I got this rather random idea today, but it struck me as having a lot of potential, though perhaps its time may have passed.  
Sponsored copy paper for schools.
The idea is pretty much as it sounds – copy paper provided to schools (K-12, community colleges, universities, etc) would have sponsored messages on it, either on [...]

Posted in Ideas 1 Comment »

I’m re-announcing http://ewerl.com here with some new features added. I put together a couple screen shots of the functionality over at the website’s “about” page, but I’ll outline the highlights here:
1. User accounts – a lot of people wanted to be able to log in and keep track of their Ewerls. This [...]

Posted in Ideas, Software, Tools 2 Comments »

I posted over at http://mashable.com/2008/07/22/3-ways-to-make-more-money-blogging/ but wanted to expand on the idea there in more detail.  The mashable article was linked to http://www.centernetworks.com/online-advertising-interaction which has a few more comments on the same topic: Advertising as monetization for blog content.
The author from centernetworks does a reasonable job of pitching his case – the trend, especially in [...]

Posted in Business, Ideas, Software, Web 2 Comments »

I’ve put together a small page with some notes which have helped me during my recent set up of phpUnderControl.  I will probably add more to the list in the coming weeks, but these are a couple stumbling blocks I hit the past few days.  If you’re not using phpUnderControl, you owe it to yourself [...]

Posted in Development, Ideas, Java, PHP, Software, Tools, Web 2 Comments »

TechCrunch has a story on a recently funded Facebook app which, frankly, seems stupid.  Buying and selling ‘friends’ as ‘pets’.  People have already sold me somehow on Facebook, and I just ignore it.  I don’t get it.  I thought MySpace was the place for stupid/flitty ideas, but it seems Facebook is moving in that direction, [...]

Posted in Blogging, Business, Design, Development, Ecommerce, Ideas, Society, Software, Web 2 Comments »

I just read a comment over on a blog at BusinessWeek and it got me to thinking about the car industry. Being from Detroi, I still have some friends there involved in the car industry at the Big Three – Ford, GM and Chrysler.  The Big Three are having their lunch eaten by foreign companies [...]

Posted in Business, Ideas, Society 4 Comments »

Just had an interesting conversation with Morgan from SaysMe.tv, and newly launched… um… service.  I paused there cause I’m not really sure what to call it.  Advertising ASP?  Are ASPs fashionable anymore?  In any event, the service looks very interesting, though limited right now to political fodder due to the primaries and election season.  I [...]

Posted in Business, Ideas, Society, Software No Comments »

Was talking with a friend last week who suggested the idea of voice-base captcha services.  The main idea is that you’d record some basic words up front, then when prompted to say a word or collection of letters to authenticate, you’d say them to the site.  The authentication system would do a voice analysis between [...]

Posted in Ideas 3 Comments »

I’m seeing a large cross section of age groups represented at the MySQL conference.  The typical late teens through mid twenties are here, as expected, but I’m seeing a high number of people who are clearly older than that – many likely mid 40s or higher.  It could just be that database work is typically [...]

Posted in Conferences, Ideas, MySQL, Software, opensource 1 Comment »

Michael Arrington posted a fresh lament about the state of his inbox. He’s got 2400+ emails in his inbox right now, and he will likely nuke them all and start over (yet again) shortly. This got me to thinking (yet again!) about email/spam/inboxes. The article rightly pointed out that right now we [...]

Posted in Design, Ideas, Social, Society, Software, Web 6 Comments »