Putting it as simply as possible, YouTube could easily be replaced.  They are geared around the “long tail.”  There are millions of videos stored and streamed that get minimal views and offer an overall negative revenue.  At the other end are a few videos that get millions of views and get YouTube all the revenue they get.  Meanwhile these earners for YouTube make insignificant percentages and many of the top artists on YouTube are not happy with their small cut.  Add to that, YouTube is behaving deviantly when they hide the feedback on videos from you until you open the video, (after playing their ad).

Don’t hate them.  Google is now at the helm, cracking the whip of profit.  The amount of storage and infrastructure to support everyone’s videos is beyond comprehension, and I still don’t think YouTube as a separate entity has yet to turn profit.

3 steps to replace them

1. Create a better, more honest interface that is merit driven, and actually driving the viewer toward better videos. (There’s more money there in the long run)

2. Provide the reward – and make sure everybody knows.  Pay out twice of what YouTube does, and give them a real slap to the face.

3. Get rid of the tail by taking care of the head.  Each minute of a video has to have a certain ratio of revenue return.  Videos that receive less than (lets say)1000 views are of no benefit.  The best way to set this up will be to piggyback YouTube.  If you have a group af videos on YouTube that average over 1000 views each, then you get in free.  WELCOME!  If not, you pay a fee and enter a trial period.  Can’t generate the views needed, and you’re out. If your thought right there is, “wait!  That’s not right!  That’s not fair!”  You’re right.  It’s not.  But here is the fact.  The fact is that we human beings have only a certain amount of time in a given day to take in content.  Year’s worth of video get uploaded to YouTube everyday.  Similarly, in music, there are millions of songs out there.  iHeart Radio brags in their advertisements to give you access to 14 million songs.  Well, at 4 minutes a song that’s 2500 years of music.  Do you want to go through it all?  You can’t!  The filter is the most important thing today. YouTube has no filter other than pushing you towards the revenue stream.   So yes, I say make it exclusive.  Viewers will know that the product here is pre-filtered and of a higher quality.  In keeping with that, you shut down the piracy.  The official video gets the plays, and only covers or remixes, or live versions can be listed alongside.  Get in good favor with content creators.  A beautiful touch would be offering a higher rate of revenue for those who pull their YouTube content in the move to this “NewTube”.

You create a better environment that has scarcity for both the content creator and the viewer.  What will happen? YouTube will have to cut the tail.  That will be the final straw.  They then become the MySpace of video.

Please see idea 45.  It talks about the industry of scanners for people to quickly scan through receipts, business cards, and various documents.  The issue I have run into is that the receipts occasionally have a crinkle or some other defect on the paper, and the software may screw up a couple numbers.  No bueno!  It does surely suck, knowing that you should go in and verify all the numbers.  Slows the process right up, and it’s another thing to worry about.

Enter today’s solution.  There is a bar code on most of your receipts today.  If not there is a transaction time and various data (including the fact that it’s YOUR receipt) on the receipt that identifies exactly what transaction it is.  My solution would be a feature available from your financial institution that would send your phone a list of all transactions in a particular format, and the software of your phone, that would put that list against the receipts scanned and in an instant be able to verify which transactions were scanned and saved correctly, and it could then tell you which ones had errors, and it could fix them.  It could then give you alerts on whatever it didn’t have a scanned image for.  Perhaps it could say,” you have no receipt image for the 175.00 in tools you purchased at the Home Depot on June 11.”  The second part of the app would be the ability to have an account with perhaps the Home Depot, who could provide you with data themselves, such as a check of the receipt for transactions you may have paid for in cash.  Just another way to provide you with what you want, (verification) and they would be more than willing to track such nonsense, since they want nothing more than tracking your shopping habits.  Obviously, if I was to be involved, it would be something you could set up and handle with anonymity.

Bam, sometimes the gems come long after I SHOULD be in bed.  🙂

So there is a market for personal receipt and document scanners of the quick(er), feed in variety.  Neat Receipts is an awesome product that combines a small (non-flatbed) scanner with character recognition software and quickly turns your documents into spreadsheet data and retains a PDF backup.  Lately, I have done a lot of scanning and faxing right off of my smart phone.  With the right lighting and decent enhancements, text can be quickly taken off of the page and the finished result at the email or fax machine of the recipient is more than satisfactory.

So here I sit at the edge of my bed, looking to my desk.  Under the desk is a large amount of paperwork, and frankly I haven’t had the time to sit and scan everything into the scanner.  It is fast, but not that fast.  It’s hours of loading, and I’m just a small scale contractor currently.

The solution, as I envision it, is to place my cell phone on a small stand.  A very thin universal, clamp type holder that basically just holds the phone still, facing and about 12 inches from the surface of any desk.  It would be an arm, and some manner of a base, like a long necked version of one of those desk lamps with the flexible neck, but instead of a lamp at the top, there would be a cell phone clamp.  (If you can’t tell yet, I am writing this as the details come to me)  Why get rid of the lamp, lol.  Let’s put an LED lamp on each side of where the cell phone will reside (I’ll put a drawing up soon).  That way you could create a better environment of proper lighting for the “scanning.”

