Immunity Research Company

Marketeers are spending billions on researching the quantitative and qualitative reach of their advertizing. Meanwhile they spend zillions on actually immersing us in an ever flowing and ever growing sea of commercial signals. My feeling is that more and more people are - consciously or unconsciously - refusing to undergo this bombardment any longer. They've developed an immunity against advertizing. Let's establish a research company that specializes in researching this phenomenon. I'm sure P&G, Unilever and Nestlé can fund our first ten million dollar assignment.

Christine Karman at BNRadio

Ideabroker-member Christine Karman was interviewed by Paul van Liempt, Herbert Blankenstein and Richard Lamb on january 29th at BNR Newsradio.

Business from fun

I always liked the strategy of starting something you like yourself, and eventually it becomes a business. Hattrick (currently 8 employees ) started this way. A couple of soccer minded people started a soccer fantasy game almost 8 years ago. They treat their users like they would want to be treated themselves. To keep the community alive and involve people in the community, they give users the tools to build certain things.

Yesterday they reached the 500.000 users mark ,all of them are "hard core"users ,many paying customers.. .72 countries in the world are smaller than hattrick is right now!

All because the Hattrick founders wanted to have a cool soccer game to play.
For some plans, a few thousand euro's, a good idea and a lot of motivation and hard work is all it takes to start a succesfull company.

Creating the ultimate GUI in Flash

I need help.
I have developed a ready-to-use GUI-Engine in Flash (click "Download" to see a 'codeless' demo). Think along the same lines as: "Macromedia's Flex" and "Backbase".
Now I need some kind of fire-start to lift it to the next level.
Look here for a site-example

What do I need?
Contacts, companies willing to implement this technology for their clients, Flash-programmers eager to participate, money to fund development.

The potential of this engine is huge in my opinion.
The engine is meant as a low-cost solution. It will give "Flash to the people". It makes Flash (via i.e. ScreenWeaver) a serious option for creating nice looking GUI's for desktop-applications.

Contact me if you can be of some help

1000st viewer!

Hmm, me myself and i are the 1000st viewer.... i guess i won that cool prize myself then..sorry folks.

Summit for the future

The opening day of Club of Amsterdam's Summit for the future 2005 was full of surprises&cool stuff: Glen Hiemstra a well known futurist, painted a new landscape for the future, where Europe has to cope with a declining population by 60 million inhabitants!, oil will dramatically rise in price and demand, and he made a wonderful remark about the difference between Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants, the first being everyone born in the western hemisphere after 1981, the latter before that time, I'm sorry to say. There are profound differences between Natives and Immigrants in coping with our digital era. (see email is old economy) Glen also showed an amazing clip of work about augmented reality from Mark Billinghurst Director of New Zealands HIT Lab. If the necessary glasses go down to normal size, this is gonna be a killer app in communication and business, imagine a 3D MSN session with multiple miniature friends on your desktop (yes the real desktop....the one on which your laptop currently resides)!
Simon Jones now ex-MD of the elas very recently closed down MIT Media Lab Europe gave a great presentation on how to set-up and run a successfull and truly innovation minded Media Lab. With a few minor changes, you can apply his rules for any business and certainly for Org's like Ideabroker. Ah yes,"the-times-they-are-a-changing"!

Spam Honey Pot

Global heating and Viruses/Spam.. Three major threats to every day life nowadays..Project Honey Pot helps to catch spammers with a new distributed system, presented at MIT spam conference . Honey Pot catches spammers who illegally harvest e-mail addresses from websites. The software generates unique tags for e-mail addresses, and records when, and by whom (or by which server), an address was harvested. That info is the kind lawyers need to sue and prosecute spammers successfully. There's also two new websites out, OptOutByDomain.com and SueaSpammer.com, to help people document illegal spam and take offenders to court.
There's money to be made in anti spam filters, anti spam trackers, contra spamming, spam laws etc.. heck it's starting to grow into a whole new industry.

Climate change immanent

Another frightening report is out, announcing world's carbon levels will rise more than 2C above pre-industrial levels in ten years time, leading to all sorts of irreversible ecological damage. Like wiping out the Maldives, Antartica, Greenland's ice sheet, the Gulfstream, coral reefs (and with them most sea-life) and a global sea level rise of 10 meters! Time to start developing more and better re-usable products, more artificial coral reefs, floating houses, real eco-products, low energy computers and put those screensavers back on, or better put those PC's off at night. You can help with this simulation too! There's real money to be made in the very near future, in water as a stock trade commodity, pure air, solar energy, self charging clean batteries and various other green products..No time to waste indeed.

