RSSTwo more Athens Startup Weekend ideas
Put together on November 28, 2008 12:07 pm by Dimitris
What do you think?
The Athens Startup Weekend that I wrote about in my previous posts did not result for my part in just what I think is a great implementation of an idea (given the constraints). Prior to that weekend and caught in the everyday life (yes, we have at last officially found a house!) I didn’t have time to prepare pretty much anything for SUW – and obviously that’s the idea. An hour or so before the opening of the Microsoft Innovation Centre doors where the event was to be hosted I found myself sitting at a cafe nearby trying to think of something that could combine 3 basic elements: a. be useful b. be feasible in 2.5 days c. be low in required expertise (as you can’t really foretell what skills you will be teaming up with). I also could not help but adding that I wanted it to be relatively innovative – otherwise I’d have no drive in making it.
That’s how I came up with 3 ideas – the howsocial.ru one and these two:
TwitterTraffic is a simple project to ask Twitter users (or any sms user if possible) who are stuck in traffic to send a tweet (or an sms) to a service saying something like ‘the #traffic at Syndagma Sq is bad’. All this information would be collected at a single place where everyone could see what the traffic is like in a city – hopefully mashed up on a Google Maps website. Also, a user could tweet ‘#traffic at Syndagma Sq’ and be sent what other people had recently said as a reply for his question. Some revenue for the service could come by providing ads on the main website and location-based ads on the replies users get sent. Furthermore, to encourage incoming tweets, points could be awarded for each one which can then be cashed in for sponsor’s items. The whole concept can be given a green approach as well as it can be assumed to alleviate congestion and pollution while at the same time attract companies which are willing to improve their brand as sponsors. That was the idea I pitched at the Athens Startup Weekend and I was pleasantly surprised when a couple of people approached me with their view for it – an approval nod of sorts to look more into it.
VirtualPointsExchange the idea with the rather bad name came about as a continuation of the previous idea. Why should users bother sending in contributions to a service? My answer was to earn ’service points’. But what use are ’service points’ if they refer to a single limited service like TwitterTraffic? Wouldn’t it be great to have a way of exchanging points between online services? So you could spend some ‘points’ or currency you have e.g. in a recycling project running online to buy TwitterTraffic points. And if after that you get bored of TwitterTraffic just move over to the next thing – by buying points there. The main thing to get right here is an exchange rate – which would probably be the result of what the people using both services think the prices of each particular service’s points should be. A bit complicated but seems to fill a need.
(Photo by Polifemus)
tags: idea |
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