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So I floated the idea of this thread in ask a small question thread, mixed response but here we are. Do you have an idea you need to sound out against your peers, even if they are gooney? In all seriousness we have some amazingly talented and experienced goons in the cavern of COBOL and its a great opportunity to have someone look at your idea. Now I know ideas are like assholes  and its more than 99% in the implementation but hey you gotta have em to make anything right? First of all research this amazing idea, its probably been done before. Or its been thought of before and dismissed for reasons you may not know or understand. If research shows nothing particularly useful post the idea up here and let the world of goons consider it. Expect lots of "your an idiot" and "this is the 100th time this has been thought of" comments but hopefully some insight too. Ok so lets get this party started, my idea. I want to make an app for end users to save them having loyalty cards for coffee shops in their wallets. The small non-chain types. Now these small shops wont have the customer base or capital for their own app so I propose to make one app to rule them all. The shop owner logs into a website backend and starts an account, details the offers available, and then promotes the app in their shop. When someone downloads the app and scans the ad they get all the offers for that shop. I have seen something kinda like this, but it isn't coffee shop specific and make it had to find the shop you need. A nice ad template with a Qr code to scan put at the till would be my solution. So, is it worth the time investment? has anyone seen a generic catch all coffee shop app google didn't let me know about? and am I an idiot for missing the wood for the trees?
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Sep 1, 2014 17:25
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You're talking about the punch cards right? What do coffee shops gain from reducing the likelihood of customers losing their cards? I probably have 100 dollars worth of free coffee i will never get because im an idiot who loses cards.
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Sep 1, 2014 20:27
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MALE SHOEGAZE posted:You're talking about the punch cards right? What do coffee shops gain from reducing the likelihood of customers losing their cards? I probably have 100 dollars worth of free coffee i will never get because im an idiot who loses cards. The main thing they gain is push notifications... Come on in and get double points or gingerbread coffee available now.
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Sep 1, 2014 20:43
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thegasman2000 posted:The main thing they gain is push notifications... Come on in and get double points or gingerbread coffee available now. how many of these things have been successful
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Sep 1, 2014 23:21
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While not a completely terrible idea, you are competing with drat near everyone in the mobile business space, all of whom have a decent headstart on you. Yelp, Foursquare, Belly, Punchcard, Shopkick, CheckPoints, ibotta, Rewardable... Business owners do not have a shortage of existing options. Yelp and Foursquare in particular are very popular because of good return. They've got established, loyal user bases that use their apps religiously to discover new businesses and promotions. What are you bringing to the table that's different? What aren't coffee shop owners getting now that you can give them? Why is a coffee shop patron going to download and install yet another rewards app? I'm not saying it never makes sense to enter a crowded market, but you'd better have drat good answers to those questions if you're going to.
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Sep 2, 2014 00:00
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All the coffee places around here use Belly. I think your idea has been done by several services already.
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Sep 2, 2014 01:51
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thegasman2000 posted:I want to make an app for end users to save them having loyalty cards for coffee shops in their wallets. In Hongkong this week I've seen pretty much every other restaurant have their own app implementing a loyalty card service. http://www.ippudo.com.hk/en/news/news-001.html#&panel1-3
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Sep 2, 2014 03:20
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Sweet feedback. So its not worth the effort. I think the reason I thought it might be was geographical. See I live pretty rural and all the coffee shops I frequent have no idea of any of these solutions. Next idea I guess 
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Sep 2, 2014 09:50
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Double post but its a new idea! I already have a customer for this one, but not sure its worth releasing or just selling to this one customer and dropping. The idea is based in archaeology and geophysics. The customer wants to walk about with their device and it to take the altitude of their locations. This will then be used to make a map of the thegasman2000 fucked around with this message at 18:15 on Sep 3, 2014 |
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Sep 3, 2014 17:04
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thegasman2000 posted:The idea is based in archaeology and geophysics. The customer wants to walk about with their device and it to take the altitude of their locations. This will then be used to make a map of the typography of the terrain. The use the customer has is he wants the raw data so he can analyse anomalies and bumps to inspect for digs. The data collecting I can see being just a repeat call getting long:lat and altitude and putting into a database. Then using that data, perhaps in a web app, to generate a terrain map either a 3d model or a 2d heatmap style. Have you already verified that you get sufficiently-accurate results from the GPS? How are you going to deal with variations in how the device is carried / vertical motion from walking?
