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Showing posts from May, 2010

Loogle

Loogle is a web service that automatically builds shop sites for anyone on-the-fly. All you need is a  webcam and a browser and you are set to sell anything with a bar code (maybe even without a bar code in the future). Loogle sets up a customizable Amazon-ish type site for you automatically, registers it with search engines and its own product search engine, along with your zip code, so that people can FIND YOU EASILY.  Loogle – what’s in a name How Loogle came about Current development status Public Milestones Loogle – what’s in a name Local Google... Loogle. Ok its a bit obvious and may not be useable for legal reasons but it captures the general idea. Google is great for bringing the world to you but you live in a town somewhere... a place and have to pay the tax of shipping and delivery delay every time you tap into the worldwide marketplace... Loogle is about encouraging local people to let each other know what is handy, nearby to fill your need. Who said the net needs to be ever

The Google/ Copyright conundrum and opportunity

The world is definitely different because of Google. Never before has it been so clearly proven that the ability to find information can be as important as the information itself. Google has got us questioning the horse and the cart illustration. Sometimes it is better to put up with lower quality information when it is soooo much easier to access. Close but not close enough… We have been so enthusiastic about the accessibility to information that Google delivers that it is only now, after years of using Google, that many of us are starting to see clearly that content is king… that still, even in the light of 30 millisecond search results, the thing found remains the draw card not the ability to find . So yes, still, the horse comes before the cart. The next problem is Google’s business model. A model that assumes that horses are a dime a dozen and it’s the cart that has all the value. In this case I have taken a pretty determined position. If content is king, then copyrig

How can you be working on 80 inventions?

A lot of people have asked how I can possibly be working on something like 80 projects and have any hope of getting anything done… … well I can’t! The thing is that being a professional inventor means that your number 1 priority is to follow opportunities as they present themselves and then once their potential is understood, they are prioritized amongst other projects to allow the most fruitful and promising projects to get priority. Sometimes it’s just timing. Timing for the right people to be available to work on the project, or the right resources to be available cheaply to continue experiments. Sometimes it’s money. Another dilemma is prioritization . As an inventor I am constantly losing perspective. The initial buzz of possibly solving a big problem sometimes quickly gets overshadowed by the grind of having to tackle a secondary issue in proving the invention. For example, I am trying to work out how to turn road trains/ trucks into lite rail vehicles. Every person I

A new approach to Business Plans

Seth Godin is one of the guys I follow for consistent gems. I have reworked an article he wrote here: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2010/05/the-modern-business-plan.html with the aim of making it more nuts and bolts-ish for the many people I am trying to help get their inventions and businesses going… What follows is my adaptation of Seth’s basic idea. Normal business plans include terms like “target market” and “resources” where you end up having to learn a myriad business terms just to understand how the document is meant to work. Well Seth’s idea, with my adaption is designed to simplify the business plan format and to focus in the document on key ideas or answers. The proposed business plan includes 5 sections: The way things are What we plan to do about it What we will do if things go sideways The people to get this done The money we will need and how we plan to use it. The way things are section describes the world as it is. Footnote if you want to, but tell me a

Evernote kludge for delegation and business productivity

If you are lucky enough to have the circumstances where you have a support team, one of the best things I have ever come across is a kludge of using one shared Evernote account for your whole team where the team coordinator becomes the recipient of all incoming Evernote notes and acts as a triage point to then on send the messages or notes for execution by other team mates. Here are some situations: I have just walked out of a meeting and want to send a thank you to the people I have just visited. I open Evernote on my iPhone, go to voice record and start recording the following… “Seb (my assistant), please send the following voice message as an attachment to <people I just visited>, thanks mate.” and hit the save button. Then I record a second message “Hi <so and so> thanks for having me today. I will follow up with etc etc etc”… and hit the save button. Seb receives both messages as soon as they are automatically uploaded and he processes them for me

RailTruckr.com – turning trucks into mini rail-cars

“Back in Dec of 2006 I was intrigued by a story about a bus that could run on rail way tracks . Ever since that day I've been chewing over how to make something that could retrofit existing trucks and vehicles… maybe there is a way?” The other night I was driving back from a meeting past truck after truck on the Pacific Highway heading south on their night run. Many of them driving within a few dozen feet of each other to benefit from the slip stream of the truck in front… efficient but deadly. I started toying with chaining trucks together which in turn led to a revisit of the idea I say the Japanese did 4 years ago. It’s been pretty busy around here but despite this and a couple of 3am nights there is a strong foundation of an idea for a system of rail cradles that attach to trucks just for the trip. There is definitely one or two patents here so please be patient with me to get them filed so I can give you more detail but maybe, just maybe this idea is goer. Pi

Loogle - local barcode-driven shop site for everything everywhere

“This idea has been percolating for a long time ever since I wanted to involve Ernst & Young in this kind of thing back in 1998.       The driving issue for me is to make the web more relevant locally but even easier to use than great sites like Craigslist .” Note: Loogle is a working title and may be changed before release. Loogle is a web service that automatically builds shop sites for anyone on-the-fly. All you need is a  webcam and a browser and you are set to sell anything with a bar code (maybe even without a bar code in the future). Loogle sets up a customizable Amazon-ish type site for you automatically, registers it with search engines and its own product search engine, along with your zip code, so that people can FIND YOU EASILY. Loogle is Google product searching... but local. It’s Craigslist, Gumtree and Ebay without having to write your advert or having to ad photos.  It's for all those people out there who have stuff to sell or want to buy st

Why I need more than dropbox…

Dropbox is great for sharing… and for having the same thing on the 3-4 machines I use as well as sharing with all the teams I work with from Rentacoders thru to internal project managers and my family. But there is a lot of stuff I don’t want duplicated on all these machines. Even for my team, there is stuff that is actively in use but there is Terabytes of stuff that does not need to be  online on all the machine all the time. My brother Sky would answer the problem quickly by setting up a server and some FTP software but even server beach with 160GB is getting very costly at $75 per month. So what is the answer? A local server sounds logical. Two TB drives connected to my home server computer sounds great, but how do I share with everyone I work with? Ok, so I set up FTP software, give the server a static IP and forward all incoming requests for FTP to that server… this is getting warmer and might even do. But wouldn’t it be great if…. I ran some software on my home
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