7 High-potential startup concepts
The ‘Story of a Banknote’ +6 high-potential product ideas to inspire you and your team
What to do when it's impossible to process all of the ideas in your backlog?
You have the option to keep them hidden, waiting in your ideas backlog, or just share them! It’s a great feeling after all when it happens to inspire ambitious entrepreneurs out there.
The following list briefly describes seven product concepts — from my personal backlog — which could trigger interesting entrepreneurial discussions; ranging from messaging, music and content discovery to intelligent recommendation systems and recruitment experiences.
1. Location-Locked messages
How about a service enabling anchoring messages in space and time? Then notify the recipients to go discover them?
A user in a particular location (certain radius and/or in a named location) leaves a message to a friend or a group of friends. The message is only available if the recipient gets to the specific place, within the predefined time frame. The message can be a combination of voice/video/text/image or another form of rich media. The recipient might get a notification on this message or not (surprise mode).
This could become a great platform for games and new interaction scenarios. In a small geo-scale, this sets the basis for games, personal messages and friends having fun with posting location-triggered messages.
In a large geo-scale, users lock their messages in places around the world. If and when the targeted users visit the same place, they discover the (potentially old) messages. It could also involve public messages — enabling a ‘happened here’ summation.
2. A Social Music Discovery
Naturally, discover music by accessing the most popular & recently played songs in reference to a particular social arrangement
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.
An ongoing, social 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.
3. 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 random banknote could have an interesting history — a set of stories, events comments across locations
The app could use a combination of 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.
4. News Synopsis via interactive Video experiences
Personalization on top of collections of independent pieces of content is quite conventional nowadays. But how about dynamically synthesizing a short news video for each user, as a single personalized experience? Imagine an intelligent process to summarize the daily news as one video, which is also interactive and according to the preferences of each particular user.
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. 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 explicitly (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.
5. 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.
Then make intelligent recommendations 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.
6. Recruitment: video CVs
The global online recruiting landscape is undergoing a significant transformation. Global trends (AI-driven workforce transformation) combined with well-known inefficiencies of the traditional job-application processes, create the right conditions for novel products and services.
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. The platform could 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.
This concept has been originally conceived back in 2010. Currently there are startups offering video CVs but this might still inspire thinking around novel features or products.
7. Music: a dynamic, audience-driven PLAYLIST
You are in a restaurant or cafe and you realize that you listen to some of the rare songs you like and also to new ones of the same taste! The restaurant or cafe could seamlessly aggregate the music preferences of the current audience (for instance via Spotify or similar music streaming services — for those customers having the app-enabled) and use this aggregation to generate highly relevant playlists: a synthesis of music matching the explicit or implied preferences of the current audience — set of customers in the physical space!
Another interesting scenario is the discovery of places (for instance restaurants, cafe, bars, etc.) based on the aggregated musical preferences of the people frequently visiting the place (customers, visitors etc.); users can search and explore places with all traditional criteria and also the music preferences of the ‘typical customer’.
Interested in Artificial Intelligence?
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