Big Ideas #9

Here's one I don't think anyone's thought of yet. With online ads becoming such a treasure trove for Google, web designers and owners, I think it will be a matter of time before Google or someone else will figure out that if you give (for free) someone a computer and the browser has a toolbar with contextual adds built into it, you could recoup your investment in no time flat. My little website generates about $2.00 per day from Google ads and I don't get that many hits (although I'd love to see that change). That's over $700 per year. It wouldn't take much to make sure the investment was paid for if you got someone's credit card number as security. I don't think many people would have a problem with that. If someone's surfing went below a predetermined amount, you could charge their card for $5.00 per day for every day below that amount. If the charge bounced, you could warn the person that the machine would be disabled if they didn't take care of the problem. Obviously, the system would have to be locked to prevent people from installing another browser although many people who would take this deal wouldn't do that anyway.

Big Ideas #8

I've got a couple of Big Ideas I've been toying with lately. One of them involves food and the other music. Throw in some wine and women and you've got a party. The one about food has come to me over the last couple of weeks as a consequence of eating hamburgers at fast food restaurants that all basically taste the same. I think what people are looking for is something along the same lines Popeye's did with chicken. Burgers need to be jazzed up. I've been experimenting with some seasoning blends and other ingredients and I'm very close. It turns out that less is more, though. The original batch I made was great and I pretty much just winged it. I figured with my culinary skills (I've been in the foodservice industry since I was in college), I would be able to improve upon the original recipe. Well, it turns out, the mixture I'm working on just needs a bit of salt and a touch of pepper(I'm not telling whether it's black, red, white or purple) to bring the flavors together. I'm going to make another batch this weekend when we go to Lafayette and see how it goes. I feel really good about this one.
The music idea actually came to me sometime ago and is more just putting a few things together that already exist to create a portal for musician's to get feedback on their music. There is one company that will rate songs in a objective manner using mathematical formulas and compare them against actual hit songs. They claim 100% success for their corporate clients. What I want to do is buy ratings in bulk (at a discount) and then offer them to independent artists individually at a smaller discount than the company's published rate. Then if one of the submissees actually has a song that rates highly, I could broker a deal for them with a publisher, producer, or record company. The entire site would be similar to MP3.com but the songs would be categorized by genre and then ranked by their empirical rating. This is going to take sometime to develop so stay tuned