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Sep 3, 2014 17:10
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fritz posted:Have you already verified that you get sufficiently-accurate results from the GPS? How are you going to deal with variations in how the device is carried / vertical motion from walking? I figure the inaccuracies will be consistent? That said its not the actual altitude thats needed but the patterns within so I don't see it being an issue how its carried or whatever. I suspect it will be in a pocket or backpack and left to its own devices.
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Sep 3, 2014 17:17
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thegasman2000 posted:Double post but its a new idea! I know you meant 'topography' but all I can see now is an app that determines if your current location is a serif or sans-serif. That or it draws the contour lines using Helvetica.
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Sep 3, 2014 18:09
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thegasman2000 posted:I figure the inaccuracies will be consistent? That said its not the actual altitude thats needed but the patterns within so I don't see it being an issue how its carried or whatever. I suspect it will be in a pocket or backpack and left to its own devices. Go out and test this first. GPS-SLAM has problems in an urban environment, it should be better in a more open situation with more direct views of more satellites, but I wouldn't bet on anything working without giving it a go first.
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Sep 3, 2014 18:13
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Lumpy posted:I know you meant 'topography' but all I can see now is an app that determines if your current location is a serif or sans-serif. That or it draws the contour lines using Helvetica. Changed that for you... fritz posted:Go out and test this first. GPS-SLAM has problems in an urban environment, it should be better in a more open situation with more direct views of more satellites, but I wouldn't bet on anything working without giving it a go first. The new iPhone due in a week is rumoured to have a barometer. "Developers discovered hints about the possibility of an iPhone 6 barometer in iOS 8 and the latest version of Xcode 6, which reportedly have new APIs that refer to hardware-based altitude measuring capabilities." http://www.techradar.com/news/phone-and-communications/mobile-phones/add-a-barometer-to-the-list-of-rumored-iphone-6-sensors-1254126 If true this makes getting altitude accurately much easier. I will run a test on my 5th gen and see what the smallest change required is. How hard is it going to be to make the 3d map from the data collected?
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Sep 3, 2014 18:18
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thegasman2000 posted:I figure the inaccuracies will be consistent? That said its not the actual altitude thats needed but the patterns within so I don't see it being an issue how its carried or whatever. I suspect it will be in a pocket or backpack and left to its own devices. GPS altitude accuracy is generally terrible, it will almost certainly be significantly more than the vertical error. That's partly because it's not measuring actual altitude, but altitude above a reference ellipsoid. Actual error will depend on things like geographic location, satellites in view, as well as the GPS chip in question. But it's possible to see errors of hundreds of feet, and the error will not necessarily be consistent.
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Sep 3, 2014 22:43
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Watching the reported altitude while riding my bike on a perfectly flat road can be pretty funny. It jumps around constantly (with jumps of 50-100 feet every few seconds in the worst cases), and averaging the reported elevations over the course of a minute or so still tends to be off my actual altitude by 50+ feet, in an inconsistent direction. As much fun as it is to have my ride tracker app say I did 5000 feet of climbing on a ride where I only did 2000, it'd be nice if the iPhone 6 improves that a bit.
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Sep 4, 2014 16:19
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You do have other sensors and you might be able to combine quats and the accelerometers to get a very rough estimate of altitude but good luck.
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Sep 5, 2014 02:48
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So, in LA, hundreds and hundreds of background actors get a call every night, then drive off to a location somewhere within 30 miles. They make minimum (or very low) wages and have no way of knowing where they're gonna go, who else is there, etc. They may be there for 15 hours, 2 of which are unpaid and stuck in traffic, only to find out there are 10 other peeps from their neighborhood. My app would be relatively simple: You say where you are, where you're going, and who you'll carpool with. [People in your age range? People who will throw in for gas? People in your call time, or will you wait around an hour to beat traffic? etc etc.] The app queries the location database and gives you matches. Now, I'm going to do in person interviews this weekend on if they'd use it, but I'd love to hear about functionality. (I'm poking around ShoutEM and will peg my friends in my city's transit bureaucracy. App purchases may be low, but it'd take cars off the road and could be sold to the city).
