New Business Ideas

at the moment these are on the wiki at http://businessideas.wikia.com/wiki/Business_Ideas . If you have ideas you can add them there. The goal is to help entrepreneurs start businesses that make the world a little better and create jobs.

Business ideas based on a new product/service or those with little or no market penetration

New Consumer Products

Augmented Reality Beauty Blindness Goggles

The beauty and appearance of people impact behavior and thinking in significant and seemingly unhelpful ways. Research has found that across genders the presence or absence a person's beauty can impact how they are treated in personal and professional interactions. These goggles display an avatar in place of an image of the person, thereby eliminating the psychological impact of appearance. Christians might wear them to avoid temptation. Anyone might wear them to reveal the depth of impact beauty has on their lives or to live free from such impact. Businesses might use them to allow for better, more rational, interactions and HR decisions.

Automatic Bean Cooker

Uncooked beans can be a cheap source of protein and calories. Reducing the hassle of soaking and cooking them can enable more people to enjoy these as part of their diet.

Automatic Brushing and Flossing System

This device makes good dental hygiene effortless. The user puts this mouth guard-like device in their mouth and it cleans all teeth automatically, without being manipulated or moved by hand. The same or different mouth piece is placed in the mouth to deliver jets of water that clean between the teeth like flossing.

Clock with Bible Chimes

Sell clocks that play different verses from the bible for hourly and/or quarter hourly chimes. The clocks could also be connected to the internet to play short messages from favorite online ministries.

Smoking Cessation Implant

When the patient begins smoking, the implant releases into the body an agent that causes flu-like symptoms. The negative response functions as punishment based operant conditioning and reduces the pleasure from smoking.

Reusable Diaper Washer

Help parents save money by making reusable diapers less burdensome to handle. This device cleans the reusable diaper without mess or hassle.

Windshield Frost Protector-Transparent Reusable Roll-on Sheet

A transparent reusable roll-on sheet protects frost from binding to the car windshield. It is rolled on in the evening and rolled off in the morning.

RFID Item Locator

RFID tags are placed on items commonly lost. With use of directional detectors placed around the residence, the user can go to their computer to locate the tagged and lost item. Alternatively the user can take a handheld proximity detector around the house to find the lost item.

Exercise Motivating TV

The TV motivates exercise by operating conditional upon the exercise level of the viewers. The system may interact with pedometers, heart rate monitors, or other sensors to determine the level of exercise the viewer completed that day. TV programs accessible and quality of viewing experience are restricted based on the level of past or present activity of the viewers.

Virtual Reality Complete Body Motion Tracking and Simulation System

The user is placed in a suit like device that can both track motion and provide variable resistance for each motion. The user is suspended off the ground so that walking and running actions can be simulated and tracked as well. This device would allow for virtual sports, games, and exercise that is compelling and realistic.
New Products or Equipment for Organizations

Crew-less Sea Shipping

Reduce costs and the treat to life posed by pirating by retrofitting shipping vessels so they can operate, in the open seas, without a crew.

Debating with the Stars TV Program

Bring rational argument and critical thinking back into the popular culture by having stars team up with experts to debate about pressing issues. Each team is randomly assigned the side of the debate to argue. Teams are judged based on the strength of their arguments and counterarguments.

Video exercise verification system

Using a system like the Xbox Kinect, verify and track the exercise that people are doing in a health club. Verified exercise could then be used to give health insurance discounts or other benefits to participants.

Video Recording System for Auto Repair Shops

Help auto mechanic repair shops add value and trust to their services by setting up systems to allow customers to view video recordings of their repairs.

Automated Hand Washing System

The user places their hands in the system and it washes, sanitizes, and dries the hands without requiring the user to scrub or move their hands. This system reduces the error and effort associated with hand cleaning and sanitizing. It could be used in clinical settings to reduce disease transmission and in public restrooms to increase hand washing rates.

New Consumer Software and Websites

Connect Internet Users Based on Web History

A web browser add-on uses web history to connect the user to other users with similar interests. When a user goes to a search engine, the program offers to connect to other users who have searched for similar things, offering another means to getting the information desired.

Digital Itemized Receipts

Allow users to track the exact items they purchase by offering them a digital itemized receipt. This may be transferred to a cell phone at the register or presented at a banking site similar credit card purchases. The user could then choose to receive information and advertisement on products that would be superior based on user specified criteria such as price or quality. Users could also better track warranty information as well as view and generate product/service reviews.

