The ability to interact with an industry expert is a valuable sales and marketing tool. For example, consulting with an attorney or a physician, seeking the advice of a financial advisor or just bounce recipe ideas off a prominent chef. The advice seeker gains valuable knowledge and the advice giver has promoted her business. ExpertKnowledge is a website that allows such interaction. An industry expert, via a paid monthly subscription, streams her video cast to an audience. She has her own custom page where viewers can tune in. Her page may have auxiliary media files that compliment her video cast. Her audience consists of passive and active viewers who can text or ask questions via video and audio interaction.

There are many sites that contain static knowledge-based content like videos or text documents. But once you read a white paper or watch a video, it’s very difficult to obtain feedback. Sure you can add to a blog post, but the level of quality is far inferior to real-time human interaction.

There are also many sites that allow streaming videos and text chat, for example, UStream. But the content is generally a hodgepodge of hit and miss videos. If a person is seeking genuine content of substance, the search can be daunting and yield minimal results.

It is my goal to establish ExpertKnowledge as the source for knowledge, how-to advice, opinions or counsel. Viewers can choose channels based on categories, then narrow their choice based on user feedback and audience participation. When someone needs live, real-time advice from a nutritionist to a mechanic to an interior designer, their first destination will be ExpertKnowledge.

Develop a free (or paid with features) job board that niche groups and organizations could integrate with their sites.

This would be similar in Ning's approach, to a user controlled and created system.

At the moment job boards are flooded with garbage, recruiters, scams and more. The only ones I've found that you can intergrate are commission based without any control of who posts, or the jobs that are displayed.

A simple, easy to control and monetize job board groups could use would go a long way in many circles, and provide a great grassroots alternative to the Monster.com and Carrerbuilder.com juggernauts.

People contstantly claim to live in communities. But we really live in neighborhoods and don't leverage our own community neighbors as resources. This is especially true of stay-at-home moms most of the time. Over the past 5 years my community has led a "co-op" environment using each other as resources for stay-at-home parents to be able to leverage, stay sane, and accomplish any tasks they need to do. The management of this is very cumbersome and could be improved. How could this "co-op" idea be improved, leverage automation, and be packaged to bring it to other communities in a pre-packaged, easy-to-get started format? I can provide an overview of the problem statement, challenges faced, desired solutions, etc.

Resurrect the idea of the ARG (Alternate Reality Game). This is an idea that was pioneered, but short lived by EA for their game "Majestic" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majestic_(video_game) and shown in the 1990's movie "The Game".

In an ARG, the line between the game and reality is blurred in which the game interacts with you via everyday communications methods, such as phone, fax, IM, text message, email, Twitter, Blogs, etc., all based on parameters you define. The goal is to provide you with clues to solve a mystery or problem to get to the next level.

I think that ARG's could be more successful if they were created on a more local level, that actually promoted local interaction to get you away from your computer and out in public. For example the game could provide you with hints relating to a physical object that could be virtually located anywhere and you would need to use the clues to locate the object to find a piece of the bigger puzzle. The game should also be realtime, so that you must accomplish things in a certain amount of time. It would essentially be an intelligent scavenger hunt of scavenger hunts, based on predefined parameters about your capabilities and interests.

You could also turn this into a platform for others to develop their own games and storylines, and setup their own puzzles and challenges.

People have become reliant upon SaaS-based services like Basecamp, Salesforce, Freshbooks, GoogleDocs, etc. There's no guarantee these services will a) be around forever or b) be up at all times to allow you to access your data. There's an opportunity to create a backup service that runs locally and sucks a snapshot of all your data out of these systems so you have a copy that resides on your servers. There are creative models in how this could be billed (ie. let people use it for free so they're covered and pay only when they need to get at the backup).

Right now there are no good options for hearing-impaired people to enjoy a movie in the theater without going to special theaters. This is an experimental concept but I would think an iPhone-based player could be developed for playing the time-coded closed captioned transcripts that accompany all movies. I don't know how access to those transcripts works nor if there would be issues of disturbing other movie viewers by brightness or if it would be too annoying to constantly change depth of field in viewers vision but it seems like this would be a $5 iPhone app that hearing-impaired people would buy to be able to enjoy movies with their friends. All kinds of opportunities to get theaters' to do the promo required as simplified way of achieving handicapped accessibility without buying and supporting extra hardware.

The ASPCA has a program called Canine-ality, which consists of a series of tests that are performed on dogs before they are adopted. The overall goal is to better match dogs to their potential owners, thus reducing the number of dogs in animal shelters.
The idea behind this web app is to provide everyone in the world with a way to find out what dog (or even what pet) is right for them. The goal is to better match people to their pets. Too often, people obtain a dog that doesn't fit their own personality or lifestyle. That dog then ends up in a shelter or on the street, and more times than not goes unadopted and thus euthanized.

Through a web site, users can fill out a basic personality assessment, which then uses an algorithm to match keywords/characteristics against a database of dog/pet related information. Since we know enough about human personalities, as well as dog and animal personalities and behaviors, we can program a site or application to help better match people to their pets. Something similar to the manual tests performed on shelter dogs by the ASPCA and perhaps a more thorough analysis.

The site could have two versions of the assessment: a quick assessment, or an in depth comprehensive analysis. It could be extended into a mobile app, too.

The pet market is huge, so the possibilities are numerous to monetize the idea. There also seems to be numerous partnership and co-branding possibilities.

Many people need childcare but have problems finding GOOD childcare providers who have 1) openings, 2) are in the area where the person lives or works and 3) has reasonable prices.

The results of a search by a parent looking for childcare could be plotted on a google map with a clickable link to get more information. Some information could also be listed in a table on the web page just like many searchs do today.

The way to make money at this would be to charge a monthly fee for each childcare, preschool or daycare that wants to be listed. Facilities without openings could list as wait-listed.

Banner ads for childcares, etc, could be purchased for a monthly fee and static or rotating sidebar ads.

Google ads could also be run for associated items, web sites, etc. plus links to affiliate web sites.

Year after year we hear people being crippled with debt yet the financial institutions are doing little to offer their products in addition to assistance to help their customers control debt. How about changing the thinking in the industry. What about a credit card that you can set a rules engine on? How about allowing me to say that my wife can only spend $40 this month on retail and if it goes over to alert me or to alert her to stop the purchase? The same could be said about my gadget purchases, of course.

Let's explore creating a smart credit card and still empower a consumer to build credit, but also help them be responsible with the credit they are building.

Technology can aid this solution of course.

Many of us spend some time hunting around for the best online banking deal, the best CD rates, etc. But even if I find that INGdirect has fallen a few basis points behind HSBC, it’s rarely worth my time/energy/hassle to switch.

How about a “banking front end” which lets me manipulate my money and pay my bills from a common screen, hiding from me the details of where my money really is. Meanwhile, I have a seeker backend that is constantly shifting my money to find the best deal, taking into account any latency or processing fees. I think you could probably squeeze out an extra percent a year or something with a program like this, and you wouldn’t be fooled by “introductory offers,” because your backend would immediately note any change.

Similarly for credit cards, your backend could be continually seeking out new introductory offers and performing “debt arbitrage” for you by moving your balances around and keeping track of exactly what needed to be paid when.