Now, the character recognition is rather demanding, and will slow down the process, so I think it should be done in stages.  You will want to be in capturing mode, and only do the OCR (optical character recognition) mode after you stop taking pictures.  The software could be set up to automatically just jump in and begin the conversion whenever you pause taking shots or it could wait for your go ahead.  So you would set the cell phone into the holder, position a pre-printed calibration sheet on the desk and allow the phone to calibrate itself for the light and focus.

As soon as the phone is ready you could begin.  The thing to understand is that the camera in your cell phone can be zoomed way outside the edges of the document and still have more than enough detail to fully recognize the text of even the smallest text on a sheet of paper.  This means that the document you are scanning does not have to be oriented or aligned in any particular way, as long as it is within the field of view of the camera.  This means speed.  A speed currently unrealized.

Using a finger anywhere on the page, all you would need to do is pass the paper through the field of view.  The camera would be set in focus and would automatically looking for geometric shapes to come into the field of view.  Upon recognition of the shape, and as it passed a particular threshold of the camera’s view, the camera would snap a single shot, quickly saving it to the camera’s memory.  Literally faster than a page a second, (limited only by what the camera could do) this process could be repeated through a stack of papers.

Upon completion of a group of documents, the second phase of the process would kick in, and the software would one at a time, take each picture and highlight the geometric shape (document) within it.  It would then crop out everything except the geometric shape, and lastly it would recognize the finger used to slide the paper across the field of view, and it would white it out from the image.  These images would be saved as PDF.

The third phase would kick in, and the OCR process would take all the data from the documents.  If it determines it is a receipt, it will save the data in an excel sheet.  If it determines it is a page from a book, then a rich text file will be generated.  So now you have a original source document PDF, and you also have a file with the data derived from the source.

Doing the process in batches and phases as I describe, would allow you to process a large group of files quickly.  It causes my mind to take it to the next step, which would be, camera permitting, a rapid version of the above.  Perhaps, a book reader, or movie speed (many frames per second)  Make no mistake, everything mentioned above is individually available right now.  I’m just suggesting we tie it all together.

This idea has been pulled and will be pitched at the upcoming Syracuse Startup Weekend.  It has been saved and will be published after the event.  🙂

Before I even begin, I will make very clear I am wildly proud and happy with my teenage son.  Slacking is something that I’m sure every father notices at some point in their children and feels an obvious obligation to reduce.  Yelling directly in one’s face or beating with a stick may not be the only way to adequately get the point across to a teenager, as natural as it may feel.  I think the issue with any slacking is the relationship of current video games or television with a future of reduced wages and low standard of living.  Obviously they are thinking about their future, just not for than 5-10 minutes from the present.  Coincidentally, they are easily prone to distraction in many forms.  One of those forms commonly being an app on their ipod or phone.

The idea for today is a simple app that would paint a future picture of the young person and give them a no nonsense, immediately engaging understanding of what their current behavior will more than likely bring them, down the road.  10 year increments could be used, going all the way to expected retirement.   It would be an educational tool disguised as a game.  Upon starting the app, the user, er – slacker, would be guided through a quick process of entering their name and location, and taking a quick picture of themselves, which would be added to the app for effect, and a thumbnail of their face would be used throughout the process.  They would be asked some basic but important questions, like “what would your choice of automobile be, if you could pick between the following 5 choices – truck, motorcycle, vintage car, sports car, foreign sedan”  These type of questions would form a solid connection to the teen as they use the app and it caters the result to them, (more on this below).   Some of the most important questions would be, “What kinds of grades do you have?”
“What college do you intend to go to and for what occupation?”
“Do you intend to get married?”
“How many children do you see yourself having?”

The app would then allow them to advance 10, 20, 30 years into the future, and would accurately give their expected standard of living in terms a teen could appreciate.  Like 3 most likely cars they are driving (based on the initial input of their taste), where they are eating when they go out to dinner, or perhaps the quantity of times they can expect doing extra things they love, like going to a pro football game or stadium concert. Aging software would modify their face, on their thumbnail, just making the result more real for them.  The key with the app is that it could do all the math in the background.  Telling a teen they will make 14 dollars an hour means nothing to them.  Telling a teen they will more than likely be driving a used economy car, or be living in a one bedroom apartment in a crummy area of town and actually using real locations that they know, that will have a much bigger effect.  You could even throw in options asking if they plan using recreational drugs, or any other question that could engage their current thinking and apply it to their future selves. The statistics are out there.  The math can be applied.  The app is not giving an exact bottom line, it is just showing the difference between this path and the other.  Will it cause a mass exodus of teens from the video games to the public library, not likely, but if enough kids load it up on their device and talk about it, the consciousness WILL increase and that means that lives WILL be changed.

I will contribute 500.00 towards making this a reality.

