Out of startup ideas? Here, have a few.

I’ve been collecting product ideas for a while in a notebook. Some of them are pretty crazy, but some of them should exist. And since there are too many now for one person to do anything about, I thought I’d share them and hope that someone creates one for me.

You ready? Here’s the list:

• Internationalization (translation) as a service — Facebook stopped growing until they figured out how to translate into multiple languages. At some point, every big product will have to be translated. Why not automate it?
• Software to help colleges manage alumni and raise money for endowment — this is a big problem for a lot of colleges. Are you tired of getting calls from your alma mater asking for donations? I’m sure they’re tired of hiring people to call you. It’s a pretty poor process overall that surprisingly no one is trying to make better.
• An easy way to pay your taxes online — why do we still pay our taxes through the mail? This is annoying and it should be a pretty easy problem to solve.
• A tool to help lawyers more quickly organize class action lawsuits — I know this sounds kind of controversial, but there’s probably hundreds of millions of dollars to be made here. Lawyers currently send out thousands of letters to get people involved and this could all be done online.
• An app that lets you take a picture of a condition and send it to a doctor for diagnosis — forget about potential liability here. This could be used in third-world countries where people don’t currently have access to good medical care, and it would also be a good lead generator for doctors.
• Better disposable umbrellas — yeah, disposable umbrellas suck.
• YellowPages for cell phones — how would you find someone’s cell phone number if you didn’t have it? I don’t think there’s currently a good way to do this.
• An app that pulls up an image of a person based on their name — There are so many times I’ve had a meeting with someone and didn’t know what they looked like. This would also be a useful service for products that require users to upload a picture of themselves.
• Automatic referral tracking through URL — this one is kind of technical, but every page on a product should append a unique parameter (something like ?id=532391) that way when I copy the URL and send it to a friend, they know who referred who. And a link could be permanently created between users
• A marketplace for airline tickets — this is a hard one, because you’ll have to get around a lot of airline industry regulation, but anyone who can crack it will be very successful. It’s amazing to me that if I can’t make a flight, I can’t sell my ticket to someone else.
• A tool to help online services onboard users better — most products have pretty horrible onboarding flows (the steps after a users signs up) that aren’t being tested or optimized. There are a few services out there that do this, but none that have really stood out to me.
• Reliable Wifi for conferences — seriously? An entire industry of technology experts and we still have horrible wifi at every event? Don’t even get me started on the difficulty most people have with A/V.
• A way to dynamically change a landing page based on the source of the traffic — Groupon currently shows a different landing page when users come to the site directly vs. from Google. Different referral domains indicate different mindsets and therefore different levels of purchase intent, so this one’s a no-brainer.
• An affiliate system for event organizers — As someone who organizes lots of events, I haven’t yet seen an easy way to create affiliate links for other people to make money sending people to my events. This could be used for conferences as well as event newsletters
• An ad platform for funds raising funding — forget about startup crowdfunding, thanks to the new JOBS act big funds will be able to publicly advertise that they are raising new funds (this used to be illegal). Imagine helping Accel partners run a LinkedIn ad campaign to build a pool of potential LPs.
• Ad retargeting that keeps track of the users’ progress through the customer lifecycle — there’s a distinction in marketing between branding and direct-response advertising. If an ad platform could keep track of how many times someone has been shown an ad (they can), they could slowly progress from branding to direct-response over the course of 8-10 impressions
• TheLadders for tech jobs — people want high paying jobs in tech. Maybe there’s a service out there for this I haven’t heard of, but it can’t be very good if I haven’t heard of it.
• A way to get customer satisfaction ratings from people on restaurants based on their checkins — a store owner could communicate directly with the customers who check into his or her restaurant and get feedback inobtrusively.
• A URL shortener that tracks the behavior of the user you send the link to — this sounds evil, but it’s feasible, so someone should do it just to make sure it’s not used for evil. Could be used for customer insights.
• A service that allows account registration through only email — the fewer questions you ask during the signup process, the higher your conversion rate. So why not ask for only an email? That’s what Groupon does. You can get the rest of the info through Rapleaf or some other service.
• CSS in the cloud — there’s no reason CSS couldn’t be created dynamically through some third-party service, that way a designer could update the look of your site without having to push out new code. This would also solve the headache of cross-browser compatibility.
• A bookmarklet to help people manage their job search — the job search process sucks. Let people use a bookmarklet to track jobs they like, which they’ve applied to, and the rest.
• An app that lets you sell your spot in a line — this one’s more of a novelty, but it would be fun to build. You’re #3 in line for the new iPhone? Put your spot up for auction and see how much people are willing to pay.
• Uber for buses — Like Uber, but better for the environment. Smart routing could make sure a nearby bus could pick you up and still minimize the total transportation time of everyone on that bus. Imagine a bus that comes right to your door every morning and drops you off right at work.

Anyway, just a few ideas. Let me know when you’ve built one of them.