Place to Drop Off the Kids

What if there were a convenient place where parents could drop off their kids while they’re in a store — grocery store, wal-mart, at the mall, etc. — where the kids are:

1. entertained
2. supervised (with background checks for employees)
3. safe
4. exposed to educational tools

I’m imagining a place where kids younger than 5 can play with semi-educational toys, kids from 5-8 can do puzzles and board games with each other, and kids 8-12 can surf the Internet (with a very strong filter, of course). You could stockpile the place with DVDs as well and give kids headphones so they can watch their own little movie and it could be stocked with things from PBS.

Then you charge the parents like $15/hr per kid (or some other reasonable figure that makes the financials work) and because the parent is free to get their errands done and it’s very convenient. And to make the parents feel better, their kid is sitting there learning in a safe environment so they can justify the cost to themselves as welll.

I’m betting most of the time you’d just have a single person in the place and you’d only have a handful of kids, so your human costs would be low. At peak hours (which you could gather data on initially) you could staff it with more people. In a big place like a mall you’d get a lot more people of course so you’d have to have more people on hand but you’d make a lot more on volume.

I wonder if you could even demonstrate that having this kind of a store is more likely to bring parents to a particular mall and so you could justify getting free rent from the landlord.

A Thought Experiment: Think Like Benazir Bhutto

The whole assassination situation in Pakistan is really sad and as I thought about it I tried to think like Bhutto and play it out. What would I think about in the months before the assassination if I were her?

My thought on this is that she knew she was going to get killed. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if she said her goodbyes to her children and to her husband and struck a deal with her husband that said, you stay out of the country and take care of the kids after I’m killed. Her father was killed, her brother was killed, she knew if she went back she’d be killed; if not now then after she won the election and became prime minister. And that’s why she left the country in a self imposed exile while her kids were young a decade ago. She was smart enough to not have them lose their mother at a young age, so she raised the kids, got them to be young adults and then went back.

Why go back if you know you’re going to die?

Two reasons:
a) It’s a sure-fire way to become immortalized and deified. Getting killed at the height of your popularity means everyone remembers you that way and everyone starts to inflate your importance because in death they feel the need to honor you. Basically if you die young you become a martyr. I don’t think Lincoln, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., or even Jesus would be as powerful figures as they are if they hadn’t been killed.

b) It’s a sure-fire way to foment revolution in an unstable country. I think she understood that if she were killed off, regardless of who did it, people would blame Musharaff and sometimes all you need is that little bit of a spark in an unstable country to topple the establishment. If you give her the benefit of the doubt and say that she truly wanted democracy, she knew that it wouldn’t happen so long as Musharaff was in control and he was able to keep people relatively happy most of the time. There needed to be some sort of a national or international incident for which he would receive the blame and that would force him from power. I think she thought this was one such incident and given that it was likely to happen, she wasn’t going to stop it from happening. If it was something like, like a nuclear weapon getting into the wrong hands, then that would work too but she figured her assassination may just be enough. Only once he is out of the way could democracy really take root; otherwise he would always get in the way.

This is clearly a sort of messed up way to think about your life. Most normal people wouldn’t be willing to accept death like that but I think she was the type of person to do this. I think most world leaders and politicians are more concerned about their legacy and their impact than with longevity; they wouldn’t pursue power so hungrily if they really cared about being normal and balanced.

To summarize, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to think that she knew she was going to die and understood what that would mean and willingly put herself in that situation. Which, in my opinion, is really courageous and just as diabolical. I’m not suggesting she wanted to die. I’m just suggesting that she ran through this sort of an analysis and concluded that even if she did die, the result would not be the worst possible outcome.

Update: Based on some feedback I wanted to reiterate and clarify that I am not suggesting she set out to martyr herself or willingly die. I’m just asserting that she knew she would likely be killed and in thinking about whether or not it was worth it, this is the analysis I would imagine she went through, with the ultimate conclusion that this would further her cause and likely further her name.

