If you want to start a company and are working on new ideas, here’s how I’ve always done it and how I recommend you do it. Be the opposite of secretive. Create a Google spreadsheet where you list every idea you can think, even really half-baked ones. Include ideas you hear about (make sure you keep track of who had which idea so you can credit them/include them later).
Then take the spreadsheet and show it to every smart person you can get a meeting with and walk through each idea. Talk to VCs, entrepreneurs, potential customers, and people working at big companies in relevant industries. You’ll be surprised how much you’ll learn. The odds that someone will hear an idea and go start a competitor are close to zero. The odds you’ll learn which ideas are good and bad and how to improve them are very high.
Developing new startup ideas, Chris Dixon.
March 14, 2010
Censuous - a beautifully designed, non-technical web interface to pull census info into kml or shapefiles.
Getting data out of the census is non-trivial, even when you know your SF1, block groups, GEOIDs, H04001, etc. The barrier to easy data access is still slightly too high - the place-based summaries are great, but mapped data requires just a bit too much knowledge to be really accessible.
This one is such a no brainer. No need to describe it further.
Meet Bethel: the first operating system with versioning and complete metadata, including intelligent linking between files.
For example, when you make a jpg from an illustrator file, Bethel knows that these files were once linked and maintains this link into the future, even if a file is moved.
When saving, Bethel invites you to enter useful information alongside the file name - a project number, perhaps a short description. You don’t need to do this in some parallel system of a wiki or a content tracking spreadsheet - it should be intrinsic to the file storage system. Lots of metadata fields are available, Bethel offers the ones you most commonly use - and gives the option to require documentation if you decide to be rigorous.
And then all the links and metadata are indexed and viewable by others. So you can search for a file made for a particular project, no matter who created it, and pull out a previous version from the integrated smart versioning.
Bethel also considers workflow essential to the creation and storage of files: if you do analysis or GIS, and create a final document, it probably contained data from other files or sources. And if you change a file early in the process, the subsequent files need to know about it. So in Bethel, just click on a file to see how it fitted into the process, and see its parents and children.
Returning to a project after a couple of months? Grab a file and switch to wiki-view, where comments are displayed seamlessly alongside file info - creating documentation from files on the fly, with details of who did what when, and enough pointers from them to describe why. See what else you did that morning, searching right inside the document.
Bethel. Because you’re sick of copying and pasting file paths into half-maintained documentation. Because you have a bad memory. Because files are not isolated but belong in a rich workflow. Because other operating systems fail on collecting all the metadata we leave behind.
