When it comes to travel, maybe you are on a vacation or just on a business trip, we are always out to find some adventure, something that is far from the norm, something new. For you to get the best experience from a place, then you need to have everything planned out quite well. It is at this point that many people go wrong and eventually wind up not enjoying their visit as much as they should. With getyourguide.com, you can get all that you need online. This means that you will not only find an experienced guides to show you all the exciting places in the area, but you will also get the best guide who knows the do’s and don’ts in the place.

It does not mean that you will only be getting a guide to guide you around the place of visit; you will also be able to book for tours, attractions, and even activities. This is quite a great idea. To be able to complete all your booking in one site is amazing. If you are a constant traveller, you do know how hard it is to have everything that you want planned out for you in advance.

Let’s say you are going to Kenya on your vacation, all that you will need to do is to log onto getyourguide.com and you will be able to book for everything you need. You can book a camel ride, you can also book a visit to the Maasai Mara, and you can also book yourself a stay in one of the exquisite hotels in the country.

Through getyourguide.com, travel has been made hassle free at pretty favourable prices. With getyourguide.com you will get the best deal for the best experience. This is because getyourguide.com works with local travel companies who will be out to make sure that you get to experience all that your place of visit has to offer. If you would love to visit Europe, North America, Asia, Africa, Oceania or even south America, all you need to do is to log into getyourguide.com and all your needs will be addressed. By getting rid of all the intermediaries, you will be sure to get the best price, guaranteed.

Founded by Johannes Reck and Pascal Mathis, what getyourguide.com has to offer is quite unique to the market as it works with local providers so that you can get the best experience. This goes beyond what we are usually used to. We are usually used to individual providers providing booking for their services online, with getyourguide.com; you get everything in one place. If you would love a spa treatment during your visit and some rock climbing at the same place of visit, getyourguide.com will help you make all the arrangements with the best providers around. All you need to worry about is the important stuff; having the time of your life. If you are out to find the perfect visit, where you practically have everything worked out for you then Johannes and Pascal have it done for you through getyourguide.com.

As for my personal opinion on the whole idea, I must admit that I love the idea. Too many times we find our holidays and vacations getting all messy due to some few mishaps here and there, which are all as a result of not finding the right provider for the service you want. Previously all we had were many providers from different parts of the world that offered online booking, now with getyourguide.com; you will get all that you need in one site. The one thing that really intrigued me is a provision that they have. It states that if you happen to find your booked tours at a lower price elsewhere, they will make sure that they refund you the difference. This will be done without any questions. I guess that getyourguide.com is what we have all been looking forward to when it comes to having a great experience while travelling to exotic places all over the world. I sure know what to do the next time I want to visit the pyramids to get the best experience.

In conclusion, getyourguide.com is for sure a great idea. The one thing that we can expect from getyourguide.com is more growth in terms of service. This only means that we will be seeing even much better deals than the ones that we currently have. If you do love travelling then getyourguide.com will let you enjoy your travel with all your needs being addressed no matter how diverse they may be.

Ever been caught in a dilemma and wished a friend or relative was close by so they could give you advice on which is the best decision? Now, in certain circumstances, you would need only call them up and explain what the issue is and they will understand well enough to give you the appropriate pointers. But at other times, this is just not practically possible.

A good case in point is when you are out shopping and cannot decide between two floor tile designs. At such times, you cannot comprehensively describe each option to them over the phone in a way that they will fully understand.

Introducing Swatable.com – the new online platform for remotely roping in your friends and family to help you make an informed decision when choosing between two options. The process is relatively straightforward. You identify the two items you need help in making a decision on. Next, use your iPhone to take a photo of the two objects which you would then upload to Swayable with a description of each. Alternatively you can search for images of the two objects online.

The link to the ‘Swayable’ is then distributed to your circle of friends and relatives on Facebook, Twitter or on email. Each person would vote on either one of the two items depending on the one they prefer. Real time percentages on the Swayable app representing the proportion of your social connections that voted for each alternative will be available.

You can then choose to either go with the majority vote or make a contrary decision knowing full well that it might not necessarily have the approval of most of your friends and family. Either way, you will be certain that you got advice that was based on an accurate description of your options thanks to the images.

Swayable.com is a fun and practical tool. But it is not the first online tool to employ group opinion and decision making. Some earlier sites though targeting different niches from Swayable include AmIHot.com, RateMyFace and probably the most famous, HotOrNot. That the Swayable iPhone app is free is a positive and removes one major impediment from the application’s future growth.

There is currently an app for the iPhone. But whereas the iPhone still commands a substantial share in the smart phone market, Android phones are projected to be the most dominant smart phone operating system by the end of 2011. A version for Android phones would be a great way to tap into that fast growing segment.