Open Source e-mail encryption-spamfilter

Horny housewives, Rolexes galore, you've won the lottery....Yes, it's another happy day in your spampacked inbox. Ciphire Mail, a new and soon-to-be-open-source application, aims to put an end to these sorts of annoyances with strong and user-friendly e-mail authentication and encryption. E-mail authentication: confirmation that the stated sender actually sent the message in question like Junker does and encryption like Izecom does put together in one product. Their Business model of open sourcing the software to private users, non profits and the press is interesting. This way you'll gain marketshare and create demand and then ask cooperations and governments to pick up the tap for their clients use of the software...smart!

Inez IPSC away? No way!

Post your support here your best stories & ideas to keep Club Bar Restaurant INEZ IPSC open! "Hotspot" of Amsterdam's clubscene, nightpeople, dj's, fashionista's, resident tramps and art lovers and a great loss if it went away! Home of Pancakes, Lunchclub, Loungeclub, are just a few ideas for a restart of the business...anyone?

The Lifecycle of Memes

Found this informative paper - The Lifecycle of Memes - written by Henrik Bjarneskans, Bjarne Grønnevik and Anders Sandberg. They have analyzed three well-known memes to examine their lifecycle. They say that a meme has to complete a cycle again and again - and that it will die if it is unable to complete the cycle. But... this was the best part...

"Before our paper ends, we will inform you of our until now secret sub-goal with this paper. It is our intention that by now you, by reading this text, has been infected with one of the strongest memes on the planet: The Meta-Meme, e.g. the meme about the theory of memes. It is our sincere hope that you will tell your friends about this (yes, transmission and further infection) or maybe even let them read this paper. In either case, unless you carry a very strong vaccine, we made you a host. And you didn't even flinch. You should be lucky we are not after your money..."

So, I decided to help them perpetuate it.

MysteryMailer take III

In this article ( in Dutch) they talk about a recent survey on the respons of big companies to e-mail. It's bad: 98 companies received e-mail in this research, mostly big corporations. 48% did not reply. Only 20% replied to all 5 e-mails send. Almost 1/3 didn't reply to a complaint e-mail what so ever. Time to launch the MysteryMailer concept?

Email Dialogue

This week at Slate there's an on-going email exchange between Malcolm Gladwell and James Surowiecki that has captured my attention. Both clever writers on topical issues today - not to mention authors of some great books - they are addressing subjects like What Do We Mean When We Talk About Intuition? and Challenging the Standard Model of Decision-Making in emails to each other. Interesting dialogue they've got going. Have a read. James Surowiecki wrote "The Wisdom of Crowds", a book I highly recommend you read, if you haven't already. Malcolm Gladwell just came out with "Blink after "Tipping Point" caught the attention of everyone. James Surowiecki used to write a column at Slate and now writes the 'Financial Page' column for The New Yorker. Malcolm Gladwell is a writer for The New Yorker as well.

View from above

Haven't seen any Aliens lately? This is why. And this a good example too. But maybe, just maybe where getting in the right direction with open source beer, open source biology, BIOS and science commons and products like this. Who knows we'll see 'm back sometime..

Voris Øl Open Source Beer

Vores Øl is the world's first open source.... Beer! The recipe and the whole brand of the Vores Øl(our Beer) is done by a group of students from the IT-University in Copenhagen and published under a Creative Commons license, which basically means that anyone can use their recipe to brew the beer or to create a derivative of the recipe and use it commercially.
Asked why they chose Beer,they said; Why not? We all like beer, plus there's a legendary quote used to explain the concept of free software (now referred to as open source): "Free software" is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of "free" as in "free speech", not as in "free beer"...

UB Game

Amsterdam artist Leonard van Munster has made a game where you, upon scoring enough points, can try to scare or startle visitors of the University Library by moving, jumping or tumble various strategically placed carton boxes. You see your victims reactions in the game window. A great idea which opens up all kinds of new possibilities for online gaming and fun in the public space all from your console window.... Last year he created the interactive talking toilets.

Ideabrokers NY event

We are definitively on the right track with Ideabroker. At least according to the smiling faces in the room and feedback from all present. Thanks to Keith Wallace and Michael Pentowski from Lunatech Research for hosting our NY event at their luxurious office in Rotterdam with lots of champagne, food, and great atmosphere! And kudos to all the 6 "Young Guns" that presented their business ideas !
Three winners came up: A 1st place for Simon den Uijl from Epyon with the Flash Pack; a new superfast battery charger, 2nd place was for Robbert Van Gelderop with a new webbased backup system and 3th place was for Sander Smeets of Unity-x with Lux a intelligent bot. Lessons were learned, points earned, and advice was given by the experts. We're all wound up for the next Ideabokers event @ Cellspace in Amsterdam somewhere next month. Check us out, join, participate, there's lots to be gained from our combined input, sharing and mirroring ideas, concepts, do's and don'ts so elegantly explained by Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten tonight. To all attendees: thanks for being there! Share the message!

