3 Strange Startup Ideas
by Kendall Clark
I don’t really know if these are strange (read, “unusual” or “novel”), and there are probably 5 companies already working on each one, but anyway:
First, cheap, lightweight user studies for development groups based on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.
IMO, there are only two ways to build excellent user-facing (that is, usable) software: either you get extremely lucky (or you’re just building a variant of something that’s known to be usable) or you user-test the crap out of what you’re doing, in an incessant cyle of test-refactor-retest.
But user tests are tedious to setup and manage, such that most development teams just skip them. That failure to overcome tedious inertia leads to a lot of unusable junk software.
So how about building a startup that gave development teams an easy way to arrange arbitrarily sized user studies by harnessing the person power at Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service? Cheap, easy, and willing are the watchwords of user studies; and 2 cents per task is not free, but pretty damn cheap. And from what I’ve read recently, Mechanical Turk workers sound better than the average user study participant.
Second, interactive fiction SDK (and associated cloud-based hosting, infrastructure, etc) for Web-based games. Three facts: (1) I stopped — dead, cold turkey, never to return again — gaming the day I discovered the Web in January, 1994. I can’t be the only one. (2) Lots of movies and TV series now use the Web as a kind of game canvas — reminiscent of interactive fiction games, back in the day — to extend their fictional worlds onto the real Web. (3) Interactive fiction SDKs and languages, like Inform 6 and 7, are still going strong.
Note: by Web-based games, I don’t mean Flash games that run in-browser. And I don’t mean MMORPGs. I mean games where the primary activity is browsing, much like the primary activity in interactive fiction is looking, moving, picking things up, and putting them down.
Conclusion? A startup that built an SDK and Web-based infrastructure, as well as browser plugins, to allow people to easily develop Web-based games similar to interactive fiction. People already occasionally turn the Web into theme-based scavenger hunt games, so different game forms are certainly possible.
Third, commodity UAV-based sensor networks with data fusion tools for disposable, dynamic airborne security. Build a startup to commoditize UAV technology — including hardware and software — for building lightweight, disposable sensor networks of UAVs, together with data fusion and command-and-control sofware platforms. This would be applicable for ad hoc event security, security for gated communities and other fixed-location high-value assets, as well as stuff like livestock management, population sampling scientific work, etc.
I refrain from judging the ethical or legal or regulatory viability of this last one and present it merely as a kind of thought experiment—I predict that it’s coming very soon, whether we want it or not.