Apple’s iPad official launched yesterday to much fanfare. Hyped more than the iPhone, everyone’s really curious as to whether it lives up to the hype. Let’s find out.

I’m extremely excited to see what industries are revolutionized and brought to your fingertips wherever you go. Apple has done their piece. Now the responsibility lies in big newspapers, media corporations, and book publishers to set their content free in the iPad. Whether that means making it actually “free” and finding another way to monetize it, or charging for it at a reduced price in the iBooks store, only time will tell. Most blogs like this one have already faced the music by releasing our content 100% free with either other motives for having a blog or being ad-supported. The big guys that have have charged for content for decades that can also realize that and make the necessary changes will survive and the ones that can’t face it will not. period. The year following the launch of the iPad will be the defining moment of the media industry. Expect the iPad to give birth to a million new small media businesses that are built to weather these waters, and expect the iPad to put out of business countless juggernauts that refuse to face reality. Either way, expect to see me there reporting how I see it.

http://mashable.com/2010/01/28/what-we-learned-about-apple-yesterday/

there’s a lot about what the ipad is missing out there:
http://i.gizmodo.com/5458382/8-things-that-suck-about-the-ipad
http://mashable.com/2010/01/27/ipad-whats-missing/

it’s not getting a lot of love, but i think it has a chance of being extremely popular. everyone that is criticizing it is in tech and simply wanted more features. but if u read the first article above, u’ll see that apple has a precise plan to be the perfect content consumption device, and nothing more, not even taking photos–that’s for your iphone. and they may just have hit the nail on the head.

the one thing that everyone agrees is wack is that they didn’t solve the onscreen touch keyboard issue at all:
http://i.gizmodo.com/5446652/how-will-we-type-on-the-apple-tablet
http://i.gizmodo.com/5458397/the-ipads-onscreen-typing-solution-isnt-a-solution-at-all

people also think the border around the screen (aka a “bezel”) is too thick. So the question is: is the iPad the real deal or not? Does apple have to release some updates to their iPhone/iPad OS to really nail the keyboard? Is there even enough room on this device for the keyboard solution to be solved?

I think Apple will solve it, but it may not be with the first wave of these devices

I just thought about a serious idea to make money with a pretty basic app to start:

I’ll just leave at that. Hit me if you know how else we can make this attractive. What other factors could easily get in there to make the data more intelligent. In general the idea is that we’d be collecting location data from thousands of applications about millions of users and we’d be rewarding the app with money to give us the data. I’m not thinking we’d use it to serve ads on the phone since other people already do that. We’d be focusing just on collecting all the data across a ton of apps. The idea is that every app would do it cuz it doesnt require giving up any ad space, and they get paid. I guess that’s kinda what would make this a reality, unless we just wanted to become a plain old smart-phone location aware ad network. It would basically guarantee us a bunch of apps that would do it just to make a few extra bucks. We just need to find a way to bundle it. maybe we’d need to collect several other data points from the smartphone application in order to do that.

Ok, so I just had an idea:

HOW IT WORKS:
1) user enters in a point A and a point B
2) our system determine ALL possible routes without regards to traffic.
3) our system monitors all those routes and provides a list or even graph of how long it will take to make trip starting at every 15 minutes throughout the day. Imagine an area graph with the X axis having increments of 15 minutes through an entire day, and the Y axis has the time it will take to make the trek on average based on our analysis of the trip for the past 30 days, of even past 360 days.
4) then we basically produce a list of the top routes to take in the evening, morning, etc. WE can go many places from here in terms of the GUI and user experience to present the information concisely. People dont wanna look at the graphs of 20 routes, but they can if they want to. So on top of that, we need to figure out how to concisely produce the best routes.
5) we also need to put in search and filter parameters to differentiate weekends and holidays, etc. Obviously. I wont even get into it now, but when I spec the product, u can rest assured I’ll have stuff in mind here.
6) HOW DOES IT WORK: well, this is the hard part. Hopefully we can intercept the precise paths of their traffic lines as generated by their Traffic Overlay method:
http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/services.html

But if worse comes to worse, we’d basically have to setup a bunch of computers to grab tons of screenshots all time that we use OCR to analyze, similar to what BrowserShots.com does for analyzing how your html markup looks on various browsers.

Let me know if you have any ideas.

Yea, BUMP‘s API that they just wrote about on tc today is gonna be a big deal, and it’s gonna be exactly what the company needs. The problem with these sort of apps is that they’re only useful when you have critical mass. The technology is great, but if nobody else can bump their phone with your to exchange contact details and other info, what good is it?

