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Tuesday 22 April 2008

Replace CNN/Fox News tickers with relevant user generated content.

Make an overlay for a TV viewer (e.g. for mythTV) that overwrites the annoying ticker bar in CNN (etc.) with alternative content. e.g. fact checking from politifact.com or putting stories in perspective: "although flooding in this small US town is tragic, there are currently 3000 major floods on earth affecting 160M people" etc.

Stories rotate so frequently that a small group of people could create and schedule the content. The service could even sell google adwords in the ticker.

Update: voice analysis for spotting lies would fit nicely in here too.

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Tuesday 15 April 2008

Cute Mini Elephants

Body shape variation in dogs as a training set for Genotype / Phenotype transformation.

Sequence the genomes of all the true breeding varieties of dogs. The physical dimensions of the same set of dogs is also recorded. Now let some algorithm extract the correlations between shape and genome.

An ideal outcome will be an application where the input is an initial dog shape and associated genome and a desired dog shape. The output will be a new genome.

If these growth rules are conserved across species then the same application might be able to design a cute little short legged dog sized elephant.

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Tuesday 8 April 2008

Google Road Trip

EBay for transport.

- You plan a route on Google Maps and click the "Road Trip" button.
- You see a list of other people who are making the same journey, some have space in their car, and some want to join somebody who does.
- Companies can use the service to offer transport for defined journey legs, for a set price.

E.g. A taxi company can give a price from the city center to the airport; a flight charter company can give a price from Miami to Cuba; a guy who commutes every morning can sell seats in his car.


As the service matures more legs will be entered and eventually Google will be able to give you total journey prices comprising multi legs. Ebay style reputation feedback will keep folks reliable.

2011: I type London to Sydney in Google maps. The "Road Trip" options include:
- BA business class direct, 1000GBP.
- A 3 stop journey using Aeroflot and a buss leg between Ulan Bator and Yinchuan, 400GBP.
- An adventure by container ship to Cairo, passenger seat in a Rally car to Dubai, and a final leg on a jump seat in a FedEx plane, 200GBP


Update: this would fit well for a company offering something like this air-taxi idea.

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Cyberhavior