Mobile Trends

An especially nice artikel, a small summary of the expected mobile trends for 2005.
The best, I think, is this one: There will be a mobile phone camera paparazzi rage incident where some haples celebrity ends up punching someone who is taking a picture of them with a mobile phone.
Can’t we build some ideas around this? Nick a cop, Punchline, etc.

Why innovation is dead

The past three days I've been giving guest lectures at Avans on interactive marketing. I now know why innovation is dead in the Netherlands.

If I look at the way points are calculated, how grades are given, I understand why nobody excells in anything anymore on our colleges / universities. Damn'd, it's really hard to fail these days. You can compensate everything with everything. And still... there are people failing classes...

Also, the students were extreemly interested in the new media. But using them... seemed to be really difficult. Only very few good ideas, while the objective (be creative) wasn't that hard. So I guess I understand why there are few creative marketeers in this country, and why innovation is dead. We don't stimulate it, we don't teach it.

Apples

A bring-your-own-mouse-keyboard-and-monitor minimac and the iPod shuffle are the newest products of the company named after a fruit. You just gotta love'm for their marketing, design, color sense and ingenuity! With slogans like: Life is random and: Inexpensive but never cheap, they're right on track ! Compare that with products from the company named after a construction part..What would you rather be named after?

Ideabroker on author rights

We did some thinking on the ownership thing. The answer is in the Creative Commons button. This is the type of Creative Commons license we chose for every idea posted here. Every blog entrance opens to it's own website. So it's public under the intention to be materialized. It's however time stamped and protected under Creative Commons. Breach of Commons can be legally prosecuted by the community. That will hold up in court. It will not need anybody to sign a NDA.

Since a posted business idea is open, everybody can shoot at it or contribute. Maybe it has been done before...Maybe it can be proven not to work...Maybe the domain needs registration...A better name...Whatever...Well let's say the idea may need improvement. That's why it's on ideabroker. To benefit from the community. Or to get those dust-gathering, shelf-lying ideas picked up by someone.

The ultimate deliverable has to be an executive summary of a business plan. The upgraded business idea stays under Creative Commons (maybe we should grant a special license to the initiator). Anybody that re-uses (or steals) the idea has to keep it under the same Creative Commons. We're currently working with our lawyers on a more specialized rights document.

If you want, you can always protect your ideas before posting them here, by sending them to your local tax office for time stamping, or register them on your own computer for just 19 Euro at File-reg, a great new service!

E-mail is old reactions

Boris recently posted a story on this page about e-mail being old media. According to the young generation it was old, slow and they associated it with parents, homework and business.

I used his quote today in a guest lecture. He asked me to record the reactions of todays marketing students, and I figured I'd share them with all of you.

Everybody (49 students) except for one used MSN. But the term instant messenger was however totally unknown to them.

Anyway, the reaction to e-mail being considered old by our newest generation was: well, they don't have to use it now. They will change their opinion once they start studies and work, since then not everybody is online and you need e-mail to communicate. It's much more efficient to use MSN when they are online, but the older you get, the less time you spend online, the more efficient e-mail becomes.

Case study: when is an idea public property

So, what happens with these great ideas here on IdeaBroker? Who owns them? What happens when you post something? If I post a great idea, even propose a domainname but don't act on it. What is the status of this idea? How long does it take before you can take someone elses idea and act on it?

These are not general questions; a few week ago Annedien posted a great idea for us here: MysteryMailer. I liked the idea from the start and said so in the comment field. The domain MysteryMailer.nl was still available and Annedien mentioned this. About a week later I was reading the articles again and noticed the MysteryMailer article. I checked the domain and it was still available. I figured she wasn't going to go ahead with the idea anyway and, without wasting time registered it. I started talking with my partners about this great concept I read on Ideabroker called MysteryMailer and they were even more enthousiastic about the idea.

Then I received a message from Annedien that she was a bit surprised that I registered the domainname. After all it was her idea. Now before I go on I have to admit; it IS her idea and i WILL give her the domain if she really wants to pursue the idea. But let's learn from this example. What happens with information you post here? Who owns it? I totally expect my ideas to be adopted by readers and if I don't want that to happen I don't post them. How do other posters/readers think about this issue? Did I steal this idea? Should I be able to take ideas and do with them what I want? Do we 'trust' each other not to copy each other ideas?

Your comments please...

Parclescars

Two simple car ideas:
Make a connection between Major cities by:... carliner, you drive your Smart, Greenwheels or Handicapped Vehicle onto a train or car-transporter and get off in the next major town. Parking is free for Greenwheels and handicapped vehicles, you save gas and those o so expensive Greenwheel km's longdistance..

Have a car-transporter running circles around the outskirts of town: you park your car on it. If you want to pick it up again, just call and they'll bring your car or run a valet service from and to the transporters pick-up points..

