how about a teach kids tech series

if you haven't seen it by now there are bunch educational videos for parents that google has put together. http://www.teachparentstech.org/watch



i just sent my mother a "tech care package" to hopefully educate her about using the computer. it was a joke of course.

this whole thing got me thinking about teaching people about tech. perhaps google should make a video series for kids. (if they already have one let me know... haha i make like people read my blog). maybe the videos showed kids how to use various google tools like google docs, email, web development, etc. schools could use this as classroom material. then all these kids would be techies already and we won't need this teach parents tech one generation from now. awesome!

shoyu flakes

while i was eating some cold tofu, ginger, and shoyu i had an idea.... the idea is called shoyu flakes. its like shoyu that melts in your mouth. it would be an awesome garnish on top things like tofu, sushi, or even something like salad. it could be like bonito flakes but of course it would be shoyu favor instead of fish.

what do you guys think? maybe @chefmorimoto might like it and i'd be rich and famous.

UPDATE
http://www.nymtc.com/pl_mtcpremium/200709soysalt.html

a couple lame ideas

(its been a while since i blogged. i've been meaning to get back into it. so here is my first attempt)

idea one: email/wiki page
email is great. haha. well, this idea kinda is about how email sucks for discussions. i don't know about you but it sucks when ideas from email threads. its hard to trace through how the idea evolved, hard to make sure you see everyones comments and concerns. things get lost.

a great example, is my family's football game potluck emails. an email goes out week for people to sign up for potluck, people don't respond to all, format the response funny, etc, etc. by the end its hard to know who is bringing what unless you read all the emails.

enter. wikipages and google docs. some people know that some things are better to collaborate on in wikipages or google docs. good job to those people. but its out of the way. its a separate place. usually when its separate its hard to get people to use it consistently. not to mention a very low percentage of people actually know what google docs is.

anyway... the idea is that we could better integrate google docs and gmail. actually, perhaps its like a distributed wikipage. where there is a document structure thats possible and threaded discussions. i like that... hm. let me think about this more.


idea two: twitter filter
i like following people on twitter. i hate following people that tweet any more than 5 things a day. i tend to ignore anyone with a few thousand lifetime tweets. i just don't want to see that much information. i know there are probably a lot of external services that can do this, but i really just want a way to filter tweets from specific users. perhaps the filter understands the users "tweet rate" and gives me a down sampled view. or maybe the filter just picks a "popular" tweet from that user.

anyway, thats a simple idea that would really be awesome.



(these ideas were kinda lame. but i just wanted to write something down for a change)

ideas for web videos

i read a lot of blogs and i've noticed that i actually prefer when the blog/article has pictures instead of videos. actually, videos are great for digging deeper into the topic, but i've found that the videos in blogs slow down reading a lot, because you want to know whats in the video. so, you tend to load up the video and manually fast forward to see if there is anything good in it. this slows down my reading and i hate that. but i continue to do that because sometimes the video is actually way easier to understand than the write up.

to solve those problems i have two visualization ideas for web videos.

skimming for web videos
skimming is a iMovie thing and its pretty cool. basically its a way to explore and preview your video and is a great way quickly identify the best parts of your video. to skim all you have to do is move your mouse horizontally over the video and the video plays back chronologically in respect to the mouse direction. you can also hear the audio while skimming. watch the apple tutorial on skimming

skimming for web videos makes a lot of sense to me. it allows you to quickly find things of interest. perhaps there are technical issues with doing that, for example how to download the data to be able to do that. the whole buffering the video thing really sucks and i hate that i have to do that all the time. not to mention it sort of defeats the purpose of the skimming feature.

a collage of video thumbnails
usually, when you upload a video you can select a single thumbnail of the video to show users what the video is all about. but, i've always wondered why stop at just one thumbnail. what if there were multiple thumbnails that showed snapshots of the highlights of the video. then i can just look at the collage of thumbnails to know what the video was all about. i created an example of my thumbnail collage for this time lapse video:

(my mock up)

compare my mock up with the actual video. i wonder if my thumbnails actually helps. what do you think?