Related articles

• How to Make a Decision with Swayable (lockergnome.com)
• A new kind of “Hot or Not:” Swayable (businessinsider.com)
• A new kind of “Hot or Not:” Swayable (scobleizer.com)
• Need A Quick Opinion From Your Friends? Try Swayable (readwriteweb.com)
• Swayable: Social Decision Making With Your Friends Help (blogherald.com)

Do you remember that time you went to a party and the DJs seemed completely disconnected from their audience in the sense that they just could not find the music that struck the right chord? This can be a source of great frustration not just for you as an attendee of the party but for the DJs too.

Actually, look at things from the DJs perspective – you have tens, hundreds or even thousands of people in front of you looking to have a good time and you have to find the music that will connect with most if not all of them – tough to say the least.

Finding music that will appeal to everybody is virtually impossible. Music tastes are almost like fingerprints – no two people have an absolute identical music taste. And it looks like one person, Ben Gleitzman, wants to take the literal comparison of unique physical attributes and unique music tastes a step further.

Introducing Automatic DJ – a system that can decipher the kind of music you like simply by scanning your face. How is that for intuition! Sounds outlandish? Not quite. The ‘intuition’ is actually backed by a fairly logical process – unsurprisingly, the internet is involved.

Automatic DJ uses a special iSight camera that captures an image of your face and then runs it through a recently added feature on Facebook – face recognition. With more than 700 million active user accounts, there is a strong chance that the person whose face is scanned by Automatic DJ will already have a Facebook profile.

The system then looks at the music preferences as outlined on the person’s Facebook profile and then creates and plays the appropriate music. In effect, the songs are automatically selected for you hence the name Automatic DJ. You do not need to say a thing. The application’s owners have gone ahead and made the source code public so that other programmers may customize and improve the software even further.

Automatic DJ is no doubt an interesting and fun application. It might not have everything going for it though in the long run.

First, Facebook has already come under fire for creating a database of Facebook user images that can be deciphered by image recognition software without obtaining the express permission of users. Whether this functionality will continue to be available is not clear. And even if it will be, many users will squirm at their data being that easily traceable. Since Automatic DJ relies on Facebook’s image recognition facility, this could end up being its waterloo.

The second shortcoming is that music preferences on Facebook are not completely streamlined neither are they wholly representative of all the music genres. And just because someone indicates they like reggae music for instance does not mean that they enjoy music by all reggae artists.

Related articles

• Automatic DJ – Scans Your Face And Creates A Personalized Playlist (smartideabox.com)
• HOW TO: Promote Your Band With Turntable.fm (mashable.com)
• Griffin’s DJ Cable Makes iPad DJing Significantly Easier [Music] (gizmodo.com)
• Diy Dj (wonderfulweddingsforless.wordpress.com)
• Nerdy DJ Turntable Web App Kind of Rocks [Music] (gizmodo.com)

Dating can be and should be fun. But conditions are not always conducive to help us meet the right person at the right place at the right time. And many singles still squirm at the thought of registering on a singles website so they can be matched with someone they like.

Such fears are well founded since just because two people claim to like travelling does not mean they both necessarily like the same thing.

How about a faster and more real way to catch a date with someone whom you can indeed tell that you share the same interests? Think if it as speed dating but with none of the pressure and pre-arranged meetings. That in a sense is Mojomapp.com for you.

Launched in San Francisco, Mojomapp.com is a smart phone app that simply shows users exactly where to locate singles in different recreational places in the city. Mojomapp.com even shows the concentration of each gender at that location.

Unlike dating sites that ask for so much information that it often feels intrusive, Mojomapp.com keeps things simple and discreet. Each user need only indicate their gender upon logging in before they proceed to choose their gender of interest.

It is this sum total of ‘anonymous’ logins that allow the app to calculate and show the gender distribution of single people in a given area. Simple colored icons are used to distinguish between male and female singles.

Since gender alone may not be pointer to each person’s sexual orientation, Mojomapp.com uses the information that each user provides to indicate the orientation of each person in a given site. This reduces the likelihood of awkward moments where one is approached by someone who is not compatible with their sexual orientation.

Armed with this wealth of real time information, all you would then need to do is walk into a place frequented by the singles you prefer. Then, find ways of breaking the ice knowing full well that you have a higher chance of meeting someone with whom you share some common interests.

Users of Mojomapp.com can use the app to chat anonymously with an interesting date before they move on to a face to face conversation.

To attract more users, Mojomapp.com is currently free but it is likely to start levying a fee once it has sufficiently caught on in the market. Dating is meant to be fun and it is not improbable for Mojomapp.com to create a buzz in the singles crowd.

What might give some cold feet is just how much anonymity can Mojomapp.com give you if you are say, in a restaurant where your fiddling with your phone might quickly give your (at least facial) identity away.

