Here’s a startup idea that will make make the world a better place: Replace guide dogs and white canes with mobile streaming video. Use a service like Qik, Ustream.tv, or Kyte to stream video from mobile devices carried by blind people. Video streams will be watched by volunteers across the Internet, Mechanical Turk style.

Watchers will commit not to take their eyes off the screen during their shifts. When the blind person wants to cross the street, for example, they’ll indicate it by pressing a button or shaking the phone (in accelaromater-enabled devices like the iPhone). The watcher will pay extra attention, and guide the blind person using voice instructions (”Stop, car on your right”). For extra safety, more than one watcher can monitor each video stream at a given time.

The challenges in turning this into reality involve reliability, dependability, and cost. I assume that getting people to volunteer shouldn’t be a problem.

What do you think about this? is it feasible? will people buy into that? leave a comment.

Some patents are useful, some are useless, and some are plain weird. I came across these patents and felt obliged to share the wisdom. The USPTO must be a fun place to work.

Nose Pick, US Patent #D430934. This is a very useful invention indeed. What’s amazing is that it took humankind so long to come up with this stroke of genius; it was only invented in 2000.

Mobile Morgue, US Patent #6299229. I wonder - does this come bundled with a mobile cemetery?

A collar for walking your snake, US Patent #6490999. This one is so useful. It was invented in 2001, and indeed I don’t remember seeing anyone walking their snake before that. All snake owners where holding their breath waiting for Mr. Donald Robert Martin Boys to invent this ingenious serpent leash.

Female Urinal, US Patent #6571399. I guess this could be useful in some situations, but somehow I find it hard to see it happening any time soon.

Bonus: Sanitary Appliance for Birds, US Patent #2882858. I thought this one was crazy enough, until I saw this. I guess you never know which “technology” is actually commercially viable.

“It’s not the technology that’s scary; it’s what it does to the relations between people that’s scary”
- Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

I’ve been living in Silicon Valley for too long now to have first hand experience with people’s fear of technology. It’s important to look beyond this environment, and even beyond the western world, because the next big jump in technology usage will come from people who are not using much of it (if any) right now, in places like rural China and India. These people are slowly joining the ranks of the middle class, and so can gradually afford to buy mobile phones, iPods, TVs, and cars. Surprisingly enough, they learn how to use these products quickly and easily mainly because user experience design has made such amazing progress in the last few decades. Their fear of technology is masked by their eagerness to belong to the middle class. This pushes them to quickly adapt and become an indistinguishable part of it.

Pirsig was right about technology being ultimately not scary. He was also right about the human relationship part, although he didn’t anticipate the rise of the social networking and its effect on human interaction. All these new members of the middle class connect with each other through their computers and phones. Their usage patterns, much like ours, gives a new meaning to the word “friend”. While the world is getting flat, so does friendship. People whom I barely know are now connected to me on LinkedIn and Facebook. Maybe the best demonstration of flat friendships is Twitter, where people follow each other based on trends and activity levels rather than familiarity.

The notion of strangers having a peep hole into my life is odd. I obviously cannot rely on these “friends” for help in a time of need. Or maybe I can? Does the fact we’re “connected” have some merit beyond the few square nanometers of disk space that hold this information on Facebook’s database server? While this is an important question, a more interesting one is what will be the effect of flat friendships on tightly knit communities burgeoning into middle-classdom. These communities rely heavily on human interaction, which makes it fascinating to witness and understand how they embrace technology.

While the current slowdown is definitely painful for many startup companies, the big picture is actually not so bleak. Most experts agree that the current slowdown will last for about 2 years. This is roughly how long it takes a tech startup to release its first product (depending on many factors, of course; building Internet sites takes much less, developing new drugs takes much longer). Therefore, now is the time to start a company and be ready to meet the market when it needs your product.

On the supply side - from the LP perspective, venture capital is actually not such a bad idea compared to other investment opportunities. VC investments are risky and volatile; downturns should be planned for. Traditionally conservative investments like real estate did not fare so well recently to say the least, and so did other channels. LPs still have money to invest (though admittedly less), and some of it will find its way into venture funds. I therefore find it hard to see the VC well drying up any time soon. Yes, it’ll dwindle some, but won’t run out.