(actual vimeo video)

perhaps there would be away to toggle between skimming and the thumbnail collage. anyway, those were two ideas that i think would help save time while encountering videos on the web. do you think those two features would be useful?

an idea called EventMedia

so, i yet another one of my ideas. here it is... well it has to do with iphones and its called EventMedia. and just by that description it sounds really boring.

my idea is pretty general, but i have a pretty good example. here is the general idea; i want to be able to introduce web technologies to live events to supplement its entertainment or even educational value. seems pretty obvious right?

lets say you are at the Players Championship (a golf tournament). you are a huge Sergio Garcia fan, but you can't give up the chance to see Tiger. so, of course you follow Tiger. as you are walking along the course, you wish you were two places at one time. actually, tiger and sergio rarely swing at exactly the same time. so, you are really wishing that you could follow all of sergio's shots and all of tiger's shots. so, you turn on the special Players Championship EventMedia application and you select "virtual follow sergio". this application will notify you (via vibrate) 10 seconds before sergio takes his shot. it will give you his current tournament score, his current shot (on the whole), distance to the cup, his club selection, his past scores on this hole, etc visually on the screen. you watch sergio hit his next shot on your iphone for the next 20 seconds as wait for Tiger to make his way to tee box. awesome! other features include, "eagle chances" notifications, "blow ups" notifications, real time leader board, press conference feeds, and of course TV commentary as you watch it live. add in the social aspect of spectators "twittering" cheers, picture gallery, and maybe event real time betting and you get more awesomeness.

the idea is pretty simple and obvious. EventMedia could be applied to all sorts of sporting events (woah think about the advertisement possibilities), business situations like conferences, large public gatherings like political rallies, etc. or this could be a huge hit during an olympics, where you want to be some many places at once.

imagine this... EventMedia initiates the wave via your iphone at your next football game... while recording it for your facebook profile! hahaha.

trying to keep my creativity alive

i guess i have an active imagination, because i keep on thinking of new ideas. although, i have no idea how good they are. but, as someone pointed out, i should write them down. so, i try formalize my ideas and build upon them. if you are wondering why this is important watch this video; Talks Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity?
here are some of the highlights:

"we get educated out of creativity"

"if you are not prepared to be wrong you will never come up with anything original"

"you become frightened to become wrong"

"we are now running companies where mistakes are the worst things you can make"

"we don't grow into creativity we get educated out of it"

"professors look at their body as a transport for their heads"

"you have been steered away from things you like "

"suddenly degrees are worth nothing"

"academic inflation"

"creativity is having original ideas that are useful"

"rethink the fundamental principles that we are educating our children"

"remove all insects from earth in 50 years all life will perish. remove all humans from earth in 50 years all life will flourish"

anyway, here are some of the ideas that i had recently.

twitter twin
not sure how i thought about this one, but wouldn't it be cool to find your twitter twin? the basic idea is that since the character limit is set and there are only a set amount of things you could type in, i would think that some of your tweets have to be duplicates. so, lets say you twittered, "obama is cool" then maybe you could see that 20,000 other twitter users said the same thing. but if you said something like, "new rule: stop putting down the other candidates. its lame." i wonder how many other people think like that.

when i twitter something my "followers" can respond. but i often think about how my thoughts, tweets, are similar to totally random people. this might work better if the subject area is narrowed; for example the elections twitter view.

hawaii night life pics
everyone has mobile phones with cameras these days. you see these pictures all over peoples facebook or myspace profiles. its pretty cool to see your friends pictures from their nights out. you can kind of get a sense of the "quality" of the club by looking at the pictures. whether its crowded, how dark it is, etc.

i began to think that it would be cool to organize all of our pictures by time and location instead of user profile. what if we chunked up a friday night into hour blocks and then categorized it by location (ie, pearl, level4, bar35, etc). then as the night goes on the people take pictures and upload it to the site, which is automatically sorted and categorized.

its kinda like the hawaii nightlife diaries, but created by masses.

world perception
after the presidential debate, i got to thinking... i wonder which candidate other countries prefer. i'm not sure that will change my preference, but knowing that answer is definitely interesting. i think there are a bunch of things i would like to know what the world thinks. what does the world think about Tibet? what does the world think of global warming? what does the world think about America?

