Jackson Miller

I have an idea I would like to throw out there. I think it would be a fun side-project or StartupWeekend project. Granted, it is a feature, not a product (and definitely not a company), but I think there are some verticals that would find it very useful.

IndexCloud Elevator Pitch:
IndexCloud scans a piece of content (say, a semester’s worth of chapters in a text book) and identifies the key topics (not just words). It then creates a clickable “tag cloud” of the topics. When a user clicks on a topic, IndexCloud presents them with links and passages to that topic in the content. IndexCloud would be used by students studying for exams or doing research, publishers looking to give readers a new way to explore their publication (think magazine issues on a tablet), and even large corporations doing analysis on their customer service interactions.

The dotcom is owned by a squatter.

I am not doing any side projects since all my time goes to Bizen, but I think this would be a fun one and I would love to see someone do it.

Just a little self-promotion.

Check out an interview with me on the North Carolina Startup Blog about the value of an idea.

It was fun to revisit and I am looking forward to hopefully working more with the Startup Blog Network.

It looks like I am going to get an opportunity to revisit the valuation of ideas.

I’m preparing an interview with a guy who blogged (jokingly) about buying new innovative ideas for $0.02 a piece (his “two cents”). Soon he started receiving offers from around the world from wanna-be entrepreneurs hoping to cash in on their business concepts (from revolutionary golf tees to a system to locate kidnapped people). Many missed the part about the 2 cents and hoped to get many times that. The other part they missed is that the real value of their ideas lied in finding a way to execute on the idea, rather than selling it.

It should be fun. I will be interested to see how my perspective may have been influenced by trying to raise money for statzen.

I just saw a classic posting on Craigslist. It is probably not very interesting to non-developers. Some entrepreneurs will even think it sounds like a good deal. However, every coder with at least 1 project under their belt has met this guy:

I NEED A COLLEGE STUDENT WHO IS A COMPUTER GENIUS TO PARTNER WITH ME. SOMEONE THAT CAN AFFORD THE TIME AND EFFORT TO PUT INTO A HUGE MUSIC WEBSITE THAT WILL TAKE THE WORLD BY STORM. I CAN NOT PAY, BUT I HAVE THE IDEA, THE DOMAIN NAME, AND THE COPYWRITE IF YOU WANT TO WORK WITH ME I WILL MAKE YOU A PARTNER WITH A PERCENTAGE AGREED BY BOTH PARTIES. THIS IS A MULTI-MILLION DOLLAR IDEA!
YOU HAVE TO HAVE THE CAPABILITIES TO BUILD A SITE THAT CAN BECOME THE NEXT MY SPACE (ONLY BETTER). IF YOU HAVE THAT KNOWLEDGE PLEASE EMAIL ME ASAP!

OMG!!! Really?!?!? You have an idea of how to make MySpace better?!?! (Hint: everyone who has ever used MySpace has an idea of how to make it better)

The problem is that just by throwing this offer out there demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of what it takes to create “The Next MySpace”. Let alone the luck component.

It is tempting to respond to him and offer to do it for a 99/1 split (with me getting the 99% share). The thing is, even then it is not worth it.

There are good ideas out there, and I don’t want to discount the potential for a couple of people to come together and create something huge. It can happen. It just doesn’t happen like this.

BTW, when he says he has “THE COPYWRITE”, does he mean that he is a copywriter and can provide the copy for the site? Or does he mean that he owns a copyright for the name of this new brilliant application? I am betting on copyright because I would be shocked if he is actually planning on doing any real work like copywriting.

Last year I wrote a post titled “I Will Buy Your Idea“. It was a tongue-in-cheek post that was trying to make this point:

Ideas have no monetary value. The worth is in the implementation.

Dane Carlson picked it up and posted this on his Business Opportunities Weblog:

“Finally, someone recognizes the true value of a great idea: Jackson Miller is buying them!

Don’t plan on paying the rent with just one, though, because he’s only paying $0.02 per original idea. Trust me, this is the best deal that you’ll get, without a great implementation!

Then a funny thing happened, my post became the #1 search result on Google for several searches about buying ideas. Dane’s post is #2. Since then I have had a steady stream of people contacting me trying to sell me their idea.