Related articles

• Big Buy: IAC’s Match.com Wants To Acquire European Online Dating Site Meetic (techcrunch.com)
• Six Reasons To Rethink Your Online Dating Site (businessinsider.com)
• Meet Hitchie: speed dating for business contacts [Video Interview] #TNW2011 (thenextweb.com)
• Get Daily Dates Instead of Daily Deals With InboxCupid (mashable.com)

Car sharing is a concept that has been explored in many different ways. The issue of congestion and the high ration of car per inhabitant keeps on increasing. Most cars are designed to transport 5 people, but most of the time they hardly occupied by more than 2 people.

Most concept of car-sharing up to date requires booking your car in advance and having a limited amount of choice or on the other hand they embrace the concept of hitchhiking trying to fill cars to their full capacity.

GetAround.com is bringing car-sharing to the social web. We all know the success of such companies like Zilok.com in france for exemple which focus in facilitating rentals between individuals. GetAround.com is focused on making car rentals as faster and easier than ever before. By Creating in intuitive platform that enables individuals to easily register their cars making them available to potential costumers. Basically they call themselves a a peer-to-peer car sharing service. You are going to actually rent a car from someone that lives near you, or rent your car out to someone in your area.

They claim the rental process takes around 60 seconds! They also make sur to provide legal backup for both parties with an  Insurance coverage that  includes liability, collision, property damage, and uninsured motorist protection. Their process can be completed with simple iphone no paperwork needed!

This car rental market is dominated by big players such as Zipcar but founders are confident that their innovation will help them to quickly penetrate the market. They’ve been awarded the Most Disruptive Startup at  this years TechCrunch’s Disrupt Conference 2011. Here’s is one of the stats that makes this company so disruptive, 2 days after their official launch they already had 1600 cars available for sharing – that is 20% of ZipCar’s market acquired in a single day!

They also offer devices that you can plug in your car enables smartphone holders to directly access the car without having to pick up the keys, just like state of the art rental companies. They however hold a totally different position by only playing the role of the faciliter for peer-to-peer rentals taking a percentage on the transaction. On the website they claim that lenders can make up to 350 dollars a months by lending their car around 15 hours per week! I guess the only downside of the service is that you will have to return the car to it’s initial location, You wont be able to drop it in Las Vegas if you came from San Francisco.

I’m curious to see how things will evolve they’re in private beta at the moment but have made an impressive buzz with this award from Techcrunch.

Related articles

• Car-sharing service RelayRides raises $5.1M from Google Ventures (venturebeat.com)
• Interview with GetAround: Revving up car sharing with an awesome app (thenextweb.com)
• Getaround Signed Up 1,600 Cars In A Day; That’s 20 Percent Of Zipcar’s Fleet (techcrunch.com)
• Startup Turns Anyone’s Car Into Part Of A Zipcar-Like Fleet (mashable.com)
• Getaround app takes car sharing peer-to-peer on the iPhone (tuaw.com)

“From Google to Social Bookmarking”

The worldwide web is the richest and most complete source of data ever built by human kind. Anyone can research, learn or sell almost anything but that is the case if they can actually find what they are looking for. At first, the answer came from a small start up called Google, which grew to be amongst the largest tech firms in the world. If you knew exactly what you were looking for then Google was the perfect solution, in the matter of seconds you could reach your content.

The web grew to become even larger; Along with Google which became even more efficient with better algorithms, localized search, Maps and so on. But there is one thing that Google didn’t manage or try to achieve: “Recommendations”. Some might argue that Google’s Adwords is somewhat links to the recommendation business, but at the end there it isn’t a breakthrough technology. Companies out there all know the value of online recommendations especially when focusing on online businesses, we saw Amazon & Netflix spend millions to develop their in-house recommendation systems.

Those recommendation systems are doing the job but they are very limited. Limited by the fact that they were designed for a specific domain and are mostly based on simple algorithms or on other user’s behaviors. In recent years, the importance of social networks became a major part of the web , with this phenomenon social recommendations emerged. Users have now access to perfect tools to communicate therefore they are able to share content with their peers easily.

This is when everyone realized the potential of social bookmarking. Forms of social bookmarking existed since 1996 but it’s only around 2003 with Del.icio.us that it took of. People used it to bookmark their personal interests while surfing on the web. But is only 4 years later that users actually started sharing content, with the appearance of Digg.com and the Facebook share feature (2005 ).

This phenomenon became huge and other major player like Stumblupon.com, Reddit or even twitter took part in this craze. What is revolutionary about this is that real users are actually indexing content that they feel has value. Thus Opening new doors on how to find precious content amongst the “junk”.
History of Hunch: “The Decision Making Engine”

Hunch emerged from an initial idea from a Women entrepreneur Caterina Fake. She was previously known for being the Co-creator of Flickr.com along with Stewart Butterfield in 2004, which was later sold to Yahoo in 2005 for 35 million dollars . She is one of the first to use the notion of “user generated content” publicly, she is passionate by the fact the individuals can create amazing content when put into a community.