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Sep 5, 2014 06:57
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I am thinking with a super small customer base could you sell it to another one? Perhaps to large companies like Boeing or something where shift workers could use the same functionality? Companies that big have employees that live close but due to different depts don't know each other exist or work there ?
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Sep 5, 2014 07:34
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thegasman2000 posted:I am thinking with a super small customer base could you sell it to another one? Perhaps to large companies like Boeing or something where shift workers could use the same functionality? Companies that big have employees that live close but due to different depts don't know each other exist or work there ? No reason it couldn't. It works in my niche (in theory) b/c both outside parties (Booking and Production) have tons and tons of other things going on, so it's priority 5,006,607. Plus, they're constantly going to NEW PLACES for NEW SHOWS; for consistent companies, the carpools could be relatively simple (always driving to the same plant, no reason to keep the app). Golden Bee fucked around with this message at 10:09 on Sep 5, 2014 |
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Sep 5, 2014 10:06
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Don't forget you'd be muscling in on UberX's turf. Don't be surprised if you start getting a whole lot of cancelled or deliberately erroneous pick-up calls. The service seems untenable, your launch gets sullied by word-of-mouth complaints (when word-of-mouth is how you'd be spreading it initially) and you fail to swing the minimum population of users required to sustain it. And that's assuming that everything else about your service is in perfect nick and conditions are ripe for it. Anything that requires a minimum saturation of dedicated users spread over a certain geographic zone and various time periods is going to be a lot harder than something that can function just as well with 1 person as with 10,000. e: To expand: The most valuable asset here is (duh) the user base. Don't develop the app first and then try to find the users. Do your groundwork, find a bunch of people who want to carpool, put them in touch through a central messaging system (forum, mailing list, even just a lovely barebones app) that you control, and let that build up. If it's working, expand it and bring in more people, and THEN build a streamlined app. The app is a convenience factor, a facilitator, it's not what will create a user base of the thousands of people required to sustain it. Don't fall into the trap of creating a smooth streamlined app for the purpose of solving a problem or a need that doesn't actually exist. Do people really want to carpool, especially with strangers? It's not a new idea, and you have a hard enough time convincing people to take public transport in well-serviced areas - and in those conditions, you don't even need to speak to people. Finding people willing to say "yeah that's a great idea, carpooling is so much better for the environment, I'd definitely do that" and getting bums on seats are two very very different things. Also, people with cars are far less likely to offer it up as a carpool. They're the ones who pay for the drat thing, why should they give it up for free? So then you're talking about financial compensation to encourage people to offer their car as a carpool, and then you're basically talking about a direct Taxi/UberX competitor, but without the hundreds of millions of dollars of investment money. As soon as they see you pop up they'll crush you or drop their price for a couple months until you run out of cash and die. thegasman2000 posted:I am thinking with a super small customer base could you sell it to another one? Perhaps to large companies like Boeing or something where shift workers could use the same functionality? Companies that big have employees that live close but due to different depts don't know each other exist or work there ? This is a safer idea but I think it also suffers from the problems of either "Do people actually want this? Is there a market for this? Do people want to carpool" and "This is a pretty obvious problem, either they'll have already sorted it with in-house programs like a shuttle service, or they've acknowledged that people just flat out don't want to do it". If you do think you can solve this problem better than everyone else, the real value will be either in your marketing (meaning you can sell anything to anyone, and there's no point developing such a risky prospect -- focus on something higher value with your marketing prowess) or with your solution for the Travelling Salesman problem. In which case you can make far more money selling that algorithm by itself rather than trying to lock it into a localised city carpooling project. Develop it, test it, sell it to FedEx so they can handle their delivery fleets more efficiently. If you could get a whole % increase on their delivery efficiency they'd throw millions at you. ex2: Also if you keep the focus on just actors etc and try to lock down that demographic, going through all the local audition places etc to get them, you'll have a much better chance of getting dedicated users. But since LA is such a big city, you'll probably find that to connect people to other people you'll need to set up collection points around the place (rather than at each person's house), and to convince carpoolers to drive there to pick up people you'll either be paying them quite a bit (directly or indirectly, cash in hand by the end-users.. and then how do you resolve payment disputes?) or just, more likely, shifting over to a dedicated shuttle service aimed at actors. Which is fine, if there's a market for it and you can make a profit, but it's gone far beyond just an app used to connect people together. A complete hands-off app like you might be talking about is essentially just a forum for a community for actors with an aim of carpooling. Which would then be in direct competition with the forums that likely already exist, and could trounce you at a moment just by adding a 'carpooling' subforum. Sulla Faex fucked around with this message at 11:19 on Sep 8, 2014 |
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Sep 8, 2014 10:56
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I had pretty much that same idea but for airport carpooling. End game would be somebody like Travelocity buying it and popping up a message after booking with something like "X users that live within X miles are also taking this flight, would you like to share a ride?". Then I realized that not enough people from Bumblefuck, Nowhere are catching the same flight for it to matter.