So anyway, the API will be what makes it so everyone basically has bump. Bump’s gonna figure out how to take advantage of the fact that a bunch other apps will have their api in use. I’m not exactly sure how they plan to make it a catalyst to more people exchanging contacts through it when Bump might only exist through another app, but I’m sure they have something in mind more than just allowing you to quickly connect and play Connect Four after bumping.

Apple really should just put them out of business and make this killer feature a key component of their iphone offering. It’s just so useful and would be great if you could bump with everyone.

I’m trying to think of an idea to submit to them in order to get early access to their API….sorry if this blog article isn’t very coherent, but i’m just enamored by this tool…what can I do original with their API?

…lets think about our constraints, goals and generap api features:

1) you must have an iphone or android phone

2) it would be nice if the idea somehow resulted in making the core bump app more popular or somehow made it so more people could bump, even through applications using the api. If u nail this, u’ll surely win the 1st place $2,500 developer contest they’re holding.

3) generally, the service exchanges any information from one phone to another that can be grabbed via the phone’s api, i.e. contacts, photos, and any info stored directly in the bump app….what spin can we put in sharing info. sharing info seams a little boring. there must be some little twist we can apply to it that makes the final app seam so much bigger than just sharing…however, the point is just that the key thing going on here is simply file sharing and to come up with the killer idea we must own that fact.

4) the exchange only works when phones are near each other in proximity and actually touch each other make a bump motion.

IDEA PHASE:
1) when is it useful to bump in games?

2) what about building another api on top of their api with even more features and make it available for even more iphones? What other services can we mash up to make a killer service that lots of other apps would enjoy?

3) how can we promote bump and more specifically its functionality within other apps? I.e. I’m sure Bump the company–i.e. the contest holder who we’re trying to get to agree to our idea–would want a feature developed that got people bumping while in other iphone apps!

4) is it realistic that you’ll be in the facebook app or some other app and u’ll bump someone else that’s in another app.

5) is there any purpose in bumping someone that is using another app that is different than the one u r using? hmm. Maybe. Games? To exchange virtual currency? …uh oh. there we go! we’re on to something. let’s keep going…

6) VIRTUAL CURRENCY PLATFORM BASED ON BUMP USED BETWEEN MULTIPLE GAMES. THEY DONT EVEN NEED TO BE THE SAME!

7) and when you do it of course you can choose to exchange contacts and all the standard bump stuff. And therefore Bump is happy cuz it means more people are using it, which is exactly what they need if they want to become relevant. They need everyone using it, and now they have lots of people using it to exchange virtual game currency.

so let’s extend the idea…What I’m worried about now is that they’ll say: “hey, we already thought of that and plan to do it a long time for now for whatever reasons.” I mean I’m sure they’ve thought of virtual currency. I’m not sure why they haven’t done it yet, except because they only have limited developer resources–which has now changed since they’ve opened up the API…So anyway, here’s the problem: i’m not sure how excited they are about another API built on top of their API that does not at least bring a lot of value of its own. Therefore, WE MUST BUILD AN APP THAT IS USEFUL IN ITSELF AND NOT JUST AN API IN ITSELF.

9) What can our app do that is related to Virtual Currency? …ummm let me think: Stock Market type stuff. It’s a market for virtual currency from all the different games, where one currency from one game is like currency from one country and has its own exchange rate that goes up and down differently than the exchange rate for currency from another game, etc. Not sure how pie in the sky that is. I wouldn’t say I’m the expert in virtual currency, although you can checkout all my research from last summer on the social gaming and virtual currency market here: delicious.com/faceyspacey.com/virtualcurrency

10) I small slimed down stock market could be made for virtual currency exchange. My guess is the hard part and reason they dont have a very popular tool for this is simply cuz to exchange money in mmorpgs, which are what have been popular until the iphone, requires making ur characters meet in a game setting and then u drop ur gold on the ground and the other guy picks it up, etc. That whole industry is plagued with scam artists, deceit etc, or at least has gotten a bad wrap. I know they have several ebays for things like that and Ebay itself banned the sell of fake gold from Chinese gold mining sweat shops lol. So that’s why there is no super legit offering in this market for this. I know there is a few. I think the links are even in my bookmarks, but I’m sure it’s not the next Zynga that this idea could be. And it could be simply cuz physically bumping to exchange money is very legitimate and means u must actually know the person. It’s not something easily done with Chinese sweat shops involved, without them mailing an iphone or, i guess u could just log on another iphone with the same account credentials the chinese sweat shop guys are using to play the iphone game. But, either way, physically bumping might be exactly what makes this idea ripe. That said, I’m basically admiting that I’m not inventing the idea here, just suggesting a timely mashup.

