Career builder.

A year ago, when I was a student, I was wondering how to get a great job. I sent emails to guys from Microsoft, I was seeking guys from Google, and I talked to guys from Validio (one of the best companies here, at Kharkov). What should I do? What should I read? How can I become your employee? Recently one guy approached to me with exactly the same questions.

What a heck? We are living in the era of connectivity and there is still no common place where potential employees could contact employers directly (without annoying them). Well, at least I don't know one.

Idea: a site, where employers (Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, EA, Yet-Another-Great-Company) could put their "programs", and potential employees could participate in that programs. Initially employees are working alone. They are reading proper books, developing proper programs or whatever. If a candidate looks perspective, an employer could assign to him or her a mentor.

If you decided to create something like this, I will be glad to help your great project :).

PS: The image is taken from the NIFCO site. All copyrights belong to them.

Droodle-Digg

What is a droodle? Droodles are a kind of cartoon popularized in the U.S. by Roger Price's 1953 book Droodles.

Can you guess what is displayed on these images:
Simply hover the mouse and you'll get the answers ;).

Now that you know what droodles are, we can move to the "Droodle-digg" idea: Imagine a site where droodles are provided by your visitors. Anyone can upload a new droodle-image and wait for the comments. Visitors leave their guesses and mark others' comments as funny or boring. The funniest comments are moved to the top of the comments list.

Hope the idea is clear enough to get your own droodle-digg project started ;). Let me know when you are done and I'll join to your community :).

Distributed JS Supercomputer

The idea is as simple as crazy: create a JavaScript library to perform distributed computing. Put this library on sites with low postbacks rate, e.g. Google Reader or YouTube.com. While users are watching videos your JavaScript library will search the next biggest prime number or extraterrestrial civilizations.

Yes, there will be many things to solve. Here are the most obvious:

1. Security. Client-side computation can not be considered as reliable. But you can easily check correctness of computation by giving the same portion of tasks to several different clients. Furthermore there are many problems where it is hard to calculate an answer but easy to check whether specified answer is valid.
2. Performance. JavaScript is not multithreaded. But you can give small portions of time to your "worker" functions...

Anyway, you guys are much smarter than me. Maybe you could improve this idea ;)?

How do they see?

Wouldn't it be great to see the world by others eyes? Just imagine an add-on to Youtube where you can watch videos as animals do :)...

This is not easy to implement, and I don't know how can this bring money, but I know for sure this should be spectacular experience!

"Inspired By" Portal

We people often develop new things being inspired by our "heroes". For example, there are dozen of authors who are inspired by Ray Bradbury's poems, and they write own stories while they are under inspiration. I know several programmers who create their software being inspired by Google. I know several guys who write their music being inspired by Yann Tiersen...

So, the idea is to create a platform (a site) where people could share their "inspired by" creations. This is not a fan site. The main idea is development and sharing of own stuff.

Social feedback.

This is really simple idea on how to get better feedback about your service: make a public feedback page and allow your users vote for others' suggestions.

You can even create a standalone service that will offer consumers this kind of feedback pages via open API.

I thought to write more clarifications and evidences that this idea is viable and good, but then decided to keep this up to you. Hope the idea is clear. But if you have any questions or you see some drawbacks - you are welcome to the comments :)!

aLive Dictionary.

Recently Google has announced Ajax Language API. So, I've implemented my aLive Dictionary :). This is a very first approach but you can check it out here. I've tested it under Firefox 2.0/Opera 9.5, and I know there are some bugs under IE6.0/IE7.0. Anyway I would highly appreciate any comments :)!

Hope you enjoy it.

Podcast service.

I know why I have no comments in my blog: You have no time to visit this page, read it and certainly write an answer. That's easy and is okay.

So why can't we eliminate these unnecessary steps "Visit" and "Read", leaving only a "Post Comment"? We have some time traveling to work and back... Honestly, I prefer listening audio books while walking back home (if there is no good company to share my walk).

Here is the idea: Provide real-time podcasting service to bloggers/news sites. In the morning site visitors could select blogs/news/articles they would like to listen to and receive narrated version in the evening. Or visitors could subscribe to audio-version of a blog (eliminating "Visit" step).

You can outsource this service to India/xUSSR/China. Of course narrators should have great speaking skills.

