These ideas are for Mac products (mainly). and some of them are not
big enough to pay the rent. but that's not the point of this article.
I've been reading an article or two a day about some out-of-work
programmer complaining of job outsourcing to India. I've kind of got a
problem with that myself, actually. I mean, if we can prop up
agriculture with subsidies, why not high tech?
Anyway, if these people being interviewed by the mainstream press
are as good as they claim to be, let them cook up some new ideas, start
up a company, and outsource to India. Outsourcing is revenge best
served with curry, someone once said.
For what it's worth, here are my seed ideas that someone can cook up
and spit out (politely in a napkin when your host isn't looking) before
coming up with the really good clambake that starts the next
revolution. In other words, it's the Lite Side's
Ideas for Truly Desperate Out of Work Programmers
- Someone out there in the great big world needs to concoct a product
that links together lesson plans, assessments (of all types), student
projects, and standards for any state in the USA. I've written about
this before. All the mail I get afterward promises me the world if I
just go to site X, but it never seems to pan out the way it needs to.
It is not a difficult programming challenge, just some tedious
relational database programming. Get some venture capital, write up a
prototype for Texas and California, and then watch the funds roll in.
If you phrased it right you could probably get NSF to fund it. None of
the products that vendors write to me about after these postings quite
"get it." But there's big money here - big money. Really big
money. Multimillion grant and sales opportunity here, cross platform,
too. Can you smell the money? Smellllll it. Flplipliplip. That's
the sound of your money flipping between your thumb and forefinger. For
a small but honestly earned consulting fee and some publishing credits,
I'd tell you exactly how to do it. Serious queries only, please limit
your cv's to one hundred pages.
- Someone needs to kick butt, take names, and write a Mac OS X
driver for Meade digital telescope cameras. Meade, for their part, are
avowed anti-Mac gearheads. At a convention a Meade rep actually turned
his back and walked away from me when I asked if their products are
Mac-compatible. It's just data, folks. May not be a big market, but
despite their attitude, Meade makes a mighty fine telescope and camera.
I'd pay $150 for a working driver and interface program right here and
now. There are probably a few hundred people who would. But it's just a
driver and interface.
- I need a utility to synchronize my printer choices in OS X and
Classic. Kind of annoying that they don't match. Soon after you write
said utility, Apple will build it into the OS, so don't expect a lot of
revenue. Maybe you could sue them or something.
- Is there a utility for turning the Mac's screen sideways?
Sometimes, I just want to read a book on my laptop. Sometimes a page
monitor is just the thing.
- I need a gradebook program as powerful and complex as Grade Machine
that can export an entire "look up your own grades" module and update
it on the fly. I don't trust services like MyGradeBook.com; I was burned with
lost data from several dot-com flameouts and want my data on my
drive. Grade Machine needs to get its interface house in order and
update to OS X. And it should integrate with that whole standards
database thing I referred to earlier. Sweet mother of Abraham Lincoln,
do I have to draw a map? Someone get on this! And I'm not talking about
some crappy little DOS-ware port left over from a textbook CD from ten
years ago either!
- Someone take a look at the shareware over at www.EntryPoints.com. Anacrostics
makes double-acrostics. It hasn't been updated in years. It doesn't run
quite right in OS X. It won't print until you quit the program; it
doesn't remember your last settings; saved puzzles keep adding in
functions you turned off the last time you used it. Despite all this,
it's a great program because of what it does. If the folks over there
ever update it and fix it, I'll be ready to pay for it. Don't send me
links to crossword and word search programs (yawn).
- Interactive e-books. Fill in your name, and the bodice-ripper then
refers to you by name all the way through. Heck, that's halfway to a
holodeck. Oooh, then give that to your wife as a vacation book or a
Valentine's gift. Big points there, I'd say. Choose your own
ending updated with choices to click for preteen readers. E-books are a
niche product because they emulate poorly what a book already does.
Make e-books do something regular books can't, and you've started
developing a market. Potential big bucks here, but could be a dot-com
kind of thing, too. Depends on the quality of the product.
- Did you replace your old mouse with an optical one? Schools need
mouse balls. Physics teachers in particular. That's a hint. Haven't got
a clue how you'd make money at it, though. Some kind of kit to turn an
old mouse into a physics experiment. Maybe you could sell the idea to
Pasco or Vernier or someone.
- Lab equipment like Vernier sells, except it's all video based. In
the box you get a webcam, a ball, a car, a ramp, a pulley, etc.
Everything you need for one lab station. Total cost cannot exceed $150.
No interface boxes. You bundle VideoPoint video analysis software with
it. Ten workstations is $1,000. Hottest product since interfaces were
invented, I gar-on-tee.
- Outsource product idea generation. Okay, if high-tech jobs are not
protected, then neither are the ideas that generated them in the first
place. You see companies today saying things like, "We may outsource
the grunt work, but all the ideas are still made here in the USA. It's
the new economy." Where have we heard that before? Taking it to the
next level, the only thing the USA will supply is capital; even the
ideas will be outsourced to another country. You want to get in on this
before corporate figures that out? Start a new company that pays $0.25
bonuses to foreign programmers that propose new products that make it
to market. Whammo! Nothing left for us to do but flip cheeseburgers and
do shiatsu massage.
Before you fire off one of those "your ideas are so lame" missives,
just remember that if I can crank out ten ideas while sitting here with
a toothache distracting me and papers that need grading, then why the
heck can't these geniuses whining to the press do even better?
I'd tell you more, but the wise-ass article competition from Burma
is just killing me. I'm going home to grow sweet potatoes.