The idea of Hunch came on the basis that decision-making is difficult. Sometimes the simplest questions are hard to answer. Here are examples of questions than Hunch aims to answer for you: “What should I be for Halloween? Do I need a Porsche? Does my hipster facial hair make me look stupid? Is Phoenix a good place to retire? Whom should I vote for? What cologne should I buy?” . Before Hunch other antic techniques were used for this matter like Coin-flipping, Rock-Paper-Scissors or maybe asking your girlfriend.

Hunch aims be the best ever decision making tool customized specially for each user. Of course it’s not going to tell how to run your business or other very complex questions. But everyday questions that might not be bothered to think about or maybe decisions we don’t attached to much importance too.

At this point the whole Hunch was trying to map users taste based on series of random questions in order to create a “Taste Profile”. Those questions are called “THAYs” which translates to “tell hunch about you”. Here is a sample of these “THAYs” :

• Where do you live?
• Would you setup a new home theater on your own?
• Which fries would you prefer to munch?
• Alien abductions are they real or fake?
• Are you a mac person or a pc person?
• Do you generally prefer your sandwiches to be cut vertically or diagonally?
• Which lettuce would you usually prefer on a salad?
• Do you like to dance?

By analyzing all those answers, linking them together and comparing them to other users hunch is able to link tastes and personalities that no one ever thought about before. The second “Layer” used by hunch where simple ratings on different type of objects, actions, thoughts enabling yet another range or correlation and associations.

For example when looking and political ideologies and food preferences: “Conservatives like meat, comfort foods, cheeseburgers, deep dish pizza, and wooden, country-style kitchens. Liberals are vegetarian brie-lovers who enjoy wine, international food, and sleek, stainless steel-style kitchens.”

Hunch Now: “From Social Bookmarking to Indexing You”

The current online trends provide the perfect environment to study people’s interests and personalities. With the growing capacity of channels to rate and share media Hunch is able to add more “layer” to its recommendation system.

Towards the end of 2010 Hunch had to take a different direction. It had to move away from being a simple decision engine to focus on providing personalized content recommendations powered by behavioral data. This change of strategy is logical as companies targeting behavioral data start make real sense for big businesses , as they seen to become a very valuable tool to increase sales.

The Hunch Taste Graph

Hunch incredible knowledge on users taste already used the opportunity to merge this date with “Public Social Data”. This data can be found in forms such as the Facebook like or share or shared links on twitter. So much data is available in the social cloud and hunch is capable of giving it some structure. A localized layer can also be added with the emergence of Geo-localized data from “check-ins”.

Check-ins are basically people notifying where they are and what they are doing there. Platforms like Gowalla or Foursquare, which is set to reach 10 millions users in the coming months , are growing in popularity. This trend is highlighted with the recent launch of the “Facebook Places” feature .

Monetization:

Hunch’s Taste graph has great value but it has to find ways to monetize this rich data. Businesses need to able to the added value of using such a service. The Business Model can be separated in two; revenues from the actual Hunch.com website and the revenue linked to the API.

The website is the primary distribution channels with an average of unique 30’000 visitors per day . Some of the content on hunch are products such as dvds, books or restaurants. Using affiliate programs with Amazon or Barnes & Noble is the first and most logical way of generating benefits. The better Hunch gets in those fields the higher the probability of users shopping through those links.

Furthermore, with the introduction of company profiles hunch encourages users to rate and recommend products also making it easier for companies to publish on the platform. Those companies are considered as individuals and will be pictured on the same level as a individual user in Taste Graph. Engaging companies to participate will be key for hunch in the near future.

The other possible revenue channel for hunch is though its API to enable developers to benefit from those recommendations in their applications. Would benefit large or independent online stores, they could increase average checks by recommending better content. Hunch can either sign large deals with heavy users or find a system to charge a percentage for each recommendation converted into a sale.
Funding and Value:

Today it difficult to estimate Hunch.com’s real value if we look at their funding history we can see that the change of direction has help them raise another 12 million in March 2010 in Series B funding (CrunchBase). We can conclude that this illustrates renewed confidence that Hunch will manage to use its Taste Graph to generate revenues. It is difficult to estimate the real value of the company, Google was rumored to have made acquisition offer of 60 million in 2010 but it doesn’t mean much.

Business Model

Opportunities & Threats

Hunch is it’s 4th year and has made significant progress in those years, becoming a very abstract service to something that can add real value. The partnerships and the way they treat their users will be key for the future.

We have seen companies like digg.com completely loose user loyalty due to sudden design changes . Hunch has made decision to remove feature like that made them a fun decision making engine, users have been disappointed. The user experience needs to create engagement otherwise hunch might just become a new social bookmarking site or a twitter for content. They need to carefully manage their content in order to maintain consistency and avoid content pollution like on twitter. Treating their users with care is key as they are the real value of the service like most web 2.0 communities.