So that’s it, Bump, I’m submitting my idea to you and most to your developer contest now. I’ll do the idea, and I’ll win your contest. The hard part is it’s a lot bigger idea than a 1 month contest for $2,500. But maybe we can work together to do something hot.

….Enough bullshitting, let’s talk about the product now:
1) ok, so similar stock graphs to the regular iphone stocks app
2) the graphs produced based on buying and selling of currency across our platform.
3) we put overlays into any app using the bump api that shows the user his currencies, i.e. how much he has of each currency. The api allows app developer of other games and apps to make a feature to drag and drop currency from their app into the bump api popup overlay. Once it’s in there, u can’t use it in your game, or maybe we can figure out how to keep them always in sync.
4) with the popup overlay open from the 3rd party app (or maybe 4th party app at this point since my app is the 3rd party app) you can go bump someone else that has the popup overlay open and then it will show u what currency they’re offering and them what currency you’re offering. So more specifically, the popup overlay must hold what u plan to trade, and u must drag the virtual money from your current game into the overlay or through some other means like a basic button move the in-game currency to the popup overlay utilizing the api. Then u bump with someone who’s done the same, and it asks you both to confirm a final time after showing u the amount and type of currency being offered from the other person. With a double confirmation, the money is exchanged.
5) if you have the game that utilizes the currency received, u just need to open up the game and since it uses the api already, u’ll be shown a popup automatically the next time u load the app with a button in it to claim the money. Claim it, and it’s added to your bank account in that game.
6) in general, let’s imagine the dynamic that this will really happen to come up with more features: ok, so you’re at your friends house. you’re friend is a video game junkie stoner type, and you of course are a type A software programmer. he has money from playing WOW on his iphone or the like, and you have money from hours you billed while using a time-tracking and billing iphone app. For some crazy reason u want to hire him to do something, or wait, better yet, u wanna play the iphone game he’s playing cuz u just hit it bit and are on the beach sipping coronas, so u bump while in ur time tracking app and while he’s playing some stupid iphone game having to do with skateboarding, and you pay him for his currency…And if these were regular people, they’d be bumping and exchanging currency because they’re both playing a game they like, and hmmm, they want the money not in the currency it came in, but converted to the current game they’re in. AHA! so they must choose an option: do i want the money converted or do i want it in the currency it was sent to me in (i.e. in the above example where u go open up another game and there the currency is waiting). I actually think the real use case–or at least the one this product should be initially focused around–is automatically converted currency. Sorry if this is a little rambly, but that’s the point–I’m brainstorming. Catch if u can.

SO, two regular people that enjoy games on their iphone exchange currency. Why do they exchange currency, what’s the point? The point was in the first example where u get a different type of currency, but I dont think that is the main use case we’re in search of here. The main use case has to be paying someone to do something, cuz exchanging currency does mean anything if it’s automatically converted. At the end of the day someone ends up with more currency and he was therefore “paid” by the person who put more money in the pot. So why do you pay someone? Well, cuz it’s a friggin game and u just wanna hook ur boy up and give him some currency to get rolling and maybe catch up to where ur at in the game. And maybe he’ll do something for u in the outside world in exchange for the currency, like buy a 6pack….Ok, now I’m sounding like a cheezy Web 2.0 Startup Product Tour. But u get the idea….The real idea is actually buying virtual items. SO bingo, there we go. That’s the round 2. I think we just start with giving currency. The only issue is that with that there is no exchange rate that can be calculated. The whole idea in the beginning was to track how much people spend of one currency to buy another to easily produce exchange rate graphs and build a marketplace.

…Anyway, I’m not even gonna try to figure this idea out. Cuz I’m just gonna wait until Bump likes what I have to say and wants to brainstorm it with me. I’m sure they’ll have some ideas of their own. This is a good point to leave off.

SUMMARY OF IDEAS:
1) exchange of currency from different games to produce exchange rates, and graphs, and a little stock market, with in game popup overlays to drag and drop the money exchanged and receive it in a game the money corresponds to, etc.

2) paying your friends via virtual currency that they can use in any game that is making use of the api. Again, you can do this from any game using the api and bump with a phone running any other game that is also utilizing the api.

3) you can exchange money for virtual items. So imagine like before where u drag and drop currency into the popup overlay, you can drag and drop items. And once in your Bump treasure chest, u can select it for trade and bump just as above when bumping money of 2 different currencies. I wont even get too deep into the UI, but if u do this stuff for a living, u know exactly how this product looks already or all the possibilities for how it can look.

4) now, lets actually just come up with the Keep it Simple Stupid need to have to get the first release quickly out: what can you trade that is very likely to be traded. I’m afraid virtual items might take a while to catch on. Is there anything else u can get paid to give to someone on an iphone? I dunno, we might just be stuck with exchanging virtual goods.