MS Acces DBanalyser 2.0 Beta

The situation
One of my clients has this bad coded old Access app. Starting 2005 it needed some major changes -- now! -- that would (for one) result in opening and combing out 317 rapports to change the way the data was retrieved via DLookups.

Microsofts DBanalyser . . . oh wow? . . crash!
Microsoft has been shipping a solution for "office development tools" for Access "to query and scan the entire Access components system with". Apparently somebody at Microsoft started to build it, got tired and never finished it. Scan results do show up on the screen and then the whole thing crashes...
So I thought up a little search and replace prog that does the trick and spent one day to build it. It finds Field properties in reports, text in database-queries and specific lines of VB-code in modules, reports and forms.
There are two search and replace options to do these odd replacements in the code so repetitive work on multiple variations on the same theme is done by just pressing one button. (That's what I like about things like this :-)
It works like a dream. No hassle. Saved a week or six in one morning session of intensive Search & Replace. Client extremely happy and all work done with some time to spare.

Help me out
Anybody interested to lift this search and replace tool for badcoded Access modules up to something marketable? I think we can interest Microsoft for a buyout if successfull :-)
I do not have the time to package it but if you like it : talk to me...

Designs for..?

We are in the forefront of new product design, software design or concept design.. Cool no? Yeah very, but it also means we've got a reputation to keep and more importantly an obligation towards our end-users to make them nice, user-friendly products, interfaces, systems whatever...In the heat of the moment we sometimes tend to forget we've got those guys, called...eh?..eh: Customers!... and you'll get products like this, this, this, this or this one....A simple tip before you start; would YOU buy or use it? If not, don't bother us with it.

Dance and Donate!

You can sit on your ass, watching the special Tsunami aid event on the Telly tonight, or you can dance those Christmas Kilos away at this dance event in the Melkweg tonight!
Organized by all DJ Bookers, Dj's ,Vj's, Party organizers and performers.
All revenu goes to Giro 555 Asia. And while you're at it, don't forget to send an SMS with GEEF to 2020 or GO AZIA to 7222! Our very own Ideabroker idea! Support your local Ideabroker.IFFI !

Ideabroker news

Yesterday the founders of Ideabroker "JK & The B's": B, B and B met in the real world to discuss the future. What i can tell y'all now is that it looks damn promising.....But if it turns out not to be.... heck with such a name? We'll start a band!
We'll open up Ideamaker asap, a place where you can share those o so secret ideas to get other opinions, input, help and critics. This place will be highly guarded, requires you to sign an NDA and therefore is safe as can be. In the meantime, check out this site where you can register all those cool ideas on your Harddisk for 15 euro a year! In English, German and Dutch, and for now only Windows is supported..... but OS X will follow soon.....right! Too expensive for ya? Well are you sure it's a good idea then?... If so and you're really strapped for cash, just send your idea including a stamped return envelope to your nearest tax office. They'll simply date it..no more. Hey, at least they do something in return for all y'r money......
What also works for me, time and time again is just sending off a press release to various parties and create some rumour around the idea...who's gonna claim your idea after that eh?
Happy Creations!

Happy New Year!

Happy new year all you creatives, entrepeneurs and ideamakers!
Let's make it a succesfull, creative and profitable 2005.
Don't forget to share though: ideas, opinions, love and funds for Asia.
I'm very happy to tell you that our idea for a (Worldwide) SMS relief number, got picked up locally by all the Dutch Telco's (for Free!) and all Radiostations.It's also operational in: Asia, the US, the UK and Belgium !!!! So if you got some calling credit left: SMS: GEEF to 2020 and donate €1,50 per SMS to the Tsunami victims in Asia.

Open Source Magazine

Just a quick idea: could you start a magazine with stories and pictures from and for everyone? Sort of like the ViaVia but then with any kind of content. People blog all the time, wouldn't it be fun to see that sort of stuff in a cheap magazine? From everyone to everyone? Your own 15 minutes of fame, prrinted for free and available in your nearest bookstore for just €3,99. A quarter of a page for your ideas, poetry, pictures or insults.

MysteryMailer concept

If I understand the Ideabroker.nl concept well I can submit an idea. Well... Here's one.
It's very normal for a company to hire a marketing agency to send a "Mystery Shopper" to their stores to test the service and accuracy and competence of its employees.
I thought up a concept to do the same, but in the reilm of the Internet. I would call it "MysteryMailer" (the .nl domain is still free!) and MysteryMailer can be hired by companies who want to test their Internet-end of their communications strategy.
Are people receiving relevant information? Are people with little budget treated differently than people with big bucks? Are assumptions being made about the budgets of people?
MysteryMailer could go in to directions: Either as a kind of agency that can be hired by companies who want to test themselves, or can act as a kind of independent testing organisation that creates publications of their findings. What do you think?