Lost-key drop service

A service, that sells numbered key chains, which has something like this written on it:

When the key is lost, the owner will contact the service hotline to ascertain if the key, with id number 123654789 in the above example, has been returned. If yes, he can pick it up or have it mailed for a fee. Works best if the operation is distributed having franchise operators in each city. Thus the turnaround time between losing the key and regaining it can be minimised.

A customer can register the key code online, to get an email / SMS whenever the key is returned.

Help and advice to DIY farmers

About 6-months ago, I discussed with a friend on, how I am interested in growing a vegetable garden, but have no clue where to begin. I was interested if someone will give me advice on what to grow, when and how as well as supply the needed materials. Six month later, I read about sproutrobot, on techcrunch. Sproutrobot, is a US based start-up, pretty much doing what I described above. Now if someone can replicate this for India.

DIY greeting cards

Create an online service that allows users to create a greeting card selecting the paper, design and wordings. This is then handmade and either mailed to the user or distributed to the list provided. There are a few similar services, but none having the refinement and social integration of the “new web”.

This is the one I am most likely to try out, just for the technical kick. I also intend to concentrate on a very specific niche to be able to provide templates to best match what the user might want.

Try that electronically!

A quick list of advantages of the good old way of taking notes:

• When ideas flow, only pencil can keep up with their speed.
• Doodling actually helps with the idea flow.
• Ideas are random, typing is linear.
• You can get away with drawing something on paper to depict a long sentence. Doing the same on a computer will mean sidetracking into finding a clipart.
• No pesky distractions, including those from the spelling or grammar checkers.
• My best UI design always starts on paper
• Easy to create mind maps.
• Paper is truly portable, I can take it anywhere.
• Only once I have all the thoughts on paper, do i try to organise them and make them electronic

How about you? What do you prefer, electronic or paper based note taking?

PS: I do like freemind when I am in mood for electronic note taking.

Rant aside, I recently came across a very interesting piece from Vivek Wadhwa titled Replicators, Innovators, and Bill Gates. The form of ventures I described above might be of innovative type, but there is no harm in starting a replicating venture. Especially if it brings in a steady stream of income and gives stable employment to a few people.

One such service I see in Germany which can be easily replicated in India is the ‘Hausmeister’, literally a house master service. For a fixed fee from each resident, a company takes care of all the common issues with a housing apartment. Whether it is cleaning, sanitation, repairs and other forms of maintenance.

With the several million apartment complexes in India, this service could organise and streamline the ‘building maintenance’ nightmare and make decent money, while generating employment for several people of varied skills. People who desperately need a job that they can do with dignity.

The occupants also gain as they have one throat to choke and do not need to deal individually with a number of service providers. The last such venture I saw, was the greatly successful cable wallah. No reason similarly spirited individuals can’t make this service a success too.

Full disclosure

The only Apple product I own is the iPod touch. It rocks, itunes sucks.

Initial impressions

I was a bit underwhelmed and I doubt I will acquire an iPad. But that does not stop me from believing that it will be a big hit.

What could be better?

Personally, I would have loved the device if it came with multi tasking and maybe a camera. But this post is not about it.

Then what is it about?

This is about the big disruption the entire tablet computing movement could cause to the current state of art. How the relatively low price, the interactivity and the right size makes it suitable option in a lot of never before situations. And about how, Apple could leave a gaping hole for another Microsoft to capitalise on.

How so?

By not allowing custom built apps from being installed on the iPad. This will rule out iPads adoption in the enterprises and also cool new ideas and mashups. Large companies could use an iPad for several clever niches, but needing to install custom IP on to the iPad via the app store is out of question.

Are there any examples?

Sure, several.

• Team of financial advisors carrying a tablet for explain various insurance or investment options to average Joe. Imagine how good the apps could be made to look and how interactive they could be. It would go a long way in closing the sale.
• A restaurant replacing the boring menus with interactive ones on a tablet. Hell, they could even just ‘add to basket’ then and there. If there is a waiting time, people can pre-order their food and also surf while waiting.
• Replacing the dull and expensive kiosk with a 350$ tablet. This might still happen, but by playing a keynote presentation.
• How about the classic ‘travelling salesman’? Does he really need a laptop?
• Medical staff carrying a tablet instead of the physical patient files.
• I haven’t even begun to think about industrial applications

I think you get the picture. Not only can the tablet replace a laptop, but also paper in several cases. People more creative than me will find several more creative uses of a tablet. This brings me to mashups.