Many times the confusion seems to be from people who don’t speak english very well. This is my fault because my post is sarcastic and uses some American figures of speech. Others are probably from people who didn’t bother actually reading my post (but they took the time to find my email address on this site to email me).

These offers to sell ideas are a minor annoyance. The thing is, no one seems too eager to unseat my spot for searches about buying ideas. I think the fact that I have held the top spot for so long is an indication that there is no market for ideas.

At the time of my original post there were 5700 ideas in The Global Ideas Bank; the owner of that site seemed very willing to take me up on my offer to pay $0.02 per idea for a whopping total of $114.

So maybe this post will take the #1 spot and I can stop getting these emails (it is a minor annoyance). The offer to purchase ideas is over. I have enough ideas of my own.

Software development was my hobby before it was my career. Since it is no longer my primary job responsibility I am once again able to view software development as a hobby. Unfortunately, I have a lot of hobbies and not enough time (golf, motorcycle, would like to be sailing again, etc). However, if I did have some time, here is a list of the software I would be interested in developing:

• Apple AddressBook plugin for social network integration
  How cool would it be if AddressBook was able to pull social network information from people in your AddressBook. I would particularly like to see my AddressBook attempt to find and ‘friend’ the people I know on the social networks that I am interested in using. I am NEVER going to upload my list of contacts to a service and let them invite everyone to sign up, but if people I know have an account on a social network I use, I would like to know about it.
• Decent blogging app for a Treo
  Mobile application development is interesting because I have more and more itches that I would like scratched. The main one that is bugging the shit out of me is the lack of a decent blogging tool. I think part of the reason I am using twitter so much is because I can’t easily post to jaxn.org from my phone.
• Tool for managing multiple IPSec VPNs
  Not only am I not sure whether this one is even possible, but I am also unclear as to whether I have the knowledge to pull it off. Still, this would scratch a major itch. I think I would be willing to pay at least $200 for a tool that allowed me to connect to Nortel, Cisco, SonicWall, NetGear, etc VPNs.
• Daily aggregation script
  This one would be really easy to do. I just want a tool to take an RSS feed, collect an entire day’s entries, and post them to my blog via XMLRPC. It should have features like dynamic titles, tag aggregation from the items in the feed, etc. It is similar to the daily blog posting from del.icio.us but would take an RSS feed as it’s source and provide a few additional features. I probably will solve my need with a planned feature to statzen, but it still would be a nice utility to have.
• RSS Aggregator
  I would like to re-purpose some of the technology that I have created for statzen into a feed reader. The goal would be an aggregator that does a better job of helping the cream float to the top simply by observing the user. I am really interested in software that takes passive input from the user and then provides the user with new insights.
• SMS bot
  How fun would it be if you could send a text message to my phone asking “where are you?” and it automatically respond “Union, NJ”. Sure, that might only be interesting because I travel so much, but that is the kind of thing I could choose to make available via a SMS bot. It would also be cool if I could make an incoming SMS message fire off a program on my phone. I could create something to allow people to ask me yes or no questions via a text message like “got time for a phone call? Y/N” and it could pop up an alert on my phone with the question and Yes and No buttons to allow me to respond. These are just simple examples, but an SMS bot on my phone would allow this kind of thing and so much more.
• Whatever you want
  It is fun to develop software that other people use (especially if they enjoy using it). So, what would you want? What do you want to do easier/faster? Who knows, I might just get around to developing it for fun.

Of course, I do have a little time for software development. That time is going toward developing statzen. I have some really neat ideas that are mile away from displaying numbers and statistics. The data that I am capturing can either be displayed in a very dry ‘spreadsheet’ way or it can be used to give new insights into these massive bodies of work we are creating on our blogs and the attention people are giving our posts. [Cue "Hi, I'm a Mac; and I am a PC"].

After reading another poor soul who is convinced an idea is worth something I have decided to start buy ideas. I think that I am the only place where people can actually sell ideas. It should be noted that I will not buy all ideas, just the ones that I feel are original.

The starting price for ideas will be two hundredths of a dollar. That is right, my 2 cents gets your 2 cents. I think that is about the best deal you will find anywhere for your original idea.

UPDATE:
Since I am still getting people calling me asking me to buy their idea, I thought it might be good to share a link to this related article:
There is no room for the idea guy