GPS Enabled Carpool Matching

Using GPS a person's schedule and commuting routes are recorded. This data is used to suggest carpooling partners. The data could also be used to provide spontaneous ridesharing matches. A ride seeker indicates their origin,destination, and schedule. The software then contacts individuals likely to be taking a complimentary route to see if they would like to offer a ride for free or fee. The site could then get a commission on ride matches. Inclusion of social networking data in matching criteria could add security and intrigue to the system.

Game Console Fitness Competitions Between Teams

Motivate exercise through internet team competition based on game console systems like the Wii that detect large body motions. Teams that have the most activity or highest regimen compliance score points and win prizes.

Mood and Purpose Matching Music Player

This service plays music that matches the users mood or desire for psychological impact. It plays the best song selection for any moment by asking the user to specify their mood, or the desired effect they want the music to have (i.e. to motivate for studying, cheer up, motivate to exercise, etc.) The algorithm that matches the songs works based on the average person or detailed information about the particular user gained from history or survey.

Open Medical Decisions Site

Patients put their medical records on this Wikipedia-like site. Users of the site collaborate to make diagnosis and treatment decisions. An information integrity system prohibits contributions that don't appropriately cite an authoritative source.

Personal Comedy Profiler and Content Aggregator

This web site determines the type of comedy the user finds most enjoyable and presents them with links to compatible free and premium content. The site would generate revenue from ads as well as commission on media that is sold when available. The comedy profile could be determined by survey and feedback on content viewed.

Spontaneous Live Project Teaming Web Site

This site, similar to random chat sites, would join strangers to do projects that make the world a little better. People could team up live on editing wikipedia articles, populating web site databases on churches and church events, error checking charity web sites, brainstorming solutions to problems, or participating in distributed work systems like that being done with Kepler data and protein folding where people use the human capacity to recognize patterns for the advancement of research. In addition to traditional ad revenue, the product of these teams may be a revenue source by creating projects that solve business problems, provide market intelligence, or create an effective advertising impression.

SOS Cell Phone App

In an emergency this cell phone app notifies other users near you of your distress. Emergency officials can also use this software to send warnings and instructions to people based on their location.
New Software for Organizations

Online Ad Targeting with Digital Receipt Data

The value of online ads could be increased through precise targeting based on digital receipt information of items regularly purchased that consumers opt to share. The system would enable consumers to choose which purchase data they would like to share and the criteria the resulting ads should meet(i.e. products/services with lower price, higher quality etc., rational data-centric ads or comedy ads etc.) Besides receiving more relevant information, consumers could be motivated by access (financed by higher ad revenue) to site content presently subscription based or behind pay walls.

National Freight Routing Coordination Program

Reduce empty miles, total miles driven, partial loads, and fuel costs by coordinating fleet locations and freight delivery amongst businesses in a particular location or nationally. Instead of semis traveling with partial or empty loads they can pick up and deliver other freight along the same or similar route. The software would calculate the routes and deliveries that offer the highest efficiency while maintaining the appropriate schedules.

Web Comments Credibility Scoring System

Web article comments are often trivial and unhelpful. This system would use author education and experience as a means to score comments. Comments that come from expert authors could be viewed first thereby increasing the value of comments and the time users spend on a site. Author data could come from coordination with existing social networks like Facebook or the creation of a separate service. The validity of education and experience claims could be reinforced by peer review through rating of comments and profiles. In addition an algorithm could look at the structure and complexity of the language of comments on an article and an author's comment history to determine the most worthwhile comments.

New Consumer Services

Windshield Frost Removal Service

Remove frost from customers' car windows in the morning using hot liquid sprayer. Sell service by the month.

Discipline Free Retirement Savings

Many lack the self control to save for retirement. Help them to save by offering binding contractual obligations that automatically deduct retirement from their income and restrict lines of credit.

Discipline Free Giving

The temptation to consume more than is necessary rather than give more to charity is overwhelming for many. Offer binding contractual agreements that force the distribution to charity of income in excess of what a modest lifestyle requires.

New Services for Organizations

Coordinating Volunteer Activities for Employee Development

Employee volunteer programs can improve morale and help employees develop new competencies. Maximize these benefits for business clients by coordinate volunteer activities and projects for their workers.