Brian Solis over at TechCrunch wrote a great article about roughly the same concept I wrote about here. Brian is much more eloquent than I am and drives the point home nicely. I particularly liked the part about keeping marketing and sales going full steam ahead; just like him, I’m also a little biased…

One aspect of the current economic down cycle that nobody seem to care about is the shortage of ideas about the future. People are so obsessed with discussing the dire situation that coming up 5, 10, or 20 year plans for a better future is not in vogue anymore. Politicians generate empty statements about the economy and promise that one day it’ll get better. Pundits spend their time bitching about the economy, blaming everybody and generating predictions of doom and gloom. Chitchats with friends revolve around how the crisis affects our lives and how difficult it must be for Joe who just lost his job and his wife is due in two months. Office banter deals with the sorry state of the industry and the negative effect on the company.

No one, however, seems to spend time and energy coming up with viable and creative solutions that will not only get us out of this mess, but actually create a bright future for are grandchildren.

So why am I telling you all this? Not that I have a brilliant solution or anything. I’m just intrigued by the drought of positive ideas, wondering if it is an effect or part of the cause. The consequence of pessimism in the stock market is well known. But here we deal with a much wider system, involving every aspect of the global economy. Is it possible that lack of productive ideas about the future lead to increased interest in unproductive financial transactions, which in turn got the best brains deeper and deeper into trying to profiteer on the financial spaghetti they created? Once they embarked on creating complex derivatives, repackaging mortgages as securities, and relying on credit default swaps, could they have simply exhausted their ability to think about funding productive enterprises? Did it make them lose their famed ability to imagine and fund a better future? Bright people like Bernie Madoff spent their time and intellectual ability ripping off other people and taking advantage of the booming stock market, instead of channeling this energy into creating a better future.

The gradual decrease in IPOs in the last several years was blamed on many factors. What if one of the reasons for the lack of IPOs, and the fact that there’s no real alternative, is the same one outlined here? What if all brilliant financiers were simply too busy making money they just didn’t have time to do their job?

I wrote this article a while ago; it was recently published by Cornell Business.

In this digital day and age, the first thing a recruiter does is to Google you. Did you ever try that? You would be surprised with what comes up. Can you control the search results? You bet. Should you care? Only if you want to move ahead in life. Your digital brand is being built as you read these lines, through your and your friends’ contributions to the online elephant that never forgets. Rather than sitting back and watching it building itself, you can take a proactive role in shaping it, to ensure it plays to your advantage when you need it.

If your name is unique like mine, people will find you immediately. If you are John Smith, it won’t be as straightforward. People who search you will add search terms, like a middle name, the school you graduated from, the city you live in, and so on. Try these searches yourself and check the results.

You can control your digital brand by creating as much content as possible. Build a complete profile in multiple social networks, write a blog, comments on other people’s blogs, participate in online discussion forums, upload your pictures, share your videos, and more. Only by being proactive and actually generating information can you ensure that this digital elephant remembers what you want it to, and is not biased towards things you’d rather forget. This is true until you become famous, by which time other people will generate way more content that you ever could.

Social Networks
Let’s start with the obvious - you must have a LinkedIn page. Xing, Plaxo and others also compete in this field, but right now at least in the US, LinkedIn is king. If you don’t have one already, create a full LinkedIn profile, and start linking to friends. I suggest connecting only to people you know, and not just asking random people to join your network. If you do the latter, you’ll regret it the next time a friend asks you to refer them to one of your contacts, whom, as it turn out, you don’t know at all.

Facebook is more casual, but very influential. It has somewhat of a strange blend of friends, family, and business contacts, so content control is very important. You are the only person who can (and should) control it. If you don’t want your boss to see that old picture of you throwing up in that frat party, don’t let your boss into your network, or better, don’t let your whacky frat brothers in, only the trustworthy ones.

If you have many friends on other networks, make sure you’re there too. Being popular is good, so focus your efforts on social networks where you are more likely to be popular. Some leading social networks include MySpace, Bebo, and Hi5. Some are popular in other countries, and I definitely recommend joining them if you have ties over in these countries. Orkut, for example, is very popular in Brazil and India.

