ideapony

How different would be the business of selling books be different in this new decade of information flow and information anxiety?

Some general thoughts:

Concept: Sell good books, rare books, in tamil and english. Make searching, selecting, previewing and buying/shipping EASY & FAST

- Start small, set a small team(3) to build the site and upload content. This will include 2 programmers, 1 UI expert and 1 business expert(sales)
- Set a backoffice to procure books, build inventory and courier the books
- Start a blog to discuss how the business can be done and keep posting religiously.
- Spend quality time getting the UI and task flows right for the online and offline tasks
- UI should be usable RIA
- Experts in a domain and keep moving on
- Share the results with the world


Who should work with us
- Entrepreneur mindset
- Loves to create stuff
- Creative individuals


Basic Work Ethics
- Flexible work environment
- Free healthy food
- Free healthy snacks
- Smarter
- Faster
- Quick to change
- Agile
- University culture
- No dress codes
- Being a professional/being a geek - u decide
- Keep learning - always. Open to trainings, publications, courses, workshops. Initially work and accomplish stuff and go for a training. Accomplishments translate into appreciations
- Regular appreciations - monetary benefits, stocks, health benefits, food coupons, holiday trip coupons etc.,

Idea:
To make and distribute a laptop stand. Laptops are growing in huge numbers. But there are hardly any dealer or distributor providing stands for laptops to enable people to use it as desktop computers.

Features:
The stand model(s) should address the following problems users currently face:
1. Ability to work in any place in the home including bed, room corners, porticos, etc.,
2. Get away from the immense heat of the laptop
3. Have a placeholder to hold the papers, notebooks
4. Durable and long standing

Competitor models:
http://www.laptopstands.co.uk/
http://desks4computers.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=CTGY&Store_Code=D&Category_Code=LT

Main Idea:
Start a product design and design consulting services firm in India. My role model firm is IDEO(http://www.ideo.com).

Brief Vision:
- Create a product design firm to provide solutions to all sectors, initially to start with software UI design and thereon to product design and design consultancy

Business Plan:
- Create a business plan and share it with Venture Capitalists/TREC-Step to get the funding
- Promote with Orkut, Email groups, small high impact ads
- Recruit top class brains(freelancers) - researchers, ethnographers, product designers
- Make products that will be ease the life of common man and make him more efficient
- Promote individual products using small spin offs
- Provide world class support and service
- Never compromise on product quality for monetary benefits

A central website to share people's ideas to everyday problems. The ideas to be shared with concerned authorities and help them fix the problems. Best ideas gets voted or appraised and awarded.

High level concepts:
- Users sign up
- Logs in
- User can do the following
1. Look for problems and post ideas
2. Create Problem Statements and ask for ideas
3. Users can vote for best ideas
4. Monthly ideas voted and best ones shared with concerned authorities

more to evolve.....

Just stuck up with this idea when i was climbing the stairs. How about fixing a call taxi online?

High level features:
- Sign in and pick a date and time
- Pick the starting point and destination
- Pick the type of call taxi
- Pay the charges online or take a number and pay it to the driver

Advantages:
- No endless waiting on phones and back and forth calls to the driver
- If the taxi is available it will be sent to the location immediately
- Prepaid amount
- Book and rest easy
- Just need one dedicated staff for updating site

Possible Issues:
- Need constant updates on taxi availability
- Pay model may not be easy
- traffic congestion may cause troubles

Other day i was discussing this point of 'Usability labs' in india. There were a lot of mails floating around asking for renting a usability lab in india and using it for testing purposes. There are a handful of labs right now and they arent being used to its full capacity and not every company wants to rent it out too. My company has a great usability lab but they would never rent it out for others to use.
So the best idea for now would be
- Build a nice lab. Try to get a venture capitalist for this
- Rent it out or lease it out.
- Get the best equipments
- Get a lab manager who can take care of the lab, equipments as well as the test environments
- Be creative and try to use the lab round the year

Over a period of time
- Open a couple more labs in other parts of upcoming cities

*** Think about it ***

Problem:
Very often when i am heads down into one of those interesting design problems i am trying to solve or reading an interesting material i get this....buzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz...and ta da ta da....ding dong...and all kinds of mobile ringtones that hit me straight at my head...oh my god...i lose the thread of my thoughts!

Solution:
Many solutions hit my head immediately. Some of them worth mentioning here :)
- a sound proof glass cubicle that is not pricey. It should be activated by a touch of a button and preferably it indicates others that i am in a NO DISTURB mode
- a simple solution - "Keep ur voices low. People are working at solving human problems!" posters hung at many locations. More comical posters at different places
- Sound filters or suppressors - a small device that could bring down the decibel of noise around me or rather convert them to musical notes! This could be a small pen like device that radiates radio waves in a particular radius
- as people enter the company a device sets their profiles to silent/beep modes. This cannot be turned back to any other mode unless they leave the premises. Mobile companies should be able to do this ( a read only mode for phones)
- a decibel meter that indicates the amount of noise pollution at every desk. When the overall noise level increases there is a crazy sounding siren! a little harsh but may work in the initial stages of bringing in discipline

ok thats all i have for now!

I tend to lose my nerve once a day when i use bad products or bad services. Quoting my good friend dhans - ' a problem is an oppurtunity in disguise'. For eg., For india, the problem of population overgrowth can otherwise be seen as a nation full of resourceful youth and intelligent beings. This attributes to the current economic boom and the perennial growth in IT.

So let me highlight some of my day to day irritations and the corresponding expected solution from my end

Problem 1:
- Waiting for my milkman indefinetly
Solutions:
a) A service to provide milk at 5am in a safe and round edged basket to save it from cats and other pets
b) Milk to be provided by tubes as gas is being done in US and other countries(in indian cities eg., mumbai! so why not bangalore!?)
c) Fresh milk cream that stays fresh for a week sparing me the pain of waiting
d) Milkman drops milk carton in the box and i get to see a white lamp glow in my kitchen - wow!

Problem 2:
Its raining heavily and a differently abled person(who could not see) stumbles with all the new potholes from previous night rain.
Solutions:
a) A robo dog to walk him
b) A cost effective speaking walk stick with nice good sensors for pothole detection in a close radius. Eg., "pothole in 2meters. Take cues from GPS system's navigation cues

Problem 3:
Peak hour traffic. No lane discipline. Irritating commuters.
Solutions:
a) Listen to soothing music
b) Relax signs and calm down sign boards at signals
c) Interesting announcements at signals
d) Roads to follow standards(refer US road plans. Why they are too good)
e) Privatise road laying with L&T or such firms
f) Severe the laws for violating lane disciplines
g) Road laying for dummies
h) Sufficient highways and flyovers to ease traffic
i) Cameras in every signal to catch violators. No police sergeant should be collecting fine
j) Monitor traffic by cameras

More to come....