thoughts to blog

Raymond and I were discussing a new idea today. It’s more than likely not new, as I have heard the general concept before… but implementation details came to my head that were too hard to pass up…

Human powered search engines.

Let’s face it, we’re the most intelligent things on this entire planet. Sure computers can search things super fast… but humans have that magic touch of reason that allows us to think like other humans and give more contextual, detailed information. Combine that with the power of computers and already existing search engines… and you got yourself a prize winning hog. From personal experience… people ask me questions all the time on MSN and what do I do? I intelligently manipulate google, check a few sites and give them the best one that I find quickly. Never fails!

Here’s the concept: Build a small application, that’s distributed and peer-to-peer, that sits on peoples desktops. Put this aside as I want to explain the rest of the process…

So Average Joe is sitting at his computer or even driving down the road… and he says to himself, “What would be the best book out there on how to become more womanly?” He does a quick search on google.com and like most people… he has no clue how to properly use google.com or the rest of the internet to find fast and accurate information.

Enter in micro payments… The concept is simple, make small payments for bits of content / merchandise / booty.

Mix this in with the application that I specified above. Create a website that allows people to sign up for accounts to get questions answered… and for people to answer the questions. Charge a small micropayment when a question gets answered. Take a very small percentage of the money for the company and pay the rest to the person who answers the question.

The application comes into play in how it distributes the questions and how people answer them.

• Make it a simple distributed application with popup alerts or queued alerts and a simple interface to quickly and efficiently interface with the customer.


• Make it optional.


• Make the payments enough to where a person could make a few extra bucks when they need it… and if they don’t know or don’t want to answer the question… who cares.


• Allow the question answerers to select categories of questions that they want to recieve and have a filter / monitoring system in place to ensure that people are getting the right answers.


• Maybe using a voting system and a customer feedback system.


• Absolutley essential abliity to ask/answer questions on the desktop, web, mobile, email, and SMS. But make it transparent.

This idea is perfect for everyone… College students can make a few extra bucks for beer. Lonely people can become wanted and needed. People find their information faster and more relevantly.

The price breakdown… Right now, one of the biggest competitors, Google Answers, is sitting on a >=$2.50 per question bite. If you get enough people doing this, distribute it far enough, and don’t have a super greedy business plan… you could probably get this down a bit and hit the market where people DON’T want to pay $2.50 for their frustrations. Take 50% for the company, 35% to the answerer, and 15% to charity. Obivously you have to find a point where you don’t have too many people answering but enough to keep the flow steady… response times down… and the costs of servers, bandwidth, development, etc. is low… Obviously a good choice would be Ruby on Rails server side with a Windows Smart Client on the client.

There it is… in all it’s glory. A pre-made business for anyone to take on.

It’s name: Good Call (www.goodcall.info is available)

I can’t believe I’m writing up a business plan online for anyone to steal and make a lot of money off of it. On good faith, I highly recommend that you don’t implement this yourself without asking me and Raymond for permission, making us board members, and giving us some sort of profit sharing plan (stock options work). Ohh.. and you HAVE to use the name we gave it. Ohh.. and since we’re developers, we’ll architect and build it for you.

(p.s. the (TM) in the title only ensures that I recognize that someone probably has a trademark out there for that phrase)