FileTags: tag your files for better organization and retreival
February 15th, 2009
Entry Filed under: Ideas
$name='Idea Name'; $bday="Idea Birthdate";Ever since i have been using computers, one problem has been particularly vexing - classifying files for better organization and recall. Currently all systems whether Mac or PCs allow files to be named and classified under directories. However, what if you have files that could be classified under two different directories. For example, i would like to keep all my health care informatics papers in one folder classified by journal name. But i would also like to keep the file in another directory for a specific project. The only way is either duplicate the file in both the directories or to create symbolic links. But what if you wanted to classify the file in many different ways - the above two solutions would become unscalable.
A better way would be to have the ability to “tag” files and folders just as we tag so many social media items on the web. It would be great, if one could just right click a file or folder and add tags to describe its content and then be able to search files through a tag search. Such an application, lets call it FileTag could be very useful in making document organization simpler and scalable.
Update:
Read on the Techcrunch about the Tag Application for the Mac that does something like the imaginary FileTag. Time to go checkout it.
A great itch. Being able to watch cricket highlights online
August 23rd, 2008
Entry Filed under: Ideas
$name='Idea Name'; $bday="Idea Birthdate";CricketHighlights.com
The cricket world cup was up in 2003 and then unless you bought some
expensive dish network subscription there were hardly any options to
watch the games. Online videos were non existent. And even if one
could watch the game at some friends house, the time zone difference
between USA and cricket playing nations was such that one would have to
watch the game are really odd hours (i remember the world cup games
used to start something like at 3 am). So i always used to wonder,
wudnt it be just easier if one could watch a 30 minute highlight of a
cricket game (the one-day versions are 8 hrs long) online?
Solution Goals:
1. To develop a website, www.crickethighlights.com (i still have the domain) to showcase the game highlights
2. To develop a software solution that would automatically extract
highlight segments from the video broadcast. This would require fair
bit of video processing but wudnt be terribly difficult. One could
check the signal for the score and determine points where a player gets
out or hits a four or a six (just think of them to be like home runs in
baseball).
Status:
1. I didnt do much till 2005. then found a digital video processing
guy who was doing a PhD in the area of video summarization. Sounded
like a perfect guy to build the technology. After many mths of trying,
we cudnt really get the software going. Mainly because he got busy with
his PhD.
2. 2006. Pitched crickethighlights.com as an online video site for a
b-school course on launching new ventures. The idea was very well
received but since this was not cricket and not baseball, the feedback
was that the market is too small.
3. Nothing since then. In 2007 the BCCI, announced it would develope
a portal for doing exactly this for the global cricket audience. Seemed
like this was the end of the road for crickethighlights. However, the
BCCI site never really took off
4. then Youtube happened and suddenly one could see 2-3 minute clips of the cricket games.
So perhaps, crickethighlights.com is now an idea that should retire to the deadpool. What do you think.
Right Here. Right Now. The need for proximity based p2p matching
June 23rd, 2008
Entry Filed under: Ideas
$name='Idea Name'; $bday="Idea Birthdate";Right Here. Right Now.
Consider the following scenarios.
1. You are riding the subway. You are getting bored and notice this gorgeous person sitting a few seats away from you. You are hesitant to start a conversation (ipod plugged in). Wudnt it be cool that you get a notice on your cellphone if the person matches your ideal date parameters.
2. You are a conference and are hoping to find some people interested in the area of mobile gaming. Wudnt it be cool that you can set a lookup request on a website/cellphone which would then send you a beep if a match was found within your proximity.
In our daily lives, we go on looking for someone or something, without realizing that sometimes they are right there, beside us. As they say, “first look in your backyard, before seeking out in the world.”
Gist: Right here, Right now is a technology solution that allow people to connect with one another based on common interests and physical proximity in a manner that doesnt violate the privacy of a user and one that is not overwhelming with irrelevant match notifications.
Differentiation: At this time i was thinking this, there seemed to be no real solutions out there. However, in recent years and with the launch of the 3-g iphone, such location based applications may already be in the pipeline.
Solution:
1. A website where a user creates a profile and specifies their cell phone number
2. Allows users to create several people lookup profiles. For example, create a profile for your ideal date, a profile for finding someone for a job, etc.
3. Track users location through the GPS coordinates in their phones. Or alternatively provide a bluetooth application that detects neighboring cellphones and beams the userids of the users to the server where a compatibility match is performed
4. If a match occurs (both users profiles match on atleast X% of criteria) ,then users get an alert to send a text for to initiate communication .