11 Questions: Like 10Q but focused on college students. Once each year, on Oct 1 (or any other arbitrary date), subscribers get asked 11 Questions relevant to their future plans and college careers. They have 11 Days to answer after which their answers go into a vault. They can’t edit or look at them again. Until 12 months later. They see their answers to see how things really turned out. And they get the same 10 Questions again. It’s playing with time and time travel and looking back and into the future.
Yelp for Online courses and Moocs This problem is just being noticed. If I want to take an online course on some topic, say “How to fix a car” or “Econometrics” I might find two, 3 or even 10 offerings from different teachers and institutions. How do I know which one to take?
Cryptocurrency Visualizer: An educational or research tool that creates a visualization of how cryptocurrencies in general or bitcoin in particular, work. Showing all the network nodes, simulated users and miners, an animation of all this, including the public ledger. Could serve many purposes, starting with teaching.
IMDB for Books: A service just like IMDB but for books: titles, genres, authors, publishers, lists of reviews, etc. This would be a very cut and dry “databasy” application that organizes information about books in a factual way. It would not contain reviews or any other subjective information, but if anything, point to it.
RegisterBot: Alert me when a course that I want to take is open for registration. Uses the Universities data access API to efficiently monitor and then alert user about course availability. Generalize to other situations when you want to know as soon as something becomes available.
Personal Training Service via Skype: Delivers how-to videos and excercises, a platform for trainers and phys ed teachers and physical therapists to offer their services via skype.
ExcuseMe (mobile app for people in a gathering to allow the participants to react to what is being presented). Related to Classroom clicker, but much simpler.
Yelp for Courses: Crowdsource student ratings of courses. In the simplest example, simply let me list my 3 favorite courses. Or perhaps rate courses that I’ve taken. And then help another student discover great courses in other departments perhaps that they never knew existed. Generalize to help me pick my favorite beer, or my favorite tv show. Instead of ratings, keep it very simple: each user picks their top 3. Generalize further by tying in availability of the course, or whether it counts for your major, or whether it is offered when you need it.
Rember My Name: Use Spaced Repitition to quickly memorize names and faces. This application takes as input a set of snapshots of faces plus the name of the person and it generates a ‘game’ that helps the user quickly memorize names and faces. Good for business people going to an important meeting or (!) professors teaching a new class. You could make the input of the names and faces clever and efficient by intelligently crawing a photo album page like is generated by Latte.
FoodFlix: A service for for restaurants to get professional photos and videos for their establishments in say Tripadvisor or Yelp. The premise is that great images greatly improve the results of listings on sites like Tripadvisor, yet most restaurants don’t know that, don’t care, don’t have the wherewithal or assume that getting good photos is expensive. The concepts would be that the business is around designing and optimizing a real-world process for cheaply making and posting these photos and videos. It also tests and optimizes the style, titling, length, etc of photos and videos for maximum effectiveness for the chosen purpose.
FinancialBot: Approachable way to create stock selection agents which watch for certain patterns in prices and market conditions and do things, most likely send an email. For example: “Alert: Stock INTL price is within 10% of 12 month low.” Allow a normal person to do program trading in a safe way. Possible to have some domain specific language, or an iTunes Smart Playlist kind of user interface to create agents that ‘run in the cloud’ and send emails, or some day actually perform trades.
BarTalk: A short-distance walkie-talkie for use inside a noisy bar. We can talk to each other right across the room. There are many other applications. It’s clearly just a fun toy but it could be very cool. A software-only solution that might work goes as follows: Using a pair of smartphones and bluetooth headsets, the two phones could use low-power bluetooth to transmit voice between the two. If that approach can be made to work technically, then the further details of the user interface are quite soluble.
Giving Portfolio: This app uses publicly available charity ratings databases to design a customized, personal portfolio of giving based on broad categories of causes, funds to be donated, and a time schedule. With this app the donor orders a customized report recommending varying donations to causes over time. For example, I want to support charities with less than 12% overhead, that focus internationally on education and homelessness, and I want to donate $1000 every quarter. This tool will send me an email every three months with specific and up to date recommendations.
Genius Online: Inspired by an Amazon announcement today: Amazon Mayday. This idea is to provide the same kind of “Apple Genius” live support to Mac and Windows users. They pay a subscription fee or a per incident fee and get live video assistance for their basic computer problems. I do this for my mother all the time. And by the way, if someone calls AppleCare to get help, the incident cost is pretty high. This could by concierge-tested very easily.
SpeedSpy: A distributed way to address speeding or unsafe driving on public transportation. Running this app simply captures the location and speed of the vehicle. The app knows the official speed limits for busses, trains, trolleys and captures apparent violations. This data is collated on the server to be used for flagging dangerous drivers, or times of day, or parts of a route.
Internal Social Network: Professor Ben Gomes Casseres is interested in a tool optimized for groups or organizations of 100-1000 people or so. Create a secure internal social network that mimics the best of Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, Reddit, Wordpress and other social media platforms. But this one should be focused on forums, topics, events, resources, and images of interest to the group. Ideally, cloud based and accessible from all devices. One use, for example, would be for internal communication inside Brandeis or a specific program here. But it will compete with open networks that students also use. So, ideally, it is linked to these open networks, filters relevant info from them, or something like that. The business model would probably involve the organization or group leader buying the product, managing access, and doing some monitoring. There are some products on the market that may approximate this, but it is not clear how good they are (e.g. Ning). Corporations often have such internal networks, but they worry more about security than organizations such as universities – for corporate use, a cloud solution is less likely for them.
Curriculous: A teaching and learning tool to allow a teacher to easily create a course web site, including curriculum, lectures, course notes etc. Based on the product with which I made this site. Future would allow each lecture to have a video assoicated with it, allow students to hand in homeworks directly on the site, automatically convert the curriculum into a powerpoint or pdf and many other cool things.
Tweeting Trees: Chris Osgood of City of Boston says: Drought and high heat are two of the major summer stresses for our street trees, and we don’t have the ability to water every tree in the summer when they need it. To encourage residents to help out – to adopt-a-tree – we thought it would be compelling if adopted trees could tweet @ their adopter when thirsty (a.k.a. low moisture levels.)We’ve been looking for a partner who can build something for us to pilot this with.”
Lean Startup Growth Engine: Educational “game/simulator”. A teaching and learning tool. Choose stragegies, set prices, design the product, burn money, earn money, analyze results over time, pivot and either get off the runway or crash.
FlowPlanner: General visual discrete simulations. Professional software product, useful in all kinds of strategic decision making. Visually lay out a ‘network’ with ‘products’ and ‘customers’ flowing through, queueing up, being processed, developing bottlenecks and traffic jams.
LiveClassroom: A teaching and learning tool allowing instant feedback from an audience or classroom regarding a lecture or meeting or event. Members get an email notification that looks like a survey asking about today’s lecture or class. The results of these probes are available as beautiful visualizations which help track the effectiveness and retention and motivation of the audience.
Classroom “clicker” app for smart phone: Create quick surveys and tests, on-the-fly and allow folks in the audience to use their smartphones as a cicker.