What about them?

The thing about mashups, they are obvious in hind sight. But it takes a creative mind and an open ecosystem to dream and create one. But I can imagine a few hacks / mashups surly.

• How about a tablet controlled robot or speed boat?
• A tablet replacing the entire instrument panel of a car
• Tablets used in performing arts
• Tablets used in science and education
• Tablets used by NGOs in rural upliftment

The possibilities are limitless. But the artificial limitations imposed by Apple, will leave the door open for a highly hack-able, maybe android based, tablet provider. Whether that’s a known brand like Asus, who spearheaded the netbook revolution; or an unknown startup like NotionInk remains to be seen.

Sure, Apple will sell millions of these devices and make tons of money, but saying that there is no room for another player is a false assumption.

1. User calls a premium number and speaks the advert.
2. The server processes the voice and tries to understand the message.
3. If the message is correctly understood, it will post an appropriate ad on Craig’s list, with the user’s phone number and an auto generated email id.
4. If the message is not fully understood, it is passed to a call centre for transcription.
5. The message is then transcribed and posted to Craig’s list.
6. Any email received on the auto generated email id is sent as text message to the caller.

The above set up allows the user to place a classified ad in under 2 minutes with no unnecessary steps required. The calls are placed to a premium number thus generating revenue.

I am surprised no one has thought about it or maybe I didn’t dig into it enough.

What would it be?

An empire building game that needs to balance technology, way of life and climate to achieve sustainable conditions. The players will need to move from stone age to iron age to industrial age to knowledge age. All this is well covered by games in the Civilisation series. The difference is, to advance in the technology tree, they will need to consume resources and they need to understand that resources are limited and that consuming them is not without consequences.

Learning

A game that will show the interdependence of several factors like:

• Exploitation of natural resources (wood, coal, oil, gold, diamonds, animals, fishes etc)  for technical progress and their costs in terms of environmental impact
• The long term implication of the such impact
• Investing in technology to achieve sustainable development
• Also the flip side of not consuming natural resources and it impact on growth and empire building
• The need to consume resources to ‘unlock’ next levels of technical innovation
• Trading of resources amongst empires which have surplus of something
• I would probably underplay the option of war and more of foreign trade as a means to acquire scarce resources.

What next?

I am not a game developer so wouldn’t know how to get about doing it. But may be some like minded people will come together and look at it. Maybe Freeciv can provide a starting point. Maybe it even becomes successful and makes some money for the creators.

Well, I don’t need to beat the dead horse about why one needs to backup data. But with the explosion of digital assets, it is all the more important.

What are my digital assets?

The largest, of course, are photographs. Apart from these, I have a fair smattering of music, code, documents and others.

How do I back them up?

Currently, photos are backed up on DVD and in the cloud (picasaweb). Picasa acts as incremental backup and DVDs are full backups. A copy in Hyderabad acts as offsite backup.

Other things lie around on 2 USB drives and dropbox, plus my disk drives in my PC and laptop.

What other option have I tried?

I have tried a few backup tools, Windows 7 backup utility, some more apps on Ubuntu, and found everything lacking in one way or other. I haven’t tried the Apple Time Machine or Windows Home Server. But, from what I have read, they might be answering most of my needs listed below, expect being cross platform. I have not spent much time trying online backup solutions because of the reasons mentioned earlier.

Problems I face?

Synchronizing data is my biggest problem. Although, dropbox is great, I can’t use it to backup my photos or music. In addition, I am afraid to plunge head long to an online storage system, since downloading all of them in India will be a real pain, not to mention, expensive.

What will an ideal backup tool look like for me?

In a sentence, “Drop box on a (USB) stick”.

What was that again?

Well, let me expand. These are the list of features, if I were to write a backup tool, which I might do some day.