Anyway, I’m done….BUMP, I’m not even gonna say my idea on your site. I’m just gonna link u to this. I hope u like my idea, and give me developer access and discuss this more in depth with me. It’s more than just a developer contest idea obviously, and I’m sure you already have things like this in your roadmap. I can help you make it a reality sooner. I look forward to hearing from you:

james@faceyspacey.com

So, I was reading the recent thread on TC by Sara Lacy on South American startups:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/12/16/is-globant-south-americas-next-ipo/“

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/12/14/mercadolibre-and-why-south-america-shouldn’92t-settle-for-quick-and-easy/

And, hey, for us entrepreneurs, the fact that things are going so slow, and we see the same real time stream clones on Techcrunch each day, only means we’re more wise and more apt to penetrate the market. Several years ago, i felt like there was so much information I had to catch up on learning–and I was right. I felt like people were innovating faster than I could and that it was impossible to keep up. I’ve now mastered so much of it and got 4 years of Techcrunch trends in the back of my head that the pace of the market feels so slow to me, making it a piece of cake to penetrate the market. So my inner nerd is disppointed that he’s not walking in a Minority Report universe, but my entrepreneur side sees a market that is more ripe than ever, and suspect it to be so for the next couple hundred years at least.

So Facebook is taking some big risks with essentially making their profiles public, Myspace style. I don’t really give a shit about the whole privacy thing and how they made it so most stupid people would willingly open up their profiles for public consumtion. What interests me is the risks their taking in the name of constant growth. Basically, this is one of the big things–aside from crappy custom profile designs–that made Myspace fail. Things were too public, and everyone could view your profile and it became a popularity contest vs. a place to truly maintain long term relationships. I’m not saying anything new. I’m just stating my context for my rant here.

Facebook, you have potential to be really big. Lets see something already.

http://www.avatarmovie.com/
watch that and return back to here after

….becoming your soul and transfering bodies. u better believe it’s possible. While Ray Kurzweil and the guys at Sinularity U: http://singularityu.org are trying to figure out how to clone the matter that makes up our body, somebody is gonna have to figure out how to extract the soul (to inject into the matter), and first and foremost, figure out exactly what the soul is. Spirituality is a science, and not a religious matter like the gurus would have you think.

Thist movie by James Cameron is ground-breaking and will spark the minds of many across our earth. As a result someone some day will figure out the science of life and who and what we really are. It’s definitely not these body bags of matter that we walk around in.

Web 2.87 is baby stuff compared to this stuff. For all the people that think of lame startup ideas all day and for all the business men that have a hard time finding a unique market, believe me, there are tons. Ur just not informed enough to see all the potential for what we can do with technology. Just think of the movie Minority Report, or any futuristic movie–you’ll see tons of technology and tons of new stuff that can be invented and sold.

Last thing: let me tell u a great quote…When I was at the Paypal X conference with my dear friend, T Legend (AKA Tyler Beerman), Tim O’Reilly stated–or rather, quoted someone else, who i forget–saying that for every market that is sufficiently white labeled and made easy for the masses, a new adjacent market opens up for the taking of shark entrepreneurs following the trends.

Wath the movie Avatar, believe this stuff is possible, believe you can do it, acquire the smarts to be able to do it, and you’ll realize that there are a million market opportunities, more exciting than ever. And it shouldn’t even be about the money. This is stuff for people far in their careers where money isn’t an issue. This is Science, and it’s amazing in itself. “Amazing” isn’t even the right word to describe it. It’s where I’m made to go. This is all I wanna do.

SITE BEING LAMBASTED:
http://www.cloudshare.com

TC ARTICLE THAT INSPIRED THE LAMBASTING:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/12/11/cloudshare-lands-10-million-to-bring-software-demos-to-the-cloud/

Ok, so I’m gonna start this startup idea off by completely tearing apart a product I saw today on TC. Skip to the end to get the product idea.

So as soon as I saw that TC article today about Cloud Share and read the first few lines, what came to my head was a small b2b product that allows startup companies to build product tours, i.e. like the Zen Desk tour I just covered–not the tool that Cloud Share ended up being. Cloud Share is a tool that lets companies demo enterprise software, and probably provides all sorts of click metrics and usage metrics…Wait let me check it out….Ok, even though their product tour sucks, it’s exactly as I supposed: metrics about usage of their demos, inviting people to use various demos, multiple demo versions for different groups of people, branded explanation sites wrapped around a demo, real time collaboration (i.e. chat and what not) with users, rules to allocate hours of usage allowed to various people and groups. Yea, so vaporware. All I hear while reading their documentation is the hyped terms: “multi-tiered hierarchy” etc. Then if u right click to view the images in their tour and view them, u can see them slightly bigger, but they barely show what they do actually do. Being skilled in all these sort of ideas, i can tell what they’re up, and it’s not much. Again, it’s like what i just said. It’s just hillarious that the the images in the tour are so low quality and small. It’s obvious that these guys are selling custom development to big corporate companies that don’t know any better.

