While working on one of his inventions, a colleague asked Thomas Edison why most of his inventions failed. Thomas Edison replied something along the lines of, “None of my inventions have failed, I’ve just proven hundreds of methods that don’t work.” I love this quote. If Edison had quit working on his inventions when one after another “failed”, he wouldn’t have discovered the light bulb, the phonograph, and the kinetoscope (a small box that played moving pictures).
I enjoy constantly developing and refining new ideas, trying to find new ways to look at everyday things. At first I just tried to store my memories in my head, but as I got new ideas, they pushed out old ones. I began organizing my ideas so I could revisit them whenever I had new thoughts.
I’m currently sitting at work bored out of my mind. So I decided I would open my main brainstorming file and expand on some of my ideas. Some of these ideas may seem completely off the wall, but with a little “lateral thinking“, maybe one of these will turn into the next light bulb.
If you would like to follow along, I’ve attached a small example of one of my mind maps. I’ll explain each one as best as possible. Don’t you go stealing my ideas or I will find you….
Digital Avenue
Digital Avenue is my baby. It encompasses my Web Design, Graphic Design, and Audio Production. I won’t go into too much detail with this one. If you want to read more about where it came from, what we’ve done, and where we’re going, read my blog I already wrote about it – “Evolution of An Idea: 8 Years Later“
Digital Avenue Music
Digital Avenue Music is one of those “long term” plans. I have a degree in Audio Production Engineering and I would like to actually put it to use. I’ve been doing small recording projects, but my long term plan is to acquire adequate funding to take it to a much larger scale. I would like to open a full size, state of the art, digital recording studio. Rochester is a town of 100,000 people with the closest recording studio thirty minutes away, and the closest quality affordable studio over an hour away.
I always hear people pull the “this town has no good music” card, and for the most part it doesn’t. The problem is there’s no opportunity for it. No venues, no support, no advertisement, no radio stations, and no recording possibilities. A state of the art recording studio should be a step in the right direction.
Petopia
If you know me, you know I’ve grown up in the hotel industry (Read: Lodging Industry Survival Guide). In a town like Rochester, with IBM, Mayo, and Saint Mary’s, a hotel is as self sufficient as The Spork. If you’ve ever had to travel with a pet you know it’s a pain in the ass. You get stuck on the top floor with all the smokers, you don’t get housekeeping service, you get charged extra, and more. This idea has two different ideas within it:
- One idea is opening a hotel designed for travelers to bring pets. It could have cool stuff like indoor and outdoor parks (seasonal), toys in the rooms, daily walking services (while you’re at your appointments), a gift shop for the pets and humans alike, continental breakfast for the dogs and humans, and much more. Of course no expense would be spared for the humans staying either.
- Another way to look at, is have a hotel that has it’s own selection of animals. When a guest checks in, they can look at the available animals and pick one to adopt for the night. Of course with this one, you run into all kinds of weird things, so the humans supplying their own pets may be a better idea.
Cereal 7’s
I think this idea has been done, but I still think it would be awesome. Rochester has an extremely large population of 18-25 year olds. This demographic will only grow when our own 4 year college opens. These crowds are into “trendy” things, like hanging out at Starbucks, Barnes and Noble, and pretty much any place with wi-fi and open at odd hours.
The idea is to offer something quirky, like cereal. Cereal? Yeah, Cereal. Offer every type of cereal you can imagine. Offer it in dispensers. Customers pick up a bowl, walk down a line of every kind of cereal you can imagine, mix and match whatever they want, pick from a selection of milk (whole, strawberry, chocolate, etc), and enjoy your own cereal creation!
On top of the cereal, the experience would be complete with a “trendy” vibe, including free Wi-Fi, open in the late hours of the night/early morning, bean bag chairs, those types of things.
Bargain A Bagel
This would be an exercise in a business plan with extremely little overhead costs, capitalizing on the “long tail economy“. This is also a similar business model to the “Cereal 7’s” above, except with it’s own unique “thing”. We would typically operate as the average bagel shop. Sell variations of bagels and spreads.
The catch is, once a week, we will hold a “Bargain for a bagel” event. Bagels would be assigned a monetary value (known to the employees but not the customers). Customers will bring in all their useless junk and exchange for an equal value in bagels. We would obviously need a cap on this, or people will be trading old cars for 10,000 bagels or something.
Say someone wants to trade a junked out (but working) TV. An employee would estimate the TV to be worth $15 (this value is never given to the customer). The employee also knows the arbitrary values on our bagels (again, the customer does not). So the employee says “I’ll give you 6 blueberries, 2 plains, and 2 strawberrys for that TV” (a value equal to $15 which is what we valued the TV at). Then the Customer can “bargain” and say he wants more blueberries, no plains, and wants us to kick in some spread, eventually reaching an agreement.