Backing up my (online) self – Online Data Backup – the reverse of what you’d think

This is not about a service that allow you to backup your harddrive online. I want the ability to take my online self, my online “files” and online “harddrive” so to speak, and download it as a backup on to my own harddrive.

Someone should build a lightweight desktop application into which I can put my username and password for Google, Facebook, MySpace, WordPress, Flickr, Digg, etc. and as soon as there some change (as defined by me, the user) it downloads this change onto my harddrive as a backup. This simple app would then save all of my GMail email, all of my Google Docs and Spreadsheets as word docs and excel files, Google Calendar meetings and alerts as iCal data, Google Reader Feeds in xml, all of my friends from Facebook, all of my pictures from Facebook, my pics from Flickr, blog posts from WordPress, etc.

Then if I ever decided to move my data somewhere I could change it into common file formats for other programs and start quickly without losing any history or any data. Or if Google ever banned my account (as they have accidentally for some other people in the recent past) at least I still have all of my data and am not crippled.

I would probably pay for a product like this because the permanent peace of mind is worth $50.

Marvel MMORPG

Marvel should license their brand and all of their superheroes to a video-game company or hire a good video game company to create a massively mult-play online role playing game. World of Warcraft is huge these days and to get into that world you have to learn all of this backstory and character types and blah blah blah. With the Marvel Universe, thanks especially to their movie success in the last 10 years, everyone knows the main characters. The X-men characters, Spiderman characters, Hulk characters, the Avengers, the Fantastic Four…you could be one of those people, customize your character, get level upgrades and special body-armor and things like that for going on quests.

Given their brand names I bet they could get a million people on that thing pretty quickly. I know I would consider that and I really wouldn’t consider World of Warcraft.

Inverse Social Network

In thinking about what I really want out of a social network (that is not currently available), I really want the inverse of what a typical social network currently is.

The State of Today’s Social Networks

Roughly speaking, today’s social networks are all about allowing an individual to share information with the rest of the world (pictures, contact information, blog-like thoughts, etc. ) and communicate with “friends” (or receive communications from friends). Clearly, there are different flavors of these networks — LinkedIn serves a different purpose than Facebook — and so the features they highlight and the usage patterns of these features are going to be different.

What’s the problem and what is missing?

The problem here is that people will automatically filter what they’re willing to share to the lowest common denominator. If you are “friends” with your boss, your mom, and your best friend and you don’t want to share everything with all of them, chances are you’ll pull back and limit what you share. Clearly this is an issue unto itself but I won’t touch that because I think you can get around this with groups and group level privacy settings.

This lowest common denominator effect does highlight something else though, and that is that there is clearly a lot of information missing from someone’s profile. More precisely, all of the information I know about someone else is missing from their profile and in many cases this is the really critical information about someone.

For example, if I know my boss’s kid’s name but he doesn’t want to reveal that for the whole world to see on his LinkedIn profile, I actually have a unique piece of information that is quite valuable. Or, if I have a casual acquaintance who has let me know his hometown but who has not publicly offered this information, again I have some unique knowledge about that person that I may want to remember.

Inverse Social Network

Rather than seeing a page of what someone is willing to share there is a lot of information that I know about people that I would like to merge with the information they’re willing to share. This way what you end up with when you’re looking at a profile page of person A is a complete snapshot of everything you know about that person. With a simple search and tagging feature I think this could be really powerful because I would be able to remember everything I ever knew about someone. If I’m going to have a meeting with a client, I can pull up their page and see everything I know about them. If I’m going to see a friend from out of town that I haven’t seen in 6 months and I have no idea what his brother’s name is, I can look it up.

And I may even want to share what I know with other people who may find it useful. So if I have a group of friends whom I trust, I may want to share information about my boss or one of our mutual friends so that we all have access to the same information. I think this sort of sharing would make people afraid but there isn’t much you can do to stop it in the first place. If I tell my friend what my boss’s kid’s name is and he happens to remember it, that pretty much accomplishes the same thing today.