maybe we can find out the answers to these questions with a world wide polling system of some sort. i really like this idea, because I (we) are only fed what we hear in the news, what we read in the newspaper, etc. that information is very country specific and in some cases that is not a good thing.

it would be fantastic if there was a virtual world wide meeting place to express your thoughts on world problems.

tangible internet
it would be cool to some how make the internet tangible. something you can touch and gain information from. something not traditional (not like a printed paper or something). i guess i just realized that i hate having to sit in front of this computer screen to get information.

an idea for relationship management

every once in a while i have random ideas for cool sites or services. this one takes the cake for randomness. but here are some others

should have tried to do the android competition 2

an firefox extension idea for copying links

an idea called moody

wordle for my blogs and an idea

an idea for twitter

an idea for ESPN

resume visualization

google reader process improvement

geosearch

a crazy hackystat idea

google reader feature requests

things that i want from google

actually, those are most of the ideas that i blogged about. i made it a point to try to write "idea" posts to help me formalize my ideas better. anyway here comes a new idea...

an idea for relationship management

think online financial management for your relationship. i'm serious. really! okay, i'm not that interested in a software service telling me how my relationship with my wife is going, but i just see a huge market for this. online dating services is a million dollar industry (Yahoo! Personals, Match.com, and eHarmony). there are probably hundreds of ways to meet people online. the funny thing is that i would think that the sites want you to meet people and possible date, but ultimately fail and come running back to their site.

so from a pure business standpoint there seems to be a huge market for this. i kind think of this as the next generation of financial management sites, diet sites, or even things like WebMD. anyway, my imagination is kind of flying around these days. i kind of think that there are some very social and very dynamic things that haven't hit the mainstream technology yet. another totally random idea that fits this idea is social networking for religion. or better yet, a site that teaches you a specific religion. this seems to be uncharted waters.

UPDATE
someone instant messaged me with:
[12:30 AM] READER: what kinda of relationship manegment
[12:30 AM] READER: gimmie an example
[12:31 AM] Aaron: not sure...
[12:31 AM] Aaron: i think that question is interesting.. haha.
[12:31 AM] Aaron: can computers even help with that.
[12:32 AM] READER: i dont know
[12:33 AM] Aaron: i think that would be an awesome advancement in technology. or i guess social science.

anyway, the point is that i don't know how one would manage a relationship via technology. is that even possible. i don't know? but i do think that there are many of these types of social problems that current technology and/or science doesn't really help yet. maybe its the thing of the future.

should have tried to do the android competition 2

a few months ago i wrote about should have trying the android competition. a couple of cool things about this post was a guy named Jeffrey Sharkey had a similar idea than i had. jeff's idea was called android scan. another cool thing was my post had a comment from software by rob (well at least i think its him):

This is a good idea; I've discussed this exact concept with a few different people over the past year. I'm glad someone finally executed on it.

I actually explored it pretty intently about 6 months ago and started to put a team together to pursue it, but decided against it due to lack of resources and time - apropos given my quote. I knew I'd have to shut down my consulting business and go full force at this one for it to have a chance at working, and the timing wasn't right.

You're on the right track. Let me know when you have another idea like this one :-)

anyway, back to jeff and his android work. i just found out that jeff's android scan has made it all the way to the 275K prize. congrats goes out to him. he slightly changed the name and the description; but CompareEverywhere still has similar ideas that i had. oh well, i suck and jeff rocks.

an firefox extension idea for copying links

so, i did some searching around the internet for some cmmi references tonight and found some interesting ones that i wanted to share with my team. so, i started to write a wiki page with the links (hopefully i'll add some summary too). anyway, it occurs to me that i need to visit the page twice to copy. one time to get the title of the page (i hate links that are just the url) and another time to get the url. so i copy the title and url separately.