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Sep 8, 2014 11:47
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loving get in! The new iPhone has a barometer so that's one job that's now easier!
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Sep 12, 2014 15:26
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Rather than walking around with an iPhone app to generate the topography, why not fly a drone around and have it do rangefinding? You can do range imaging using just a video (and Structure from Motion).
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Sep 12, 2014 16:02
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thegasman2000 posted:Ok so lets get this party started, my idea. I want to make an app for end users to save them having loyalty cards for coffee shops in their wallets. The small non-chain types. Now these small shops wont have the customer base or capital for their own app so I propose to make one app to rule them all. The shop owner logs into a website backend and starts an account, details the offers available, and then promotes the app in their shop. When someone downloads the app and scans the ad they get all the offers for that shop. The thread has moved on but I just want to say I worked for a company that at one point tried to do just this and boy oh boy did it actually totally suck compared to plain old punch cards
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Sep 14, 2014 21:56
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thegasman2000 posted:loving get in! The new iPhone has a barometer so that's one job that's now easier! How accurate do your customer's measurements need to be? Considering barometric pressure varies with weather, your results could be all over the place if you're using a barometer in a phone for measuring altitude. http://www.gmat.unsw.edu.au/snap/publications/lib_etal2013a.pdf posted:However, outdoor readings of height (altitude) from a pressure based altimeter can vary by
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Sep 15, 2014 07:28
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Only accurate relative to other measurements. I foresee all readings in the same day or weather conditions to be accurate relatively. Then I would perhaps have to skew the data between days so the overlapping data matches. Make sense?
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Sep 15, 2014 09:22
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thegasman2000 posted:Make sense? How exactly do you infer this: thegasman2000 posted:I foresee all readings in the same day or weather conditions to be accurate relatively. from this: IdentityMatrix posted:However, outdoor readings of height (altitude) from a pressure based altimeter can vary by Maybe you could dig up some air pressure data from a stationary barometer used for weather observation. Then I guess you could see the expected variation that is caused by weather alone and find out whether the expected error your app would produce is low enough... (We left the ideas behind at this point, now we are in implementation-hell  )
Nektu fucked around with this message at 19:49 on Oct 11, 2014 |
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Oct 11, 2014 19:45
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You could use the accelerometer as a check for some of that, if the barometer drops suddenly but the accelerometer stays flat that's evidence that the weather has changed.
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Oct 11, 2014 23:19
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fritz posted:You could use the accelerometer as a check for some of that, if the barometer drops suddenly but the accelerometer stays flat that's evidence that the weather has changed. how frequently are you guys traveling up and down mountains?
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Oct 13, 2014 16:15
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I've been working on an image search engine as part of my my master's thesis. If, when it's done, I decide to release it to the public, the closes competitors I have in the US market are TinEye (the toughest), Google (the biggest), and Bing (comedy option). The search and spidering parts are done, but I need to improve the frontend a bit and, more importantly, I need to find something which separates my engine from theirs. I really can't compete with Google in terms of size or speed, but I'm thinking I can start my spiders in a different location and add functionality they don't have, like the opportunity to view the genesis of an image, source-tracking, and notifications when the spider finds a repost of something you did. Of course, I could also say gently caress all that and turn it into a smut search engine, but I'd rather it have a more highbrow normal standing on the web.
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Oct 13, 2014 20:39
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Voronoi Potato posted:how frequently are you guys traveling up and down mountains? OP was talking about walking around an archaeological site, they often have big holes in the ground.