Once a month, or maybe quarterly or something, we would hold a auction or “garbage sale” and sell all the items we’ve collected for cash. We would essentially come out even on the whole thing (or we could skew the values in our favor to turn a profit), but it would be a cool niche that would draw attention to our business.
Rochester Guide dot Net
RochesterGuide.net is already a live project of mine. It was a developmental project I originally built using e107 hierarchy to develop a “Family site” for my family to stay in contact. Once I realized the networking capabilities, I expanded it into Rochester Guide. Rochester Guide was originally developed as a “social networking site” for Rochester and surrounding areas. I soon dropped the social networking and turned it into simply a database of where everything is in town.
At the outset of this project I had bigger visions than I have been able to pull off. The idea is a great idea, it’s just been done over and over again. I was unable to develop anything to distinguish myself from the competitors, who are sponsored by the Rochester Convention Bureau, meaning they don’t have to compete for their business.
RochesterGuide.net is currently at a crossroads. I’ve lost nothing in the venture, I’m exactly even on it right now. I can hang on and ride the “long tail” and try to develop something to set me apart from the rest, or simply close up shop and move on to the next project. I’ll make that decision within the month.
Update: I cashed my chips in and closed this project down February of 2009.
Unnamed News Feed Project
A few months ago I noticed a growing trend among many people, including my girlfriend. Over the last few years celebrity gossip has absolutely blown up. Do you remember 5 years ago when no one cared who was having kids, or who was seen leaving a shopping mall? People have babies, it happens. Now it seems everytime someone who has ever been in front of a camera is pregnant, its a national media event.
Accompanying the growth of celebrity coverage came hundreds of celebrity “gossip” sites. Now you could instantly see who was where, with who, and wearing what. With so many of these sites online, people spend countless hours checking, and rechecking every site every hour, in an endless loop.
Maybe it was out of neglect by my girlfriend (You heard me!) that I found a solution.
RSS Feeds are becoming extremely popular for just this reason. Except, for the average person RSS feeds can be hard to configure and use effectively.
I created a site which displays 4-6 of the most recent headlines from 18 hand picked celebrity sites. I compacted the display into a small, yet informative window. Aptly named, Celebrity Junkie (working title) allows “Junkies” to quickly browse for updates on each site. The instant a “celebrity blogger” posts an update, it automatically puts the headline on my site.
Currently it’s only set up to display the 18 sites I’ve found to be the most popular. Eventually it would be cool to expand this into other news areas such as Sports, Business, Financial, International, Art, Music, and so on. I would also like the option to add your own favorite sites and drag and drop them in your own order.
Personal Blog
This is what you’re currently reading! Exciting isn’t it? I started this a little over a month. Pretty much just to stroke my own ego. Not to much to say about this one, it’s just a fun personal hobby of my own to relay “important” information to the masses.
Art & Design Blog
I’m currently in the very early stages of developing a blog with my cousin Tyler, which will encompass a lot of things, including our passion for art and design. We’ll offer our tips and tutorials on everything from Photoshop, CSS, all the way to old school HTML tricks like blinking text!
We have a lot of cool ideas in store for this blog. We’re gonna try to take the typical design stuff, but apply our own personal touch to everything. We’ll be providing weekly features, some ideas include a “weekly font”, “weekly web sites” and things like that.
We’re also looking for people to join the team and help us get started out. If you’re interested in something like this, post a comment or e-mail me.
Blogphoria
Blogphoria was a once promising project I was working on, which inevitably was put on the backburner. You can still view a working version of it by clicking here.
I found a problem people were running into. People would get to a computer to “blog” about great ideas, or just to vent. Eventually the complications of the computer and software would create a wall between the writer and the content. I set out to develop a site that was easy to jump into, but still offered the depth some users would desire. What I came up with was Blogphoria.
Maybe I will revisit this project some day, or maybe it will simply spawn into a whole different idea.
Update: I closed this site down awhile ago, so the “working version” this refers too, is actually closed.
Conclusion
There you have it, a peek inside the lightning storm in my head. Some of these ideas sounded pretty good when I actually wrote more down about them, and some sounded even worse than they originally did. But the bottom line is each small idea may someday lead to something greater. None of these are “get rich quick schemes”, but many of them offer the opportunity to combine passions of mine, with real world long term business opportunities. Who knows where these plans may lead me in 5 years.
If only Doc Brown and the DeLorean would pull up outside, maybe I could check them out. Great Scott!
PS: If you liked any of these ideas, or have ideas of your own, I’d love to hear about it. Leave a comment or send me an e-mail.
Tags: Business, Inspiration, Life, Lizzy, Tyler