1. Installation: When I install the software (which was trivial in first place), it asks me only one question. What do I use the PC for, with a set of clear options (think big graphical buttons).
   Options include:

• Web surfing
• Home office
• Games
• Programming
• Creative work

1. First Backup: When I plug-in the external drive (big enough), it will prompt to use the disk for backup and then backs up all my important documents without me telling which are important.
2. Sync and Restore: The next time I plug-in the same drive, it does a silent sync, without bothering me. At the end of the backup process, if any of the files are removed locally, it will show me a friendly dialog allowing me to restore or permanently delete them.
3. Multiple Computers: I can use the same external drive to backup multiple PCs as well as sync multiple PCs running multiple operating systems. If a file exists on multiple PCs, it will intelligently update the local copies on all computers to the latest version.
4. Web Backup: It can back up the most important files to several web backup providers.
5. Self contained: Ideally the software should copy itself to the external disk and sets itself to auto run. Thus if the disk is plugged in to another PC, it could simply start the sync process without the need to install the software first.
6. Miscellaneous: Burn DVD, restore older version, etc.

What next?

Don’t know. May be I will write a utility when I get some free time, which is unlikely. Hopefully dropbox extend their sync over intranet to sync using disk. Maybe someone reads this writes such a tool. I am open to collaborate with a few like minded people in developing this. Maybe something in Java/Jython/JavaFX to keep it cross platform.

If there was ever a totally unqualified opinion, here it is. A blogger for 6 weeks and change, this is my thought what a blogging tool should be.

Those who came here searching for the ultimate editor, I am sorry to disappoint, only ideas here.

To start with; I have tried WordPress online editor, Scribefire, Windows Live Writer and Drivel; and found them all lacking in one aspect or another. Currently I find Live Writer to be better than the rest. Trying out OneNote which has few features I like.

So, having laid the foundation, here are the features I would like to see in a blog editor.

• Allow you to plan and schedule posts
• Help to collect and organise ideas
• Integrated RSS reader
• Darkroom to allow focussed editing
• Post templates
• Allow easy formatting, preferable Textile or Markdown formatting
  • Advanced source code formatting ability
• Automatically cross reference posts
• Suggest related content

Let me try and expand that, and also the reason for them being there. Well to start with I thought of the workflow behind blogging. This involves planning, preparing, producing, proofing and publishing.

Planning

Given that I made a promise to self, to post an article each week, I would prefer to be able to plan and schedule my articles. So an integrated calendar that shows my past posts and future ideas / drafts will help a lot.

Preparing

Personally I use delicious to organize content and ideas. In fact I tag all stuff I will like to blog about. So I need an editor that can pull my delicious bookmarks and keep them readily accessible. I could then lookup all my ‘toblog’ bookmarks and develop what catches my fancy. My bookmarks also act as my reference tool.

In addition, if the editor has an integrated RSS reader, it will complete the content discovery part of the workflow. Throw in a quick ‘blog this’ action, and that would be great.

Producing

So we have planned our posts, gathered all reference material and have a blog dancing in our head. The next step is to jot it all down. To add structure to this very creative process, I need a wizard. So when I click ‘New Post’ a wizard pops up showing a list of available templates. For example, I could have a Q&A template for my Entrepreneur’s Series. Refer this post of 20 post templates. Based on my selection, the tool will create a pre-formatted text, thus giving a structure to my thoughts. Needless to say the templates library itself is editable.

While writing, it would be great to minimize distraction, so a darkroom option will be great. In addition, ability to use textile / markdown formatting will be wonderful.

In addition the editor needs to have decent support for inserting media, images etc. A light weight imager editor will be most welcome.

Proofing

Once the post is near complete, it is time to shine it. In addition to the standard features like spell and grammar checks, it should have interlinking facility, which is the backbone of the internet. So I will like that the editor parses the post in the background and pulls up a list of related posts, like Zemanta. In addition it should automatically link to all known words. For example, it should automatically insert a link to Zemanta, in the previous sentence. While it is doing this, it would have figured out the tags related to this post and added them as well. In fact if it has figured out the tags, finding related posts is as simple as looking up my delicious bookmarks with similar tags.

Publishing

The final step is publishing, which is something each editor is able to do. Live Writer does it best as it can show a live preview, to the facility is completely optional.

So, what do you think? What’s your workflow and editor of choice?

P.S. I have written this post on Word 2007. So far, this looks good in the producing and publishing department.