The problem with ideas is it takes forever and a day to build and then if you want to launch, hope you get to the market before someone has built it/sold it and offer refurbs of them.
Following up my blog about the iPhone, I wanted to blog about Mophie, who make iPod accessories. The company asked attendee’s for designs from iPod to iPhone. They received about 150 ideas in four hours, from those ideas, they choose 3 that they would market and pitch. Here are they final 3 concepts. They plan on producing these and selling them in the upcoming months.
*Side note* I just bought a new shuffle to listen to podcast,music,whatever on the commute to work. My 4gen iPod was just to big and dying on me. The battery was not lasting as long and the files were getting corrupted. The shuffle is awesome and was easy to pickup. I stopped by the tekserve on 23rd street in NYC on my lunch break. I didn’t have much time to check out the place, but they did have another part of the puzzel I was looking for. I not only bought a shuffle, but I also picked up usb stereo adaptor. This adaptor is great cause I don’t want to carry another cable and “dock”.
Back to the idea to prototype. Since I am a Computer Scientist, I spend a lot of my free time coding. I have many website ideas that I think about during the day and some that keep me up at night. The problem with coding is I spend a lot of time to make a database and a web application connected and wrote similar code a million times.
I posted a while back (has it been that long?) how I started to code with ruby. During the holiday season I got a couple of gifts of Ruby books. I have been reading them and attended my first ruby meetings. I stopped by the nycruby meeting and heard 2 great presentations. Since then I have been thinking of my ideas and learning how ruby on rails can make my idea a prototype in 10mintues.
I plan on spending this weekend as a “codefest”. I have 2 website that I NEED TO BUILD. One of the websites I build in PHP, but its crap code and wanted to see if I could “build it”. (Always build 2, the first is for learning, the second is for shipping) and the second is well, more for a friend. I hope to get 80% of the code done so I can finish it this Tuesday. The nycruby meeting is also hosting a codefest this Tuesday. So I hope to have 2 finish products by next week. (hope!).
Since this post is all about ideas to prototype, I wanted to add my own venture capitalist ideas. I will be offering up $1,000 (hopefully 1 prize every month depends on project) for someone who has an idea AND can either build it or an idea for a web site AND wants to start a company. I know myself I am fueled by money and if someone offered me money to build something I can do in a weekend I would. So let’s see some comments, post some ideas/things you might want to start up. If the idea is amazing, but above the $1000 mark please contact and we can talk.
Lets make this happen!
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embedded systems had a really good article on ‘time to money’ this month. now i wish i hadn’t thrown it out (in an effort to have less crap). The gist of the article was that rushing a product to market can be just as bad as getting there too slow. Rushing to market can mean a crappy product that makes you look bad or it could be a great product in a market that isn’t ready for it. Timing is everything, getting there now isn’t. All of you Murch Corp prize recipients out there keep that in mind when you are designing your products/ideas.
http://www.embedded.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=196702178