Free Your "I haven't got time/Skills" ideas

let's just think about how it intertwines with micropresentations and possible demos. but guess they're all about different things and serve different purposes.

Thanks to everyone who attended, and special thanks to the idea creators, and the three lovely people who made some great notes during the session. I've combined their notes here:

The Format

• Bring people forward in room - makes it more communal
• 4 minute 'sessions' - 1 minute to 'pitch' the idea/wish, and 3 minutes of Q&A
• Used a visual timer on the screen in front of the group
• Volunteers to take notes (worked really well, as 3 different viewpoints made for great aggregate notes)
• Someone to pick out contributors in the Q&A section, and generally manage flow

1) Paul and Dave's Idea: attend a concert, and be able to immediately buy the mp3/photoset of the show you attended.

This has worked in the past (tapes, CDs)
Works well for artists; commercially, artists keep the profits from concert merchandising
Would be sent to you next day (or that evening?!)
The personalisation is an important fact (I was there that night! etc)

Suggestions:

• you could go online and the concerts archived; you could choose the event you were at
• suggestions - voicestamp with the name of the purchaser (as 'gentle DRM') in the same as PDFs on demand have your name in the footer
• Some of this is already available on itunes (e.g. Glastonbury)

2) Ville's Idea; a way to make his notebook smarter

Takes physical notes in paper notepads (moleskines etc)
Wants a 'smarter' notebook; something (or someone?) that keeps track of topics, dates, 'who said what' etc.
It should pull conversations together
Allows the 'hardware' of the notebook to be transformed into the software of information

Suggestions:

• Evernote
• The 'Hipster PDA' - more easily manageable sets of cards...easily transcribed/organised?
• Scan the notebooks and send them to a secretarial service for typing up?

3) Marjolein's Idea; Business cards that take audio notes

Business cards are too forgetful.
What if a business card could record a small piece of audio?
Used to record a memory of the person/event/moment giving the card.

Suggestions:

• Lines on the back of the card - put lines on the back of the card, to be used for taking notes
• Why note encode some info in a semacode (2D barcodes that hold urls, text, etc) on the card? Problem with semacodes is that the info is fixed.
• Paul talked about a birthday card that allows the sender to record a few seconds of audio, and it plays back to the recipient.
• So, the technology (and price point) probably makes this viable
• Someone mentioned you pay thousands to attend conferences, etc. so the investment in these cards would be viable?
• What about adding notes on your website, tied to the card's url?

4) Marcius's idea; get rid of business cards - contact info on web sites

Your blog should be your 'card'
People you've met could download your details using microformatted widgets on your blog page
Readers could leave their impressions/details for you on your own page - so the exchange of card details becomes virtualised

Suggestions:

• vcf address book format (Outlook, Apple Address Book, etc) doe this in a transportable file
• vcf doesn't allow retrieval as well as microformats

5) Ton's Idea; a second generation RSS reader

Wants to tag individual feeds and present a visual flow of topics of conversation.
Focus on keeping track of people
Needs to have an offline mode, as Ton travels a lot
It should allow the collecting of opinions; So Ton can flag, and then track a group of authors, but only specific blog entries around a topic
Metaphor: group people into circles (like an onion)

Suggestions:

• Marjolein has a friend who works/creates 'BluFridge' (her preferred RSS reader) and she will see if he has ideas.
• Newsgator does some of this (and is offline)

6) Jeppe's Idea; independent storage of Instant Messaging conversations

Uses variety of services (gtalk, skype, etc) to have important conversations
Doesn't want a 3rd party to 'own passwords for my services', so the archiving must be controllable (installable?)

Suggestions:

• mebo (?) does archiving of multiple services through their web interface (but is 3d party)

7) Kaspar's Idea; a website where you can suggest ideas

www.wecollaborate.org
Lets people (amateurs/professionals) suggest ideas for big and small problems (climate change downwards!)
Focus is on ideas that have societal impact
Lets people partner and grow ideas
How can we make this work commercially?

Suggestions:

• Like Dell's Ideastorm and Starbucks customer suggestions - great sites (e.g. Starbucks top customer suggestion is 'coffee ice cubes'

8) Martin's Idea; a completely visual coding tool for weblog creation

Doesn't like coding, likes drawing
Wants a program that lets him 'draw code' to build weblog templates/functions
e.g. pull in a 'tag cloud' object, and simply stretch it's proportions
The visual management of things like CSS placement within blog templates

Suggestions:

• Australian app (?) that is a visual blogging tool; a CMS that enables drag and drop (not sure if applicable to WordPress)

9) Guy's idea: a collaboration app for the Wii

reviewing products dragging items around in realtime between multiple devices
a 'game' for the wii
reviewing house plans in 3D
teams of product designers to review 3D models
uses the wiimote to move and manipulate the models
leverages the teamplay function of the wii

Suggestions:

• Webex enables people to use Autocad within the application