Warning – This is going to be a bit on the techy side, but as always I will try to simplify.  That being said, the method/solution I’m going to describe today is far reaching and doesn’t just apply to search engines. 

Search engines, like Google, use a system of values / algorithms to arrive at their site ranking.  This varies from search engine to search engine, but they all are similar.  They prioritize certain criteria, such as links to a site, or links from a site to another site, or any other readily available information about that site.  Where they differ is their prioritizing of one of those criteria over the other.  Now, that system is designed to go out to an internet that is just functioning as it should be, and gather up information so that the calculations Bing or Google are making are as accurate as possible.  Unfortunately, what happens is that certain folks out there are more concerned with their ranking on the search engines than they are with providing valuable content, and they study the system, and simply modify their site to maximize the value of the site on the search engine’s criteria.  The result is that the folks that are just worrying about the best content possible are beaten out in ranking by others who are basically just cheating. 

Now the solution is fairly simple.  I will use the analogy of a teacher (the search engine) and some students (various websites needing to be graded on their quality)  If you were a teacher in a classroom of 10,000 students that you couldn’t really regulate (like the web), you would want to reduce cheating on your tests, so that you could accurately grade a students progress.   Obviously cheaters would have an easy time of it.  Answer keys would pop up and be easily passed around.  What you COULD do, is mix up the questions – to a degree that answers couldn’t be easily shared.  You may not eliminate cheating completely, but you would reduce it significantly, and that’s the point of the excercise. 

So what should a search engine do?  Or perhaps what should any online entity that runs a standardized test or study of a large community of users?   They should mix up the questions.  Google and Bing have multiple data streams coming in.  Much of it is related.  I suggest that while the result may not be exactly the same by using various methods and measures, there is enough of a definite relationship between the data sources and measurement methods as a whole, that a search engine could continuously switch what they were measuring at some regular interval, and greatly reduce the effect of cheating as a whole.  They wouldn’t have to switch up every measurement for every site, just some of the sites, enough to confuse the observer as to what the heck was going on.  Then, within the program at the core of the search engine, the data could be compared and related back to a standard scale similar to what they were using in the first place, without switching things around.  For instance, for a football team to win against another team, there are more points scored by one team than the other.  There are a host of statistics included in that game.  If it’s a complete blowout, then all the stats will be in favor of one team.  If it’s close, ther may be some stats in favor of one or the other, but as a rule, the winning team will usually have the better stats overall.   You can’t say that the team with the most sacks wins, or that the team that had the least amount of interceptions won, but when you add those and other statistics together, and compare it with a history of the many games that came before, you could more than likely tell with great accuracy, who won the game, without needing to know what the score was. 

As I say, this applies to all online measurements of peoples response and opinion.  You design these things to be as simple as possible, and they usually would be very effective, if not for the folks that figure out how you are measuring, and cheat their way to the top. 

I wanted something a bit silly for today, and how timely with elections coming within the week.  It’s a simple idea, and before I even get into the ramifications of politics or decency, just know how my mind works.  If you would call me a name to mock me, I’m the kind of guy who would use that name myself and by doing so reduce the power it gives you.  That being said, this came to me literally whilst dipping a tea bag into a cup of hot water.  I was dropping the bag in and out of the water, and in only moments thought to myself, “man, if they had a little wind up device that you could attach the tea bag string to, and it would just go up and down slightly for a minute… it would be quite helpful.

Then it hit me.  A plastic man, smaller than a GI Joe doll, with some manner of slots in his feet so that he could be set firmly right on the ring of a mug or glass.  He would be squatting down, facing away from the beverage.  In his back would be an indentation just big enough that a tea bag string would be able to rest against,  His left and right hands would be molded together, near the right shoulder, with the hands open slightly and a little space between them  This would allow you to quickly fasten and unfasten a tea bag string in place over his shoulder.  You would set him on the rim of your glass, drop the tea bag in the water just behind him, bringing the string up his back and draw the excess over his shoulder, cinching it in place.  A few turns of the little wind up mechanism, and he suddenly comes to life, squatting down and raising up, down and up, down and up, raising the tea bag in and out of the water.

Now before anyone gets all crazy and offended.  There is nothing indecent about the bag or it’s action.  It is tea.  It is anatomically equivalent to a man putting a large sack over his back, holding the drawstrings and dipping the thing into a nearby pond.  If it upsets you, that’s not on me.  What is on me if anything is bringing some legitimacy to what is indeed a foul concept, that is now associated with a political group.  Now whether you agree or not with that group doesn’t really matter.  The Boston tea party was a tremendous moment in our history and it should be celebrated.

The genius of my idea is that it could truly be appreciated in all households.  The liberals will love it for the bashing of the “teabaggers!”  The conservatives will love it for the completely decent depiction of tea being spent, or perhaps the demonstration that they embrace the term “teabagger” in spite of the mockery.  I don’t care what side you’re on, just enjoy the benefit of the little soldier handling the business for you.