How can this bring money? Easy: context audio ads are more than suitable here...

Unfortunately I cannot give you narrated version of this post... yet :).

Hi!

Roots of this idea are described in the previous post. I truly believe that:

• Either it will be implemented by Google soon
• Or it is already implemented by someone else, but I didn't heard about it yet.
  

aLive Dictionary

The idea is to provide on the Google's dictionary page not only results of translation but also the most relevant picture to the word being translated from the Google's image search (or form the Flickr, if they could negotiate an agreement). Furthermore Google could provide an image that corresponds to the query in the source language and one in the destination language.

I like this idea because:

• Remember foreign word is much easier when you have an image corresponding to the word in your head.
• Using dictionary becomes more attractive: you never know what internet can offer you.
• Google can use this technique to improve their Google Image Labeler.
  

I don't like this idea because:

• Image uses space on your monitor. And not all people may find them useful.
  

Okay, here is an example. For say, you wanna know what does "Вдохновение" mean. And here are result:

Вдохновение	Inspiration

Now you have an association to this word, and its harder to forget it ;).

Hi!

The most important part of this post is here:

Happy Valentines day :)!

La Rochefoucald said:
True love is like a ghost; everyone talks of it, but few have met it face to face.
But I wish you to meet this "ghost" everyday, again and again - it worth your time to find and recognize it!

---

This idea is really wonderful (in my humble opinion ).

aLive Book

I love reading books. But I can remember book better if there are illustrations of the most significant moments. The idea is to insert a picture from flickr.com or google.com to the text, while book is being reading (online, of course). The exact picture can be fetched by keywords in the text (which should be marked). For sure, algorithm of choosing "right" picture is far from being easy, but we're developers - easy tasks are out of our goals and plans! Okay, the illustration of this is right here. The keywords of this post are: idea, books. Search via flickr.com gave the following result:

He-he. Now you will remember this post better :). So do I. I will develop this further.

Hi!

This is not a breath-taking idea, and it could be already implemented, but nevertheless it deserves couple lines of text here.

Update manager

This a client-server application, which integrates with OS, and alerts user when new software/hardware updates are available for him or her. This application should cover as many applications as possible. Software developers could use Update Manager's server to inform users about updates or plans. Moreover, Update Manager can optionally inform owner about program- vendor- related news.

Why this application will be useful for users? It's easy - no need to update software one by one. Everything is centralized.

You can object with (at least) one word: Privacy. Yep, but if vendor of this application is trusted, like Google (or Microsoft if you wish) then I see no problems :).

---

No, something is wrong with this idea. For some reasons I don't like it in the end of the post :). Maybe you could proceed with it and get golden eggs.

Hi :).

Here is the idea for today. I think, the era of social networks is coming to its peak, but there is still great potential. I believe we'll have something like profession networks soon.

The idea is to join professionals in some areas (IT, please) and customers (yes, like rentacoder.com but more social). Professionals will join prof. networks because they could get here skills improvement, develop and share their ideas with colleagues/friends and certainly earn respect and money.

Ok, I have more thoughts on this, and truly believe in success of this idea. I'll share them probably soon (if you will be still interested, of course :)).

Hello again!

I can generate ideas from nothing! By the way, talking about nothing: It would be great to have a (shareware?) program which do nothing. The trick is right here. Your program (site) might have a label on the main screen:

I'm doing nothing, so feel free to turn off the monitor, take a day off, relax, visit your parents or your favorite place and be sure: I won't do anything!

This will work as psychological air.

And how can you get ROI > 1? It's easy - people will be thankful for the free moments, your program presents for them. Ha-ha, you can do even better: while this program is trial it does nothing,but after 30 days of usage it could start doing something :) (format drive, please!).

Hi :)!

This is my very first post here, and I'm happy, doing this in English.

I have a suggestion to the Google (which won't be ever heard, but that doesn't matter): Launch a space ship out there, into the deep space, process pictures and create real-time video online. It will be great to fly with Google because not everyone of us would see the real space. Furthermore, when Google will find aliens, dudes-from-space (and I'm sure, it will) - that would be great advertisement for the company :). E.g. aliens could think that entire Earth is named "Google" :).

What do you think?