I could imagine this being integrated with an email client as well so that I can easily reference information about people I’m emailing, and perhaps being a browser plug-in so that the information is available while I’m viewing their facebook profile, myspace profile, or linked-in profile…maybe with some greasemonkey or just a simple window overlay that slides in and out easily with a key combination on the keyboard.

I think this would be a huge win for anyone who has a lot of meetings — namely anyone in the business world.

Who Should Build This?

I think he best candidate is probably LinkedIn. They have the right demographic of users and it would fit in nicely with their existing social network. It would also allow them to move into having more of a browser and desktop presence, and if it gets popular enough on the desktop/browser they would end up with the really interesting side effect of knowing which profiles on different social networks are actually the same people so you’d end up with an uber-graph of people connected to each other.

The other type of company that might benefit from this is a startup, exactly because if they end up with good penetration, they would be able to overlay friendships across different social networks on top of each other and create linkages between different social networks. I don’t know how you would monetize that off the top of my head but it seems like useful data.

So someone please go build it. Thanks.

A high quality news program on the Internet

Someone should put together a good comprehensive summary of the news and post it on YouTube. The problem with network news is that they have to fill it with feel good stuff, celebrity junk, and have commercials that take up 30% of the on-air time.

You could even exploit the long tail and do some fancy personalization if you recorded say 100 short segments that covered the major headlines of the day. You could then have standard transitions that you use between segments that are also pre-recorded. Based on a profile people create you could you could automatically slice together different segments that might be of interest to that user.

You could also have a few “stock” compilations for things like world news, US news, politics, entertainment news, etc. People could just come to these and hit play without having to sign in or save/create a profile.

Why is this better than reading the news? For the same reason that going to a lecture is better than a book. If you can see it AND hear it, it’s far easier to stay engaged and just reading on your own is a lot more effort. There are a lot of people out there who would rather listen and watch the news than read it and have to hunt around for the most relevant stories.

So start simple, do a news recap without all the crap on most news shows, put it on YouTube and get a userbase. Then launch your own site with high quality production and personalization. Done and done.

Ron Paul Doesn’t Believe in Evolution!?!?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zz94-OrnXzE

“It’s a theory, the theory of evolution. And I don’t accept it as a theory.”

Wow. Can all of these people really want to vote for someone who doesn’t believe in evolution?

What blows my mind is that the guy sounds so smart. I’ve heard him taken on Ben Bernake on technical economic theory, and he has an M.D., and he seems like a well reasoned, rational person. Even if someone were to argue that he is suggesting that the origin of life is rooted in some supreme being and not random chance, wouldn’t you think that he would at least say that? Why argue against the theory of evolution and not clarify that you’re talking about the origin of life?

This video just makes him look as loony as the rest of the Republican candidates this election cycle.

One of the few true journalists

Tim Russert is one of the few true journalists left. If you haven’t seen Meet the Press lately, check it out. He goes all out on every candidate that sits down at the table and brings up every topic directly that most journalists are too scared to ask about.

In his interview with Romney (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/10005061#10005061) he asks him about all of the times he’s flip-flopped and shows him taped footage

In his interview with Guiliani (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/10005061#22170363) he asks him about his girlfriend getting private security, his friend Bernie Kerik’s questionable behavior.

Even Sean Hannity says he wouldn’t go on Meet the Press and points out that Russert gets attacked by people both from the left and the right. Ironic because Crooks and Liars attacks him too. (http://www.crooksandliars.com/2007/06/15/hannitys-new-bff-is-tim-russert/)

One Pan Meals

Someone should create a cookbook full of delicious meals that you can make quickly and using only one pan. Cleaning pots and pans is the worst waste of time. I want to dump some stuff into a pan, have it cook, and have me be able to eat it quickly and easily. Maybe even 2 or 3 courses using the same pan where each course takes a few minutes and each subsequent dish builds on the flavors of the last one so I don’t have to clean the pan at all and can just keep going.

Come on Ron Popeil, where are you on this one?