there needs to be a "copy title and url" function. that just basically writes this on a paste:
<a href="http://www.sei.cmu.edu/cmmi/adoption/books.html">CMMI Books</a>

here is a random side comment: i've just realized that one of the cool things in confluence is that the it dynamically builds links with a macro. for example, if the link was within confluence you'd just have to do [CMMI Books] and confluence will create the correct link for you. so, for linking to confluence pages you only need to know the name of the page. thats cool! (i told you that was random)

an idea called moody

i was chatting with ryank about a few things and had an idea for an application called moody.

aaron: its kinda like twitter but its a score posting.
aaron: you can contribute to the mood of the group.
aaron: your friends are "grumpy" on a scale from 1 - 10
aaron: random times during the day you can set your mood.
ryan: i like the name
ryan: sounds interesting
aaron: i think things like myspace has it.
aaron: but never really aggregates it by groups.
aaron: haha. i just want it for the engineering group.
aaron: and have "focused" as an option.
ryan: that would be cool
ryan: you know...the more i think about it...the more i like it

i think the idea is just to be able to get the average mood of a group of people. just to be aware of how a group is feeling.

woah... a lot of people post twitter posts that implies their mood. what if the system could figure out your implied mood. or or... here is another random idea. what if twitter could predict what you are going to post. that would be kind of scary.

wordle for my blogs and an idea

greg wilson's blog post about wordle got me interested enough to try it on the last three months of my blog. so, i copied and pasted all the text from my blog and got this:



it looks like for some reason i write about students a lot. i hardly see any software terms in there. i guess this isn't much of a technical blog. haha. wait a minute, i don't even see hackystat in there. i better write more about hackystat, hackystat, hackystat. :)

what does your wordle look like?

here is an idea
wordle should make wordle's for your twitter feed. here is a wordle from ian's tweets for the past couple weeks:

(twittering ian's wordle - this was my first version using screen scrape from the twitter website)

(twittering ian's wordle - this is my second version using rss feeds)

an idea for twitter

here is an idea for twitter. an led sign like the one i found at plasmaled can show your updates at your desk at work. obviously, the sign would be situated so that people walking by can see the messages. the basic idea is that maybe you can twitter about work. for example,

i'm working on the proposal for the acme project.

or

i'm having a bad day. don't bother me.

its kind of a random novelty item that could be branded as a twitter hardware product. it could make millions.

UPDATE: here is a similar concept for viewing facebook pictures with a Wi-Fi photo frame.

it adds new feeds to its 8-inch Wi-Fi frame. Already able to get streams from online photo services such as Flickr or Photobucket, the wireless frame has now added Facebook to its networked family.

Once hooked up to your Facebook account, it will automatically display photos uploaded to the social network, GeekAlerts says. Which means that you probably want to be careful where you place the frame when mom and dad come over.

an idea for ESPN

i just had an idea for ESPN. i was talking to with ryank about his kid's baseball tournament. and an idea about creating a video highlight popped into my head. we all have seen those little league trading cards or fake sports magazines with kids pictures on it. this highlight video would be exactly like those fake magazines and trading cards, but it would be a Sportscenter highlight.



so, the idea is that ESPN create a online widget that allows the user to upload video segment; for example something that fits into the Top Plays of the Day. The user can adjust the time frames and line up with the Top Plays of the Day count down; maybe making their segment the number one play of the day. Then I guess the user can do a voice over to explain the play. maybe you can have stuart scott say "boo ya!".

this would be an awesome thing for ESPN to provide. if it was user friendly and very flashy, i bet it would get kids even more excited about their sports. i can see baseball, football, basketball kids all over the country making their own highlight videos.

should have tried to do the android competition

one of my co-workers sent me this blog today; Google Hands Out $1.25 Million To 50 Android App Winners (GOOG). the winers were apparently just announced. and although i haven't been following this competition i did spend a little while thinking about an idea last year.