In order to attract companies, which of course are more skeptic than individuals, solutions need to be found to prove that recommendation really are of high quality. Data is needed to prove this, as it cannot only rely on users appreciations.

Hunch has a great potential; mapping people’s taste and personalities is extremely valuable raw data. The main threats for the company it the company itself, as it must remain focus on key objective. With such a product it would be easy to loose track and jump onto every opportunities.

References:

Alexa. (n.d.). Hunch.com. Retrieved May 16, 2011, from Alexa: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/hunch.com#

Barbierri, C. (2010, August 5). A new Hunch points to the money with behavioral targeting. Retrieved May 15, 2011, from Venturebeat: http://venturebeat.com/2010/08/05/hunch-web-personalization/

Carlson, N. (2009, October 25). Not For Sale: Hunch Has Turned Down Three Offers, Including One From Google Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/not-for-sale-hunch-has-turned-down-three-offers-including-one-from-google-2010-10#ixzz1MWJzLm7z. Retrieved May 16,

2011, from Business Insider: http://www.businessinsider.com/not-for-sale-hunch-has-turned-down-three-offers-including-one-from-google-2010-10

Carr, A. (2010, September 23). Digg Redesigns, Loses More Than a Quarter of Audience. Retrieved May 16, 2011, from Fast Company: http://www.fastcompany.com/1690829/traffic-plummets-26-after-digg-redesign

Facebook. (n.d.). Company Timeline. Retrieved May 14, 2011, from Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?timeline

Fake, C. (2009, Mars 27). Hunch. Retrieved May 14, 2011, from Catrina Fake’s Blog: http://caterina.net/archive/001169.html

Netflix Prize. (2009, 9 29). Retrieved 2011, from Netflix: http://www.netflixprize.com/sg=AFQjCNE4osxOTLm7WzZnXnD0qsZwBJcrNA

MERAJI, S. M. (2010, October 10). Hunch.com Might Know Your Personal Tastes Better Than You Do. Retrieved May 15, 2011, from NPR:org: http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2010/10/04/130327569/hunch-dot-com

SCHWARTZ, A. (2009, November 12). Hunch Confirms that Liberals Enjoy Vegetables, Conservatives Like Fried Chicken. Retrieved May 15, 2011, from Fast Company: http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/ariel-schwartz/sustainability/hunch-confirms-liberals-enjoy-vegetables-conservatives-fried-chic

The Next Web. (Saturday, May 14). Correction: Foursquare currently at 9.3 Million users. To cross 10 million “soon”. Retrieved May 16, Monday, from The Next Web: http://thenextweb.com/industry/2011/05/14/milestone-foursquare-hits-10-million-users/

The Nielsen Company. (2009, 2009). Global Faces and Networked Places. Retrieved from Nielsen Wire: http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/nielsen_globalfaces_mar09.pdf

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Location based content services are fast becoming the point of focus of new web technologies.

FourSquare is probably the most recognisable such service and can in fact be credited with opening
up the market to several other niche local services. To a large extent, the phenomenal growth in
smart phone sales has also provided impetus for individuals and businesses intent on developing
internet-powered location-based services.

Hunch.com and its Hunch local iPhone app is one of the new entrants that is making a significant
mark. Established by Chris Dixon and Caterina Fake, a co-founder of Flickr, the Hunch local app
allows users to make recommendations and discover locations that are consistent with their stated
tastes. You can find everything from museums and spas to grocery stores and restaurants.

To place the practical use of the Hunch local app in context, think about sitting in an office and
craving a cup of coffee or an afternoon cocktail. If you are a travelling businessperson that is new
in that part of town or you are a local who simply wants to explore a different restaurant or bar, all
you need to do is go to the Hunch local app on your iphone and you will get suggestions on the most
popular coffee shops and bars in your area.

The suggestions are not just listings of places or products. Rather users can leave a review of a venue
that other users can read in order to get better informed on what they can expect to experience
when they do go there. Hunch local also uses an intelligent iterative algorithm where a user’s
recommendations and responses to random questions are used to tweak the user’s future search
results of the same keyword(s).

Users of Hunch local can sign onto the service directly or through Twitter or Facebook. Given that
Facebook boasts more than 650 million users and Twitter having a substantial user base as well,
this ‘single sign on’ functionality adds to the convenience of the site. Naturally, the quality of data on
Hunch local depends on the number of users that participate. For this reason, the service is currently
most accurate and informative when in urban areas. As the number of users grows, so will the
quantity and quality of recommended locations in rural and remote locations.

Where does Hunch local stand now and where is it likely to go? The service is currently limited to
the US and major non-US towns. The Hunch service initially did not require one to log in to access
the data. When Hunch enforced the log in requirement in May 2010 the number of unique users fell
from 750,000 in May to 250,000 in June. However, Hunch substantially recovered with unique users
bouncing back to 350,000 by July 2010 and has been on a growth trajectory since then.

