Recently in Business Ideas Category

For the past 6 months I've been discussing various telco/ISP companies with a friend of mine by email. The great thing about email is that it's easy. The bad thing is that the discussions tend to get trapped in our respective mailboxes and it's also interspersed with cat pictures. I thought there must be a better tool.

What we need is something that we can share links via, and then comment on said links, in private. And the resulting archive should be searchable. And it should be convenient to use -- email & web interfaces please.

I'd heard of Yammer being popular in the enterprise space and surely our basic needs would be a small subset of their epic feature list. I gave their basic account a try (it's free). The email interface seemed to fail to accept an email reply to a post, with my comment showing up 6 hours later. Maybe I caught them at a bad time but as someone who doesn't need the full enterprise suite it seems like a slightly-clumsier-but-private-Facebook. The attraction of something like Yammer is that most of their customers pay, and it's now Microsoft owned, so I have some confidence that they wouldn't disappear overnight.

Maybe I am aiming too high, we only have simple needs. Google Groups should do what we want. And it does... except the new Groups UI is so butt ugly that even as a nerd who values function over form I can't bring myself to use it. I was going to include a screenshot but I don't want to hurt your eyes. I'd go so far as to say that Yahoo! Groups looks better, ouch.

On to Facebook. I've been using it with a group of high school friends to share geeky/tech links and it works well. The email interface works well. And IMHO the Facebook UI is both functional and pretty.

The only weakness in Facebook groups is that it won't index the content of shared URLs -- this makes search a little trickier than it otherwise could be. In addition, both Facebook and Google Groups don't index keywords in URLs unless they are "-" separated. (It astounds me that in 2012 some news sites are still using "_" when "-" has been "best practice" for a decade?).

Pinboard reputedly has one of the best archiving features around but it doesn't support groups. The two of us could share a single Pinboard account but that makes discussion weird.

I've been a Diigo user for several years and I like it. Unfortunately whilst it has private group support it doesn't support discussion associated with a bookmark.

It feels a little weird that with social startups popping up every 5 seconds there's really only one workable option for what seems like a common(?) use case.

I'm on a bit of a comparison rant at the moment. :)

Recently I was looking at credit cards. In poking around the various bank sites and infochoice.com.au it became obvious that deciding on the best credit card plan for oneself is not exactly an easy task. It shouldn't be a difficult task but its complicated by two things:
1. lack of any good way to compare credit card plans in terms of features, rates etc
2. lack of any good way to play "What If" with your own credit card usage

Issue 1. is partially solved by RateCity which utilises data collated by CANNEX. The interface could do with some improvement but its basically functional.

Issue 2. I've not seen anyone tackle but I propose that it could be solved quite nicely in conjunction with the data provided by CANNEX. How about a service where the user provides their latest 6 months worth of credit card statements for analysis by some magical computer program which will take into account stuff like your monthly spend, monthly repayments, monthly remaining (debit) balance and then lookup the CANNEX database to suggest the plan on which you'd be paying the lowest fees/interest.

Similar issues are found when selecting a mobile phone plan for example (should I choose a capped plan or pre-paid, or post-paid, or ...), and even regular fixed line plan so the same idea could apply - upload your monthly statements and let magical computer find you the cheapest plan. Number crunching is what computers are good at afterall...

The business model behind such a service seems pretty straightforward. Given the amount of money the typical credit consumer could save you could probably charge a fee for the service but I propose that you'd be much better off giving the service away for free. Instead charge the banks a referral fee since they already have massive advertising budgets.

The best part about this idea is that it doesn't have significant startup costs and its not technically difficult - one for any budding computer science student to have a bash at (and if anyone would like some advice implementing this feel free to email me).

Some implementation notes: for the privacy conscious you could simply provide a web form for the user to type in their numbers, but for those who are willing you could totally scrape that data straight out of the user's online bank account(s) as most banks provide ability to download statements into Excel spreadsheets, CSV etc.

I was recently looking to buy an underwater case for my Fuji Finepix F31fd (which BTW I highly recommend for anyone after a point-n-shoot). As I was going to Hong Kong for work, and having recently purchased a couple of cameras from online shops in HK which was heaps cheaper than buying from local shops I thought I'd try and find my underwater case on a HK site. I wasn't able to find any shop selling it for less than AUD250 which is about the going rate here anyway. From the US I could find it for about AUD180, but with shipping it gets upwards of AUD200.

Whilst in HK Colin took me to the shop behind dcfever.com who had my case selling for HKD1100 (~ AUD170). Ace. But why couldn't I find this online?

I guess the answer has something to do with the site being entirely in Chinese. And shame on me for not knowing my mother tongue. :)

So here comes International Shopping Comparison. A solution to my problem would be to have an aggregator that scrapes local product info & prices in Chinese, but has a UI in English. Of course extending this idea beyond Chinese<->English leads us to the generalised concept of product price aggregation and comparison that would be implemented in any local language feeding a front-end UI that supports multiple end-user languages. For bonus points such a site should take into account what currency the user would like to spend (defaulting to the user's current location), and return prices taking into account current exchange rates as well as postage. Welcome to the Global Economy.

The thing that makes this an entirely solvable problem is that most products have the same product code in many countries if not worldwide. Hence even if the product info, brochures etc may need some translation work a product code and price are pretty easy to do.

If only I spoke more than English!