grasp of all things back end).

Maybe you team up with an outfit that already has access to the info. I know I seem to keep going back to Time Out these days but it might make quite a neat partnership with them. 

I had this idea a while back and have only just got around to writing up.

It's a pretty obvious one so I'm sure someone's on the case right now, but the important thing is to make it slick and simple, really intuitive UX, no frills. And a really light hearted TOV to guide you through. 

[katewards-blog]

Printed Facebook Photobooks? - a Facebook function that let's you template & order physical photo albums from digital shots

They should develop a very simple Facebook photo app or plug in that templates your digital pictures into a book, and lets you order a printed physical version delivered. 

iPhoto has nailed an incredibly easy interface for this, whilst offering really high quality physical products. It seems mad that Facebook doesn't promote the same thing. Don't you think there must be millions of people out there with digital photo albums that will never see the light of day? And Facebook is in a unique position to offer this kind of tool as they've the advantage of integrating it into an environment where people constantly interact with photos on a daily basis. 

I recon promoting this type of feature would help further cement their platform as the go-to portal for photo storage (over alternatives like iPhoto and Picassa, which must now be struggling to get everyone to send their GBs of shots up to the cloud... a struggle that luckily Facebook doesn't have to contest with). 

[katewards-blog]

See Thru Kindle Backdrops? - to walk and read and not bump into things

Ok this is a pretty simple one. They should create a Kindle background setting where the text essentially appears on see-thru screen.

So you can hold it up as you read and walk and still spot obstacles in your way.

It can’t be that hard. If you had a small camera facing out it could act as the lens, transmitting on screen what’s in front of you.

You could still see the text just fine, there’s a few apps on iPhone that run off this idea of synching camera to screen but their usp is that you can write a text whilst walking. Think reading must be the next step no?

And it’s just quite an gimmicky but reasonably useful piece of functionality for something like Kindle.

[katewards-blog]

It's All Relative? - city guides that compare the lay of a foreign land with the land you call home

They should develop foreign city guides that essentially map on top of your new metropolis your home town barings. Comparing district for district. Toursit site for tourist site. 

Because it's just so much easier when things are relative.

This idea's pretty rooted in insight I think - it's how we often colloquially recommend or explain things. Recently I found myself getting my bearings in Stockholm, until someone made it all very simple; Nofo is Soho they explained. The area your hotel is in is London's Islington. And that restaurant you booked for dinner is like London's Automat. And there it was. I knew what he meant immediately, and I knew what to expect. 

Can you imagine the nuanced understanding and familiarity you'd feel as an NYC newbie if someone twinned the Meatpacking with Shoreditch, Midtown with Edgware & Paddington, and explained that the Upper East Side was London's Chelsea.

And obviously it can go far beyond simple district mapping. It's about the small details that make a city your city. What's the equivalent to that spot by the Peter Pan statue where you drink coffee on a Saturday? Maybe Bethesda Angel fountain. Or what's London's answer to the Frick? 

It would probably be crowd sourced to an extent. You'd want to build in functionality so that I could layer my own Paris-Twinned-with-London layer onto Google maps for my friend. And visa versa. Maybe it's just a simple browser plug in. Possibly could work in partnership with the Wallpaper or Timeouts of this world, could be an interesting annual supplement if we don't think it would work as stand alone published material. 

[katewards-blog]

Run For A Reason? - running clubs that help the community

They should harness local running clubs for the good of the community.

Delivering food or medical goods to the elderly or immobile. Surveying the area to catalogue damaged and derelict sites that need attention.

Can you imagine uniformed fitness freaks on mass on a mission. Hovis style. Perhaps an app that lets you monitor your distance whilst the organises ensure you've a track map ready programmed with your drop off points. 

Maybe brand it ‘Running For A Reason’.

You’d get partnerships with local gyms or sporting suppliers. And surly the Big Society fund would think its a worthy investment.

We need to start to considering all the things that go on across various sectors and markets and think about how they can fit together and feed into each other in unexpected ways.

[katewards-blog]

Second Screen Gaming for the Games?

They should design a second screen companion that lets you play games whilst watching a game. Wii tennis matches with your friends on Zeebox during Wimbledon.

Special edition Olympics games during London2012 finals. Virtual in-exclusive Olympics.

Maybe with everyone contributing to their nations points.

Even get guest stars to play with fans. Can you imagine playing football with Lineker and Shearer from their commentators box at half time?

[katewards-blog]

DoubleDating? - a website that lets paired profiles date other pairs of friends

They should launch a dating website where you sign up for a Profile as a pair - with another single mate.

The idea being that you date another pair.

There’s always 2 of you so it’s safer. You have a choice of 2, so there are options. And you’ve got a close friend with you to fire knowing looks at when inevitably things get awkward.

You could add some nice details to the UX, like designing the Pair Profile to intuitively combine the social date of the two, making a frankensteinian hybrid automatically - that both you then go and manually organise afterwards.

Maybe link in with Top Table to have a running feed of available tables for 4, rather than 2. Or Timeout giving tips for the best things to do in town if your going out as a quadrant.