More Entrepreneurial ideas

In addition to the ideas I've described the last couple of days, here are a few more free entrepreneurial ideas. Coincidentally, the current series of Dragon's Den ended today but if you're interested, there's a sort of online version called Running the Gauntlet.

Tags: ideas, Dragons Den, entrepreneur

Virtual Ryder Cup

The Ryder Cup is great, especially when Europe wins. But to be honest, watching golf is difficult sometimes as the ball is so small. It's frustrating as there's no reason why it can't be made a lot more fun. Here's an idea that I hope some company like Virtual Spectator or the Hawk Eye people might implement sometime soon. Now Hawk Eye are the people who track cricket balls and more recently tennis balls using high speed cameras and Virtual Spectator are the guys who broadcast the Volvo Ocean Race and World Rally Championship races over the web in virtual form. So the idea is, you download a program with a 3d window a bit like google earth and instead of getting some TV images, you watch what's happening in 3D. Now, if you could track a golf ball the way Hawk Eye can and work out its position, you could broadcast the proceedings virtually. Watch from and control your own virtual camera angles, rather than the TV's. In fact you could even make it into a sort of video game. Users could try to make the putt themselves from where Tiger has just landed on the green. Show lots of golf stats, show the live TV at the same time, let users look at any archive rounds golfers made in previous years.

There are various other sports for which this sort of thing could be done. Perhaps it's the way sport will be broadcast in the future! Hope so.

Surfing in Devon

"Everybody's goin' surfin', surfin' ~~USA~~ in Devon..."Went surfing at Woolacombe beach over the weekend and found it to be every bit as good as in Hawaii. In fact, the waves were better - colder, but with a wetsuit on you couldn't feel it. I highly recommend it!

Free idea of the day - it struck me that the hardest part of surfing is the paddling out into the sea against the waves to where they break. It's tiring. If someone dug an underwater tunnel in some good surfing beach where you could then just pop out to catch a wave I think you'd be onto a winner. Surfers (at least the lazy ones) would flock to your beach. It may be a bit of a feat of engineering though. Perhaps if the eye-sore factor wasn't too much of an issue then something similar to a drag lift would do?
[read more »]

How to animate music

Related: animation, music, video

LibraryThing

LibraryThing is a social book recommendation site which, once you've catalogued (some of) the books you own, connects you with people who read the same things. This is more or less to books what Last.fm is to music.

On the subject of books, it's Banned Books Week this week. Check them out here.

Blogmusik

A little while ago I mentioned how great Pandora was for listening to music. Well, it is great, but it's got some competition from Blogmusik, where you can have the track you want streamed to you on request. Sweeeeeet!

Tags: BlogMusik, Pandora, music

24: Day 5 Marathon

A seemingly ridiculous way to spend a sun drenched saturday is to get up at 6:30am and go to watch an entire season of the TV series "24". Without adverts this takes up about 18 hours but no, it's worth it, well worth it. Eye strain, dead butt-cheeks and DVT are a small price to pay to witness Jack Bauer, the anti-terrorist, come up with lines like, "the only reason you're conscious right now is because I don't want to carry you."

For the uninitiated but intrigued (admit it), the official site has an archive of every hour's action for the last five seasons. Wikipedia also has a good section explaining past plots and character profiles, reminding fans who's dead and who's still alive. It's hard to keep track as Jack Bauer is probably the leading cause of death in middle-eastern men. He's supported by a government agency called CTU (Counter Terrorism Unit aka Criminal Torture Unit), the members of which solve problems and decode stuff by looking up one or two random technical terms in a dictionary and then say them together in a confident way. One time for example, saying "I used a machine-coded matrix" magically yielded some much needed result.
[in more detail »]

Related: 24 marathon, Jack Bauer

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