One of the key things that the developers of Hunch local might consider incorporating is the ability
to see one’s followers that are currently in the suggested restaurant a la FourSquare. Hunch.com has
already stated its intent for deeper cooperation with FourSquare so this functionality might not be
long in coming.

For instance, making a decision to drink at least eight glasses of water each day is easy – consistently sticking to that routine for consecutive months and years is the hard part. Worse still is not having any quantitative data that can show you how well you are faring against your target.

Greengoose.com is a start up that uses wireless sensors integrated with a web based platform all of which are meant to help you automatically track progress on the realisation of your lifestyle goals. The sensors communicate with an egg-shaped wireless receiver each time you perform an action. The receiver is plugged into a port on the router. The receiver battery lasts for 1 year.

There are different types of sensors each meant to track different types of lifestyle actions. The ones meant to monitor exercise are the same size as a credit card and so can easily fit in a purse or wallet. Water or energy drink bottle sensors on the other hand are stickers that are placed on the side of the bottle. The tooth brush sensor is egg shaped and with a slot where the stem of the tooth brush can be slipped through.

Each time you perform one of the actions, you earn ‘lifestyle points’. If you remain consistent, you get bonus points. Greengoose.com also allows for the exchange or sharing of points with partnering organisations in return for a reward. Similarly, the information can be shared with other applications. You can even integrate it with a reward system for the kids. The strength of Greeengoose.com lies not only in its functionality but also in its ability to appeal to persons of all ages.

Greengoose.com incorporates fun and play even into those activities that have a serious impact on our health. The sensors can be just as home with the kids as they would be with parents. True to its name, the Greengoose.com encourages people that have no more use for the receiver and sensors to send them back. The company will then recycle them ready for reuse. Other than being a gadget for individual use in the home or office, Greengoose.com has a bright future as a tool for business.

The best prospects for Greengoose.com will probably lie in future partnerships with health services organizations and other institutions that would naturally be drawn to customers of Greengoose.com. Such partnership may range from simply co-branding Greengoose.com sensors and receivers to investing in the development of new types of sensors to measure an even broader range of activities.

The statistics attest to this. As at 2010, the average age of US gamers was 34 years. The average adult gamer has been playing online, computer or video games for 12 years. The average gamer spends 8 hours each week playing a video game. Monthly revenues for the gaming industry exceed $5 billion per month.

Gamify.com is putting this gaming appeal to good use. Riding on a concept the site refers to as ‘gamification’, Gamify.com allows website and web-enabled application developers to integrate aspects of gaming onto their site.

Gamify.com defines ‘to gamify’ as the application of gaming dynamics to everyday circumstances in order to foster better engagement and boost productivity. Gamify.com thus brings the fulfilling, rewarding and exciting atmosphere that is such a strong part of gaming, into different spheres of life.

The Gamify.com platform delivers gamification as a service and can be applied to virtually any web-based system. Users can interact with the gamification platform on their own or they can do so through any one of several ‘Gamify Experts’.

The experts serve as consultants on Gamify.com and are ranked on a leader board depending on their achievements and end user ratings. Gamify.com has also developed a Gamification Encyclopaedia, a wiki that is geared to towards the collaborative documentation of all elements of the gamification movement.

The Gamification Platform has four modules – the Engine, API, Admin and Features. The Gamify Engine is driven by end user activity and provides feedback in real time. The Gamify API is a flexible interface that ensures deep integration with all Gamify targets.

Gamify Features module is the home of reward programs as well as customizable widgets. Gamify Admin is the nerve centre. The Admin module provides analytics in real time and is the control centre for all general administration activities.

Gamify.com holds great promise in the coming months and years. That said, its greatest challenge to attracting established businesses will be the common stereotypes of gaming being an anti-productivity activity. Never mind that gamification only changes the end user experience and does not ‘create a game’ per se.

In other words, conventional businesses will need to be convinced that the incorporation of gamification in their application or website will bode well for the realisation of their objectives. How well Gamify.com will be able to advance this argument will determine how successful gamification ultimately becomes.

The rapid rise in smart phone sales is quickly moving the smart phone from an elitist status symbol to a mass market product. According to global research firm IDC, global smart phone sales will be up 49% in 2011 – 4 times faster than ordinary mobile phones.

This growth is in turn creating opportunities for business ideas that were previously unfeasible and impractical. Crowdbeacon is one of the latest such services to hit the market. It builds on the successes of Yelp and what is arguably the most well known location based service today, FourSquare.

However, Crowdbeacon differs from FourSquare. Even though Crowdbeacon is a location based service, it mainly focuses on providing information to users depending on where they are and what they require. This is unlike FourSquare which is centred on venues, event planning and has a strong social networking element.

Crowdbeacon differs from Yelp as well. It serves a similar role to Yelp but takes the service a step further than a simple search – it creates engagement. That said, some of the information made available to Crowdbeacon ‘askers’ is drawn from Yelp using an API.