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Oct 13, 2014 20:43
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thegasman2000 posted:Only accurate relative to other measurements. I foresee all readings in the same day or weather conditions to be accurate relatively. Then I would perhaps have to skew the data between days so the overlapping data matches. fritz posted:You could use the accelerometer as a check for some of that, if the barometer drops suddenly but the accelerometer stays flat that's evidence that the weather has changed. Might actually have more luck using calibrated camera information. I'm slightly biased, but it's entirely possible to calculate the homographies between extended patches of images, then determine dimensions based on one set of known dimensions. Put a meter stick on the side of a mountain, photograph it and then the rest of the dig site as you walk around. Get measurements down to the centimeter. This might even be doable with existing dig photographs, and you can offer it as a SaS service online -- upload your dig photos to have them automatically converted into a tagged 3D mesh.
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Oct 13, 2014 20:52
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I want to make a lock-screen app that requires you to solve a complicated integral to unlock. Sort of a "drunk dial protection" but for math nerds.
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Oct 13, 2014 21:35
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Jo posted:Might actually have more luck using calibrated camera information. I'm slightly biased, but it's entirely possible to calculate the homographies between extended patches of images, then determine dimensions based on one set of known dimensions. Put a meter stick on the side of a mountain, photograph it and then the rest of the dig site as you walk around. Get measurements down to the centimeter. This might even be doable with existing dig photographs, and you can offer it as a SaS service online -- upload your dig photos to have them automatically converted into a tagged 3D mesh. You could combine these things, get the image data and make a putative 3d terrain, where you don't have calibrated dimensions, and then have the app collect sensor data as the user walks around and manually records where they are at certain times, then SLAM them all together.
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Oct 13, 2014 22:10
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Jo posted:Of course, I could also say gently caress all that and turn it into a smut search engine, but I'd rather it have a more highbrow normal standing on the web. Srsly, do this
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Oct 14, 2014 08:17
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Here's an idea I've been tossing around forever. This isn't an app though I want to actually do something. Basic business plan: - Get a few million bucks in funding (lower limit is maybe 2 mil for a small-scale launch) - Sign rent agreements in downtown areas that have (a) A view of downtown (b) leased line or other high-speed access - Erect 4k all-weather cameras facing downtown - Sell all-in-one subscription packages to businesses and rich people that basically consists of a high-def TV, installation and support services In a nutshell, you get a 60" window view of your downtown skyline in real-time with high framerate. This would be good for hotels, convention centers, corporate offices, etc. There's applications in construction as well. You'd want to build a robust client display server that handled things like connectivity issues and could replay something like the previous day's footage or something. Another neat thing is that as you brought new locations online you'd be able to sell those new views back to your existing client base. Bundle in some "appy" technology on the display server to do things like overlay weather or daily greetings or something. There's already companies in this space but they all seem to be focused on low-resolution and low-framerate service at a lower cost. My idea is to aim for the high-end and deliver exceptional quality video, day or night. I would accomplish this by focusing on cities and downtown areas where high-speed SLA-level access is available. I haven't really worked out the numbers on something like this to tell whether it's profitable or not but I think it could be. You could be extremely creative in your pricing, for example charging by the inch of display surface. Hotel customers could also be charged per-room in addition to any lobby screens you wanted to sell them. Also I think that if you signed long-term leases in prime locations you could potentially pull a Southwest fuel pricing gambit on your future competitors, before anyone noticed what you were doing. It seems like a viable business idea but since I don't have the cash I'm not too worried about someone stealing the idea.
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Oct 14, 2014 15:48
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revmoo posted:Here's an idea I've been tossing around forever. This isn't an app though I want to actually do something. Basic business plan: OK, but why do they want to buy this from you?
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Oct 14, 2014 16:18
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Because it looks cool. Same reason companies spend a million dollars to outfit one office with new lighting (true story previous employer) EDIT: I've been in a TON of high-rise offices and they all seem to have the ubiquitous massive city skyline print hanging up in their lobby. So it's basically that but in real-time.
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Oct 14, 2014 16:26
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revmoo posted:Because it looks cool. Same reason companies spend a million dollars to outfit one office with new lighting (true story previous employer) The difference being that you don't have to pay a subscription fee for a print. I don't see a financially responsible company subscribing to a service whose only advantage over a framed photograph is "that's kinda neat".
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Oct 14, 2014 17:10
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