my idea went something like this (a chat log from december 2007):

aaron: i had an idea.
aaron: its called browse
aaron: browse is a software and hardware system that has a barcode scanner that will help you browse while shopping.
aaron: like a book in borders. scan it in and see if your friends read it.
aaron: or see if it had good reviews.
aaron: or see if other people that liked that book liked another one.
austen: so a in-store amazon
aaron: browse is a system that can revolutionize shopping at the mall.
aaron: yes
austen: who shops at the mall anymore
austen: haha
aaron: haha. i always like going to borders.
aaron: real books are cooler to browse.
...
aaron: anyway browse is for more than just borders.
austen: yah that would be cool if it was for everything
aaron: browse opens up mall shopping to technology.
austen: i usually shop for clothes at stores. if there was something that told me that whoever bought this shirt from prototype also bought this other shirt from information i would drive there and buy it
austen: just cause its hard to find shirts that have cool designs that i like
aaron: haha.. or a brand name was also sold at stores x,y,z
aaron: and it costs
austen: ooo what if it was on your phone
austen: everyone has phones
aaron: android!

after sending me the winners announcement. my friend was quick to point out the first winner; Android Scan.

Scan is an Android application that finds pricing and metadata for anything with a barcode. Here are some key features that make Scan stand out:

* Automatic barcode recognition using onboard phone camera using ZXing
* Shows CD, DVD, or book cover along with detailed reviews from Amazon.com* Searches over a dozen stores, both online and brick+mortar
** Highlights brick+mortar stores that are nearby, with option to call the store or get directions
** Links to online storefronts to buy online from the phone
* Tracklisting for CDs, along with option to play sample tracks right on phone
* For books, searches local libraries to see if they have a copy

he even has a video of what his system does. go check it out.

anyway, i was a little bummed knowing that my idea was really similar and knowing that i could have won 25k and potentially 100k or 250k. but, after 10 seconds of that i quickly remembered a post on software by rob; A Fool’s Bargain: Building Software for Free (or, An Idea Ain’t Worth Squat). here is the paragraph i immediately thought of:

Every one of the good developers I know have tens if not hundreds of ideas for software products…it’s not a lack of ideas, but a lack of time that keeps us from building and marketing them ourselves.

anyway... i guess its kinda of cool that similar idea won a google android prize. i don't know. it is interesting though.

google reader process improvement

today my coworker came up to me and said, "aaron, you share too much stuff".

i replied, "well, a lot of it isn't for you. and by the way, i don't necessarily share for an audience. sometimes i have a specific person in mind that i want to share it with. sometimes my shares are defining who i am and what i like."

he replied, "okay, i understand that, but it is still too much for me. maybe the system is broken."

i said, "you are absolutely right, the system (google reader) is flawed. i work around it by quickly reading the titles and excerpts of things and ignoring a lot of stuff. but, it would be better if google reader allowed you to organize entries in some way. sorry, but i don't know how to do that in google reader. you'll just have to shift through the many entries that we are sharing."

so i thought for a while about that and figured there is got to be a better way. and i think i found a partial solution. here is my proposal to improve our process of google reading sharing. (note that i'm not inventing any thing new here, i'm just bringing to light some of the google reader features that we are not taking advantage of).

step 1
use the tagging mechanism to tag things into different groups. for example, maybe i have something like:

google - articles from and about google that i like.

environment - i'm interesting in environment and learning more about global warming. maybe this category also contains things like space exploration. i'm interested in that too.

programming - my programming and technology shares; from stuff about friendfeed to stuff about static vs dynamic typing.

other

all kinds of other stuff that doesn't fit into categories.

so, in the following example i tag something as "p-google". i'll explain why i put the "p-" in front a little later.



step 2
once you tag an item, you can switch over to the tag settings. in the tag settings i security settings on the "p-google" from private to public.



step 3
by changing the tag "p-google" to public, google provides a separate public feed and public page. here is the page that will just contain the "p-google" stuff.



step 4
just keep in mind that the "p-google" feed is separate from the public one. you could share and label it. but that kind of defeats the purpose. anyway, i bring this up. because no one will know your special public tag feed exists unless you tell them.



this might address my coworkers concerns about making it easier to shift through the content in google reader. its not the best solution, because it removes things from the public shared feed and moves it to a separate one. well, we shall see how it goes. we are trying to figure out how to make this all work effectively and efficiently for our group.

what do you guys think? let me know if you have some better ideas.

resume visualization

i just had a wild idea about visualizing information on resumes. i haven't exactly fleshed out a lot of details yet, but i decided to make a mock up and get some feedback.

