5 high-potential product ideas
Five social concepts that could evolve in successful startups!
This post presents five social product concepts— from music and news to recruitment services — which have been in my ideas backlog for a while and could inspire ambitious entrepreneurs out there and trigger product development discussions.
1. A Social Music Discovery service
Allow people to naturally discover music by accessing the most popular & recently played songs in reference to a particular social situation.
Assuming a particular social arrangement (a class in a University, customers in a Bar/Movie theater, friends having a coffee etc.); this app scans the connected music services of each person in the arrangement (for instance Spotify accounts, YouTube music content, etc.) and creates a consolidated list of recently and most frequently played songs for the members of this social arrangement.
The app recommends music to each user, inspired by the particular song/artist preferences of the persons in the arrangement. A log of these recommendations empowers an ongoing, social-driven music discovery engine (powered both by people I know and strangers which happened to be in the same place as well). The offline experience may also support naming the social arrangement, exposing patterns related to it (i.e. ad-hoc or repeating, social or professional, etc.); could also support automatic conversion to a group, with suggestions to join and exchange opinions and preferences on music and more.
The system can further present the history of the social arrangements the user has joined, enriched with music preferences, trends, gaps, recommendations, and statistics. The public website experience presents musical preferences on maps, classifications schemes (locations, geography, profession, social, party, family, wedding …) along with interesting metadata and stats enabling alternative music discovery scenarios.
Stores, concert halls, restaurants, cafes, clubs can use this to know what music their real customers prefer — for instance a cafe could use this system to instantly get the best possible mix of songs for the particular audience in the store at a particular moment; then automatically use a streaming music service to serve these playlist to the customers.
Another interesting scenario is the discovery of places based on musical preferences of the people physically appearing in the place; users can discover places based on the musical preferences of other people present in the specific location/ place.
2. The Story of a banknote
This is an old (but still relevant) idea -when banknotes were a popular payment method — about an app to attach messages to banknotes.
A user would be able to attach a story or message to a particular banknote before making a payment. As banknotes change hands, their stories could be discovered and enriched by other users, across the world. Any banknote could have an interesting history — a set of stories, events comments across locations.
The app would be based on image analysis, entity identification techniques and OCR in order to be able to identify a banknote, perform validation, identify and scan the unique identifiers of the specific banknote. On success, the user would receive a prompt to unlock the public history of the particular banknote and/or attach a new message/ story to it. For more information check the article below:
3. A personalized video newscaster
The typical internet user is overwhelmed by the wide range of news sources and the increasing volume of stories generated on a daily basis. What if there was an intelligent process to summarize the daily news as a short video that is interactive and personalized for each particular user?
The business: an online service offering daily content synopsis using human editors and also advanced Artificial Intelligence and content understanding technologies. The news synopsis is done per market, language, culture targeting a representative and objective coverage of stories across a predefined array of topics. The ‘synopsis video’ is presented by a human newscaster or an avatar. The structure of the video is based on technology to allow smooth and interactive navigation through the video, either implicitly (the user is clicking ‘next topic’) or implicitly (the system is filtering out or re-prioritizing stories within the video, based on user’s profile, preferences, session details, day of the week, etc.).
News Synopsis Videos are then released across platforms and devices. As users consume a ‘news synopsis’ video the system adapts to their preferences, usage patterns, and styles. Each topic covered in the video is clickable, targeting the original content item or a set of curated content covering the summarized story. As the user consumes the video, can simply skip one topic, or click it and get major media content on the specific story. For example, a user is watching the ‘daily news digest’ video and on a specific story — let’s say the Greek Financial crisis — the user clicks and gets a set of content provided by CNN, BBC, NBC, Facebook, etc. all matching the exact story.
4. A Social Content Discovery service
Imagine an app on your mobile able to instantly capture the signals regarding the content/news consumed by people around you, at any point in time and then make recommendations to you based on popular content, dynamics, and trends within the particular social arrangement.
This would be extremely helpful not only as a news/content discovery engine but also as a helper for the identification of common interests, conversation, and social interaction. The system could also empower the discovery of places based on content/news/topical preferences of the people physically appearing in the place.
5. Recruitment based on video CVs
The global online recruiting landscape is undergoing a significant transformation — new technologies, large unemployment rates across Europe and certain countries around the world, increasing numbers of Job seekers are considering relocation; These trends combined with well-known inefficiencies of the traditional job-application processes create conditions for novel products and services.
This concept has been originally conceived back in 2011. Currently there are startups offering video CVs but this might still inspire thinking around novel features or products.
Imagine a job application and screening process based on Video CVs: Applicants search for jobs and apply with short, standardized videos instead of CVs while HR professionals search and access Video CVs as the first step of the short-listing process. This could be implemented as an online platform allowing easy Job-Seeker registration, quick and easy Video administration, visibility and access management. The platform would allow Job-Seekers to search & apply to jobs with one-click and proceed to selective video sharing with the job poster. On the other side, HR employees, would be able to easily set-up and manage jobs, support them with video material, and browse auto-matched or applied-for Video CVs. An enhanced platform, offering all well-known functionality in a totally new, content-driven way.
Job seekers would find a free service to apply for jobs and get discovered: instead of a lengthy, conventional CV, Job-Seekers would be able to upload their short videos (a few minutes long) and apply or get found online. Especially for Jobs involving specific communication requirements, appearance, voice (for instance media or tourism related) this could boost the whole process and accelerate results. A wide range of commercial products could be built on top of this: the basic service would be free for job-seekers and possibly for certain types of corporations; there could be a wide range of paid options, extending the use-cases and enhancing the overall user experience. Offline products could be available as well — including advanced video production and tailor-made video-supported interview processes for large corporations.