Economic Development Services

Develop the economies of poor communities around the world in exchange for debt, and access to mineral and land resources. Essentially your services would bypass local politics and corruption by spending revenue from sale of resources on economic development. In one form a government would be selling oil and mining rights not for money but for development.

Neighborhood Thermal Imaging Survey

Obtain thermal imagery of neighborhoods to determine building envelope deficiencies of residences. Thermal cameras are elevated above a neighborhood with UAV, long pole, conventional aircraft, and "drive by" methods to obtain data at a low cost per building. This data is then sold to contractors and energy consultants to allow them to more easily target and sell customers.

Lease Public School Space to Entrepreneurs

Help school budgets by leasing school spaces not in use, after hours or during the summer, to entrepreneurs looking for a means to present their products and services to the public.

International Crime Witness Web Site

This site allows law enforcement agencies around the planet to report a crime where witnesses are being sought. The general population signs up for notification of requests for information that they may have based on their location history. The user can then forward any pictures, video, or recollections that may be helpful.

Unemployment Compensation-Creating Entrepreneurial Incentives

I've been told that persons receiving unemployment compensation from the government must declare any income earned while receiving those benefits and that income will be 100% offset by a decrease in the benefit paid the unemployed person. This creates a disincentive to do anything other than seek long term employment where the compensation exceeds the benefit. Perhaps this is the best case but I also think it is worth investigating the cost and impact of decreasing or eliminating this offset so that income earned through self-employment would be income kept I think this could encourage many to consider entrepreneurial activities that may lead to improved communities and even more employment. What do you think? There is certainly reason to consider unintended consequences.

Nuclear Proliferation: Is the Church the only hope?

i wonder if nuclear proliferation can be stopped and if not...what are the consequences when authoritarian regimes possess these weapons. Are we inevitably left to rely on the rational thinking and good intentions of dictators? Is it too late to devote WWII level national energy towards global development and democracy?

This is worth considering. A nuclear detonation in a major city could eliminate confidence in government and currency threatening a collapse of civilization. It seems conceivable that if society and government did remain intact the constitution and it's notions of liberty would be immediately challenged. It's even imaginable that a majority would support martial law and the suspension of all rights except the right to vote.

If the Church could achieve a new conversion and evangelism..this would certainly reduce the numbers of people willing to be complicit to activities aimed at killing millions. Even if everyone were given the millionaire lifestyle, would this stop the mindset that supports the rhetoric of Ahmadinejad or Kim Jong-il? Is there any solution other than to bring hearts to Christ?

Just some thoughts...What do you think?

Improving Nursing Home Quality of Life

i wonder how to improve the quality of life of nursing home residents. What is that quality? How significantly does dementia impair residents? Would quality be improved by helping residents do activities of spiritual and societal significance? What about prayer missions, or a history project where they record their stories and memories? How often are those done? What else would be good? How could best practices in this area be identified?

Best Practice Diffusion Rates-How fast do good ideas spread?

I wonder how fast good ideas get to those that could benefit from them. I once read that it can take ~15 years for best practices to permeate primary care practice in medicine but that was in a book probably 4 years old citing even older research. I just read an article where a researcher, who published a filtering list for use in drug screening, was contacted by pharmaceutical companies 48 hours after his research was published in a journal.

How did these companies find his research? Did they have a subscription to the journal or did they use some service like Google Reader that compiles a number of RSS feeds. Do they rely mostly on a single third party news service? How efficient are each of these methods. I use Google Reader to view feeds from sites like physorg.com and sciencedaily.com. Physorg.com says they have 7 full time staff and 6 contributing authors and produce about 100 news articles a day about the latest research. Many times these articles are comprised mostly of the press release of a research center. These sites also have no specialty, they cover any science and technology related research. 13 full time people avails 520 hours a 40hr week. How many scholarly articles are published a week?

Barriers to diffusion

When I survey journal articles I often don't read past the title. I look for things that seem to be significant to my inexpert eye. If it seems significant I'll read the abstract and sometimes stop there because it doesn't meet the significance threshold (and often because I don't want to pay $30). Sometimes it appears the most significant idea in a published article is the research procedures used and developed as opposed to the specific focus of the research. I wonder how often procedural developments aren't appropriately highlighted in the title, abstract, or entire article to reflect their significance and what this costs in terms of the diffusion of such best practices and advancing the field. Furthermore the perusing of on-topic research articles or the use of on-topic keyword searches could omit relevant developments in other fields. What is the cost of this?