the basic idea (and i'm not even sure my idea is original or not, it probably isn't) is that reading resumes suck. reading resumes is an investigation into what the person knows. even a C-student can make their resume look good. resumes suck; they suck so bad that we need phone screening, reference checks, 2-tier interviews., etc.

okay, so i just discovered that i'm not just visualizing existing information on resumes, i'm also expanding what's on a resume. the problem with the standard one-page resume is that you are bonded by space. on one page, everyone looks the same. that's why i like a academic curriculum vitae - they are very verbose and pretty much as everything. the more content the better. anyway, the reason why you can't hand in a academic CV is because its too hard for the employee to properly read and understand everything. ONE PAGE!!!! i think the ONE PAGE rule is really stupid, but nevertheless we must obey (haha, i almost always have more than one page).

anyway, getting back to the idea. i want to create a graphical resume that contains all the information that a CV has but all on one page. then the employee is basically looking for the "right" graphic. here is my 10 second prototype:



so the basic idea, is that the employee can quickly see my strengths and weaknesses. (haha. i guess i should have shown the differences a little bit better in my prototype). but you get the gist of it. basically, i could imagine this graphic on a resume site and it lets people drill down to get the data. after all, its always about the data.

i'm interested in what you guys think about my initial brainstorming. any thoughts, comments, questions, etc?

hackystat and my outboard brain

i just had an interesting idea that branches off of what wired has been talking about a lot; an outboard brain. see Welcome to a Science Journalist's Outboard Brain and help me help you.

basically, what i want is a hackystat and outboard brain combined. this is interesting because, i can learn a lot from people's outboard brain. i can learn a lot more from "watching" them work.

imagine for example, that you knew everything that philip thought was cool and you knew what kind of things philip was working on and the processes he used to work on them. if you had that then, you'd be pretty aware of philip's intentions, his direction, and you'd learn a whole lot from that.

this is a cool concept. but, i haven't had enough time to think deeper about this.

google reader feature requests

some ideas for google reader features

i want google reader to only show the subscriptions that have unread postings. this would make it a lot easier to do a "gu" shortcut and jump to the subscriptions that need reading. i want this feature. i would hack on this feature.

a better notification system for new posts. i like to stay on top of my readings so that i don't have hundreds of postings to sort through. i do this fairly quickly. i mark the postings that i don't care to read as read. and i leave the interesting ones unread. over the course of the week i go back and read the ones that are interesting. when using reader like that, for some reason i want to know when new postings are available so i can quickly sort through them. i find that to be a lot more efficient than waiting till the end of the week.

send the tags along with the posting. i wish there was away to send the tags or labels of the postings through the subscriptions. that would help me determine a lot faster whether i care about the posting or not. one could imagine a more verbose organization of subscriptions.

wouldn't it be interesting to see a tag or word cloud of the postings that you star or share. now that would be interesting.

those were some random ideas that i made up in 5 minutes. its rather interesting that i can do that so quickly. that indicates to me that google reader is a good application. its good because i see the potential. its good because i want to use it. and its good that i want to use its future features. if you think about the application that you are working on for work or as a side project and you can't generate a list like that, then i would argue that it isn't that interesting. or worse yet, your application lacks a direction.

geosearch

energyshortage's use of google earth is an example of something similar to what i had in mind in things i want from google.

imagine for a second that you searched "energy shortage" in google. up popped up a google earth representation of all the instances of energy shortage "events" around the world. instantly you would see how expansive the concept was. if there was only energy shortage events in america and there 50, then not so bad right? but what if there was 50,000 only in america, then that would probably be bad. geosearch is a way to understand the context of what you are searching for without having to read text to figure it out.

wow.. that is cool. see, i have good ideas!

a crazy hackystat idea

i gotta start heading out of work, but here is a quick crazy idea.

what if the hackystat user interface lived within something like apache lenya or ning. i don't think that is realistic, but what i kinda like the thought. applying hackystat to social networking instead of applying social networking to hackystat. anyway, that is random thought, but maybe it can jump start some brainstorming about what kinds of specific things software developers want in a "collective intelligence hackystat system.