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Here is how Crowdbeacon works. First, one must sign up for the service. As the user signs up, they are required to indicate at least one topic they consider themselves an expert on in their locality. So when a user asks a question, another Crowdbeacon user within the same locale (e.g. the same city) and who indicated they were an expert on the subject the question relates to, then responds.

Users of Crowdbeacon can use the service to get response to questions ranging from where to buy roses, the top museums in the city, the location of ATMs and the best restaurants. The response to the question is delivered via SMS, push (iphone), email and voice. Crowdbeacon employs an algorithm that ranks users by tested influence in their category and/or neighbourhood based on the number of positively received responses they provide.

Crowdbeacon is not limited to individuals – businesses too can sign up. When a business signs up, they are required to indicate one or more keywords that they would want to receive questions on and respond to (usually related to the product or service they sell).

If a response is required in real time and there is no one immediately available to provide the information, users do not necessarily have to wait for an expert user’s response. Crowdbeacon invokes APIs that draw down relevant data from other location based services.

At present, Crowdbeacon draws the data from Yelp, Wishpond and FourSquare. Plans are in place to expand this information pool to include Facebook, City Search and Twitter.

In the event that there is no one available under that category to answer the question and the APIs do not provide satisfactory data, Crowdbeacon’s own staff take up the question and attempt to get an answer on the end-user’s behalf. That said, given the infinite number of possible questions, Crowdbeacon staff do not guarantee providing an answer to every such question.

If smart phone sales maintain their steep climb, Crowdbeacon has huge potential for future growth. At present, the Crowdbeacon application and service is free. The product’s creators have intimated that their goal at the moment is to provide a unique, quality service that meets their user’s need before they attempt to monetize Crowdbeacon.

Established in 2006, Buzzfeed.com has taken the concept of internet content going viral and have built an online service around it. As of February 2011, Buzzfeed.com receives more than 4 million visitors each month.

The site has sought to establish itself as the place to go to by anyone who wants to start a story, a video, a picture or an event that will eventually go viral. In other words, Buzzfeed.com aims to catch wind of viral content before it actually goes viral or as early on in the viral curve as possible.

Each user on Buzzfeed.com has their own home page where they can put up their own new posts, reBuzz interesting posts by other Buzzfeed users or have other users submit posts to their page.
Buzzfeed.com uses a combination of technology (that is web crawlers) as well as human editors to determine the content that goes to the front page of the site.

Buzzfeed.com editors though do not restrict themselves only to content posted by Buzzfeed users. Content on several other sites such as Best Week Ever and the Huffington post is tracked by web crawlers and posted to the front page as necessary.

Note that a topic is not considered viral simply because it is popular among Buzzfeed.com users. Rather, it must be one that attracts attention from the web at large. Given the numerous visitors to the site and the numerous subscribers it its RSS feeds, being placed on the Buzzfeed.com front page places content in a better position to go viral.

Buzzfeed.com is used for either amusement or for business purposes. Of course, given the nature of most viral content, most topics will have entertainment value. However, businesses can use Buzzfeed.com to keep track of topics that generate the most traffic and thus modify their online and/or offline marketing strategies accordingly.

Users can vote for the content they would consider the most likely to go viral. Buzzfeed users that prove to be the most successful in predicting the content that will go viral move up the rankings on a leader board.

Buzzfeed is popular but has not escaped criticism. For starters, a first time visitor may initially be struck by a perception of a cluttered, congested home page. The counter argument though is that this concept has worked well so far. Buzfeed.com has also made effort to organise content by placing related content into appropriate categories.

The second issue is the liberal of internet shorthand such as LOL and OMG to tag topics. This has the potential of repelling a certain type of business or individual end user. But even this may be viewed as more a pro than a con given the site’s heavy leaning toward entertainment and fun stories.

Buzzfeed is free – there is no registration fee neither is payment required in order to put up a post. The site makes its money through advertising. However, effort is taken to ensure such links are as unobtrusive as is practically possible.

Buzzfeed has done relatively well since it was established in 2006. Buzzfeed incorporates discovery and social networking to bring out the most popular content. This contrasts with the search engine approach used by Google where the relevance of content is often the primary factor in pushing content (in this case the first pages if search engine results).

The Buzzfeed app is available for Android phones and iPhones.

The main features are:

• Detection of the fingers and their movements (see also Microsoft’s project natal)
• Recognition of objects and persons
• Projection of information on any surface, from simple light beams to complex images

Possible applications:

• Emulate a watch or a cellphone on your hand
• Recognize a person’s face and display a cloud tag with words from his online social activity on his chest
• Scan products in super markets and display information on them

See it by yourself:

First, a bar has to be oppened every single day, until late. If one of your customers comes and sees that the bar is closed, he won’t come ANYMORE. Look at it, when they go out people always have to struggle with the place to go. Everybody wants to go somewhere different, then there is the space problem, the price issue, the girls/dudes ratio, etc… Offer then some stability for god’s sake.