A lot of b2b solutions these days are total gaffles exactly like this. They have all this marketing hype about what needs they fill and very little information publicly available on their site about what they actually do and no visuals or demos lol (aren’t they supposed to be tool for creating demos). The point is they don’t let you see anything until they funnel dumb prospects into contacting them–who are usually just know-nothing non-technical employee managers from large corporations that control large budgets and impose so called efficiency tools on their tech guys. Zuora.com is another perfect example of a useless too that tricks large companies into using a 3rd party solution that they’d be better off doing themselves. (Zuora offers billing and payment solutions by the way. Check them out. They suck).

So anyway, I will end with a product idea. But I still got a little bit more lambasting today. Cloud Share’s problem is this: they’re target client is big stupid corporations that sell big software that’s important enough to be closely guarded in a demo area that you must get invited to by a sales rep. The big companies in this space already built their huge enterprise b2b app. if they built that, they can surely build and manage tools to demo it out to people. Period. Which leaves them as a team of sales sharks just targeting really stupid corporations that, again, have know-nothing non-technical middle managers that think “oh wow, this will create great efficiency; i should force my tech guys to use it.” The tech team can easily set this stuff up. The reality is a big innefficient company will waste 7x more time dealing with Cloudshare than an small mobile company would to setup the same stuff.

CLOUD SHARE, i wish you no success. Any company that refuses to be honest about their product and transparently represent it with large images and proper tours does not get my thumbs up of approval. I should be able to demo it without giving up my contact info. ETC. ZUORA, you’re guilt of the same thing. Transparent Prices. Transparent API documentation. Transparent Tour. Transparent copy explaining it. You guys are sharks praying on non-technical but important participants in our technology ecosystem. I don’t advise anyone to use these tools. Zuora is mainly built on Paypal, and makes its functionality more complicated than as documented on Paypal’s sites. That’s just off. If I’m going to come to a solution built on top of another solution in order to make that other solution easier, your documentation should appear that way. I haven’t used Zuora obviously, but I’ve skimmed their API docs which you can only get to if you search google for “zuora api”–i.e. there is no links on their site–and they complicate what Paypald does pretty well in the name of allowing big businesses have all this custom logic. My recommendation to peopel about to try out CloudShare or Zuora is to let your CTO make the decision, or get someone that’s done the actual tasks that CloudShare and Zuora are trying to simplify. Companies really offering value don’t need to partition off their technology in private walled gardens anymore. If they really got something innovative and usefull, they’d make it publicly available. These dudes are clearly trying to run a sales-focused business that prays off the stupid.

ANYWAY, IN STARTUP IDEA NEWS: here’s the quick idea: a friggin tool that builds product tours for Web 2.87 Startups. Some of my favorite TOURS as of late are:
https://www.producteev.com/?page=takethetour
http://www.zendesk.com/ (i wrote an article about their product tour yesterday)
http://www.notableapp.com/tour
http://www.episodic.com/quick-tour/

So I know you’re probably thinking: we’ll how many friggin startups are there really and aren’t they better off just making it themselves. Probably, but it’s a better idea than CloudShare:
-easy as hell to make
-definitely unique and not been done
-easy as hell to represent to people through its own tour
-and useful to me since all I do is build startups

The way it would work is you’d simply choose from one of 4-10 templates (a list of templates that would be constantly growing). And then you fill out a few forms, uploading images, and adding text, and voila, it spits u out a zip or automatically ftps it to your site or something nifty for the hell of it. That’s it. It’s kind of like what my homeboy Daniel Blake did with card.ly. That’s a simple tool just to create one-pager buinsess card style websites. It’s a simple play that will get you known a bit in the TechCrunchMeme crowd. And a the very least it will build you contacts. I’m building that shit. Feel free to hit me if you wanna do it with me.

Product Tours are of central importance to my continual web research. The reason is cuz I don’t have all day to analyze new startups, but I have to be sure to catch everything that passes through the Techcrunch pipeline (and straight to my brain stem). So the Tour is where I do this.

Zend Desk gets the Daily Great Tour award cuz what happens when you click the “Begin Tour” button…I’m not even gonna describe it any further. Just go check it out.