Blog
Writing a blog is a great way to get noticed. Blogs are favored by search engines, and allow you to express yourself. Free blog engines like Wordpress and Blogger let you create a blog quickly and easily, so you’re only minutes away from starting one. If you’re not used to writing, just start doing it and learn on the job; the more you write, the easier it will get.

If you find it hard to write blog entries, try micro blogging - Twitter and Jaiku, among others, let you blog in sentence-long chunks. Podcasting and video blogging (also known as vlogging) are also good options. The latter has the advantage of leveraging YouTube and other video aggregation sites to spread the word and make you more visible to search engines. Del.icio.us and Flickr are also good places to show the world who you are, by sharing your web links and your photos.

Optimizing for better search results
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a burgeoning industry, having to do with bumping websites up the search results for certain keywords. Doing so for the keyword “Real Estate” is obviously very hard, as literally millions of sites are vying for attention there. Searching for your name is (still) less competitive, but the Internet grows rapidly and exponentially so no matter how special you are, you will eventually compete for a few nanoseconds of search engine attention.

Search engines (the main ones being Google, Yahoo, and MSN) work by assigning a rank to each page, then sorting the search results in decreasing rank order. Many factors influence the page rank, the main ones being the quality of the text, the number and relevance of pages that link to this page, and the quality of the links to other pages. As a rule of thumb, you should create quality content, link to other relevant pages, and get others to link back to your pages. Search engines will penalize you and lower your page rank if you try to game the system, so don’t even think about “cheating”.

People Search and Online Reputation
A new breed of sites has become increasingly popular in recent years. These so called “people search” or “reputation” sites collect information about people, and some of them compile reputation scores based on the information found. Several of these sites let you edit your records, something you should definitely do. No clear leader has surfaced, as of yet, so you’d have to check each and every one of them and update your records where possible. These sites include: Spock, Zoominfo, Naymz, Rapleaf, Trufina, TrustPlus, PeekYou, and Wink.

A site called qdos.com claims to be able to measure your online reputation¸ while other sites let you fix it in case you find some issues. ReputationDefender is one such site. For a modest fee, it claims to be able to scrub offensive content. I have my doubts about their ability to do that, but if you feel you must change something written about you online¸ this is probably one of the best ways to do it if at all possible.

Content Quality
On the web, content is king. Before publishing anything, make sure the quality is top notch, just the way you’d like to be perceived by others. Check your spelling and sentence structure, don’t use inappropriate words, and read what you write. Poorly written content reflects badly on you, regardless of what you have to say.

Consistency across online content is very important too. Make sure your personal information is consistent across sites by checking the spelling of your name, city, and state. Make sure your titles are consistent; for example, don’t use “Product Marketing Manager” on one site and “Manager of Product Marketing” on another. When describing your bio and talking about what you’ve done at a certain company, for instance, make sure not to contradict yourself across different sites.

A few words of caution
The information presented here is highly dynamic - a few months from now some of it will be outdated, as companies merge, get acquired, or go out of business. Make sure you apply your energy in the right direction by consulting the blogosphere. Some good starting points are Technorati, Sphere, and TechMeme (if they’re still around by the time you read this…)

As you can see, I’ve changed theme here to this amazing design by Evan Eckard, published by Smashing Magazine. This is a good opportunity to ponder on the importance of a good design. More specifically, the relationship between effectiveness and aesthetics in web design.

Craigslist.com is ugly but wildly successful. Why? Because of its superior SEO qualities and the network effect that had a very long time to work its magic. And what about the way it looks? Apparently, no one cares. It’s functional, it works, and that’s what matters.

Can a website created today enjoy this luxury? probably not; the market is very different nowadays. It is almost impossible to build a site from scratch and get traffic based on SEO alone, because the keyword space (in nearly all niches) is densely populated. This leaves you with the option to either buy traffic or rely on PR (or social media PR), both require some level of site design. The chances of another Craigslist popping up are slim to none.

The bottom line - although good design can’t build a company, it’s a crucial ingredient. Unless, of course, it had the luxury of starting several years ago in a relatively vacant niche and slowly working its way up.