Now, put screens everywhere. You can get all the sports fans with a simple subscripion to sky, and when there isn’t much ambiance, television will hyptotize your customers, avoiding their going.

Concerning the archiectur of your place, again I have a thought. I seems to me that the best thing to do is having a central bar, like an island, and people can walk all around. This way your bar seems bigger and you create a path for your customers to follow, they don’t get lost, they just walk around. And they will always be next to the bar, ready to buy. Then if you want to add tables, put them against the walls.

The two following are a bit more creative. First, you can create a wheel, like in the roue de la fortune. People pay for spinning the wheel and they can earn anything from getting chucked out to a bottle. Make sure the expected value is in your favor. People love to play, it will work.

Now that we have applied the casino principle to our bar, why not do the same with stock exchange. I’ve seen a bar where you get the price quotes of the drinks just like in the stock exchange market. When no one orders anything, prices go down so that people come and buy. When everybody wants a drink, prices go up and since you cannot serve everyone anyway, just make the best out of it.

Voilà! I know that there are so many bars in this planet, most of whom are stugguling to make profits. Maybe I’m wrong, but I think that by simply observing what seems to be functionning elsewhere you can make it right.

I also thinking about the fact that the game “farmville” (http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=102452128776&ref=search&sid=743805430.2672672765..1) has more than 50 millions of monthly active users.

If you can get an arrangement with the owners of the game so that they allow you to create a farmville application on iphone, and if you sell it to 2% of the users for 1$ dollar, you would earn 1 million dollar.

50’000’000 * 0.02 * 1 = 1’000’000

If you get it done by freelancers that you can find here: http://www.odesk.com/community/oconomy for example, I think it could cost up to 1’000 dollars.

See him for example: http://www.odesk.com/users/iPhone-Developer-and-Graphic-Designer_~~bd36e1790a09137f?sid=5002&recent=no&tot=608&pos=1#overview

For reaching your break-even point you would need 1’000 buyers in the itunes shop. If you divide it by the number of users of the application, that makes a 0.002% of penetration necessary for your product in order not to lose money.

If you want to scan the market, you could survey the farmville users against some farmville cash. If more than 10’000 say they would dowload it, I think you can do it.

What do you think of it?

I think the reason why there is so few hiphop dedicated clubs is that this music is tightly associated with a minority of very agressive dudes.

What if you had an asshole bouncer that would only let well targeted customers in? No sneakers, no groups of guys.

And look, we all know what the rap culture is about: making it rain! I’m pretty convinced that people would be under sub-concious influence of the lyrics and spend more money.

since I’ve been in the warez scene when I was younger and I always loved watching movies, I often think about designing a movie streaming website.

Beside, I’ve juste watched the statistics of smartideabox.com (root site) on google analytics and the big majority of random dudes that ended on the website came from searching for Arthur king’s mixtape on google. That reflects the fact that internet is still a place where people come for getting entertained, and a huge part of the web’s activity is related to downloading or so.

That means we could attract many visitors with a streaming website. The workload isn’t really consequent since we will steal the videos from other streaming sites. My idea is to provide only megavideo links, since it’s the best in term of quality.

Finally, there is this 74 minutes limit on megavideo that we could benefit from, by selling shared accounts to our visitors.

But more seriously like this little company in lausanne (probably anywhere in the world) called AperoChrono provides for 40.- a bottle of hard liquor, a bottle of softdrink, and some other muchy food.

I see potential in this if it gets a bit bigger, a “catering service” for simple party that doesn’t really require catering. If There was a simple number and website you could go onto and in max 5 clicks you would able to get the essential material for your party in an hour until maybe 4 in the morning.

1st click: number of guests

2nd click: amount per guest (3 choices like 15.-, 20.-, 30.-)

3rd click: Choice of package (5 choices different like with different ingredients, hard liquor, wine, mixture, etc…or a possibility to costumise your package completly)

4th click: time of delivery

5th click: adress and GO

There wont be a very high profit margin but when I think about it I think in busy citizens for someone who plan a quick and efficient get together for cheap it could be intresting to look into it.

The Best would be to merge with a known good caterer to get credibility and to give the opportunity to clients to get a higher quality or even luxury service if wanted.

Tell me what you think,

Jonas

But it is all still about geek gamerz that seek this gratitude within their group. This could get a lot bigger with the mobile devices, internet everywhere and the social networks. What is we could bound real life and video gaming so tight that Life itself became more challenging and entertaining? What if we could give the perfect excuse to people for showing off on the internet without being jerks that show their muscle on their facebook walls?

Warning: someone is already working on something like that!  see: www.booyah.com (update: apparently they changed the concept of their game, it’s now some kind of monopoly mixed with real world)