Language is another barrier to the diffusion of information. According to "Science and Engineering Indicators:2010" by NSF the US comprises 33% of total global spending on R&D with Japan and China in second and third place. Citing the OECD the same report also shows china, the US, and the EU as all having about the same number of researchers. A UK government report indicated that China moved into second place in total number of published papers, displacing the UK and raising their percent of total papers published to something around 11 percent however these stats aren't indicative of the number of papers published in non-english languages which I wasn't able to find in my brief attempt (highlighting a failure in information diffusion as it seems likely such information exists..I just can't find it). These stats do however indicate that the potential for language barriers in best practice diffusion is worth evaluating

Additionally of course the myth of free information that the internet let's us indulge in must be put in it's place. The internet reduces the cost of information diffusion to near zero but not information necessarily information creation. All the arguments for copyrights and patents apply. Thus funding and motivating research by charging for access to the results is a reasonable model. i think it best to consider this barrier to information diffusion a separate question and ponder simply the diffusion of information that is made freely available by it's authors

Diffusion mechanisms

Of course any thought on information propagation can't omit consideration of search engines in general. Suffice it to say it seems were are in the infancy of search engine development. That term presumes a natural development with time but i suppose it's possible, that to go much beyond keyword frequency and other present algorithms, it could essentially require the development of human level AI..so we may be in for a wait.

What do you think? This is another top of the head rambling so correct and guide.

Arguments for space investment-do they point towards weaknesses in education?

Is it fallacious reasoning to say that the space program should be supported for the unknown and unpredictable advances in unrelated technologies that may come from it? If the goal is general technological progress, aren't there better investments? What about education, general research, business incubators or X-prize competitions? The use of fallacious arguments in public discourse could highlight a weakness in the public education system.

Few parts of the curricula would appear directed at more important objectives than teaching logic and reasoning. We might find that support for these other parts are justified by reasoning not dissimilar to the one mentioned above for NASA-they offer some positive effect so must be good instead of first asking how to achieve the positive effect then considering all possible ways to best attain that effect.

Of course I'm not an expert in either issue and am speaking only to the nature of the argument with a slant towards provocation:)

Feel free to correct and improve!

The Media, Polls, and Education: Their Impact on National Security

It is only rational that nations determine the makeup, strength, and disposition of their military based on threat assessments. Such an assessment would be incomplete without considering not only the military capability of other nations but their potential behaviors. Much of Europe of course invites the presence of US military assets on their soil whereas the Russians seem to fear minuscule US military deployments even in border countries. One key explanation for the difference is the assessment of potential behavior.

How should the likely future behavior of a country be determined. In a dictatorship or totalitarian regime a primary determinant of behavior is the psychology and world view of it's leaders. When assessing the potential behavior of a democracy, the psychology of the population becomes of increasing importance because, no matter the words of the present leadership, the future leadership will be determined by that population.

So assessing the threat a democratic country poses to a nation requires evaluating the world view and disposition of the population. One tool in that approach is to evaluate the popular media and polls. If the most popular voices are the ones calling for territorial expansion or war against another country one would conclude that the population is more likely to elect a government that will carry out those policies.

In addition to foreign policy proposals that seem to have popularity, determining the ability of the population to be swayed by irrational argument is also a necessary consideration in assessing the potential future threat posed by democratic countries. If the population seems easily taken by absurd thinking or conspiracy theories, that country's future behavior could rightly be considered a larger threat than if the population largely dispelled such thinking. In making this assessment any national movement or debate could shine light on the extent of irrationality in the population.

These principles, along with others of course, are likely used in assessing the threat the US poses to other countries. The larger threat the US seems to pose, the more resources countries might rationally decide they need to spend on countering that threat. This would tend to increase the size and capability of militaries in threatened countries as well as increase the risk of nuclear proliferation. These tendencies threaten US security directly but also in raising the potential for human and economic crisis that effect it morally and financially.

Education and christian evangelization (the real type the recognizes that God humbled Himself even to an unjust death, the type that knows giving sacrificially is worth more than spare billions) are two things that can reduce these tendencies.