So what could be a good use for this technology? There’s plenty but here’s one that would ease the pain of billions of people: A plain language translator.

Wouldn’t it be great to point your iPhone at a Chinese sign while visiting Hong Kong and BAM! get an automatic translation of what the sign says? Restaurant menus, bus routes and all these signs everywhere could be instantly translated.

Now THAT’S augmented reality to me.

And while we’re at it, I don’t understand why Google isn’t doing Optical Character Recognition in Street view to allow “super local searches” (i.e. bread store on St-Laurent). Yes, businesses open ad close but it could be useful if Google were to drive around the busiest streets… Then again, it might explain why they bought ReCaptcha..? Will we see street-view-style captchas soon?

We almost saw a very good example with the Bixi Mobile application for the iPhone but it was quickly and sadly put back in its grave.

Also, try to think out of the box. Here’s a free idea that I had a few days ago. I don’t know if it would workbut it doesn’t really matter. I even found a funny name for my idea. I would call it "Caxe". If you haven’t figured it out yet, it’s a play on "casque" (helmet) and "bixi". See, most cyclists wear a helmet and if you rent a Bixi, you most likely won’t have one with you. Not only that, what will happen to the Bixi’s once a regulation forces everyone to wear helmets? So why not ink some sort of agreement and lease helmets next to the Bixi’s?

This is just an idea out of the many ones out there. Here’s another one. Cater to tourists (and locals!) by printing special coupons on the back of receipts. It is very easy to find out if a bixi user is from Montreal or abroad by looking at the credit card number. Bixi could print rebates according to that factor including coupons to restaurants located not too far away from the current location. While this idea needs to be implemented by Bixi themselves, there’s gotta be a middle man to find the sponsors…

As you can see, there’s plenty of ideas around popular products!

Then it gets bigger and bigger. People like it. People really start using it. 

We see this all the time. People’s projects become bigger things. But when do you consider a pet project to be a startup? When you make money is one of the obvious answers but think again! Many startups DON’T make any money. When you’re profitable? Then again, lots of startups will never be profitable?

So my question to you is: do you have projects and how do you manage them especially when you know it won’t pay the rent?

People often have this grandiose idea that startups will either make it big or crash. After all, we’re always bombarded by multi-millions acquisitions and big funding rounds. Google buys this, Microsoft buys that, Yahoo! too.

But wait, there’s another world out there. And this is what I’ve slowly came to realize.

What really matters is your return on investment. What if you work 20h a week on a side project only to see it fail miserably? That’s a lot of wasted time.

Wouldn’t it be better if you could work less than 10 hours, just one time, and make just a little bit of money of recurring money every month? Of course earning a few hundred dollars per month isn’t as sexy as having a lot of stock options but then again, it’s real money. It’s profit that most startups won’t even see!

That’s exactly what happened with my latest mini project (DailyDollarDeal.com). It took me initially less than 4 hours to build this site from scratch.

1. I read the eBay API.
2. I found a free template.
3. I wrote a few lines of PHP (just 2 API calls actually!) 

Just a few hours later, boom, I had a site up and running. I was actually surprised at how easy eBay’s API was.

Total investment: 10 dollars for my domain name. Of course I’m cheating a little bit as I’m using my blog’s hosting service to host the service but even if I had to get another hosting company, it would’ve been profitable. It’s not lightning fast but it works fine. In fact, the delay comes from the API calls so there’s not much I can do other that implement a caching service but I don’t even want to mess with this for a simple reason: it works “good enough”!

Can this get any easier? I don’t think so. Can it get better? Of course. But in terms of return on investment, I’d do another project like this anytime. The goal actually is to parallelize them in order to bring decent income. In theory, it’s easy. If you earn 100 dollars per month then make 10 other sites and you will earn 1000 dollars per month. In reality however, things don’t work the same way…

I experimented by adding an Amazon section where people can look for clearance items (up to 90% off). It took me less than one hour to setup everything. Although it allows you to find great deals on Amazon, people prefer the one dollar auctions on eBay. If I had only done the Amazon site, I guess I would’ve called it a failure… 

The moral of the story is not matter how small your idea is, take it to the street and let people play with it. Who knows what will come out of it? Many successes started very small. In my case, I know for sure that Venture Capitalists or Google won’t be knocking at my door to give me buckets of cash (although they are welcomed to do so!) but I know that I can make some extra money even while I sleep.

Although my idea is not geek or sexy, that’s a good feeling!

"Encan Bougon " is a system that allows you to watch last minute auctions on eBay and for which the current price is below one dollar.

Why? Well the reason behind all this is that many auctions go unsold because they have typos and thus are not found by people. A lot of sellers are pretty bad at making their item "marketable" and have very bad title. And we humans are bad buyers. Most people only browse title, they don’t actually open the item to read the whole description. So a market of bad sellers and bad buys creates an opportunity for good buyers!

I started this tool sometime ago for my own personal use. I use it all the time to look for cheap baby/kids stuff and of course geek stuff. Instead of going on eBay, I use this tool to scan for products. You’d be surprised what goes unsold on eBay!

So I decided to convert my own research tool to everyone. This is a great tool for bargain hunters and although the site is only in French now (Canada, France and Belgium), it will be available for all eBay sites. Try it out and if you have any comments or suggestions, please let me know!

One bet, 10$ down the drain for a new domain name and a quick and dirty web page hack later, I present you the "I am rich" beer coasters .

You know you always wanted to show your wealth in bars to pick up girls. Now you can! I only need to sell one in order to generate a profit (unlike most startups).

This is a joke serious test experiment to see where people will go. You can really order them and I will really ship them. Enjoy! :)

The application was removed from the Apple store after 8 idiots persons downloaded the application (one by mistake? ). That’s close to 8000$ in pure profit. I’d say, that’s even more profit than many startups will ever make in their entire life. The publicity just started to kick in. That guy could’ve easily made 100 sales. 100 sales means $100,000 of free money from rich err.. mentally challenged people who have nothing else to do with their hard earned money. I say free money because although there was some initial investment let’s not fool ourselves: there was probably less than 3 to 4 hours of work involved, and I’m being generous… Most of it was probably put on the "ruby" image – if not taken directly from Google.

I get rather upset that I don’t have those type of ideas that are so dumb that people fall for it. Just like the million pixel page or the pet rock, these ideas require so little time and yet are financially rewarding. I only have ideas which require gazillions of dollars and a team of 50 developpers.

Since many great ideas work well in other domains, is anyone willing to buy a $1000 ruby picture from me? You’ll look really cool and people will know you’re dumb err.. I mean rich…

The knife analogy helps me redefine if an idea is good or not. You can eat a steak with a regular knife but it’s so much easier with a steak knife. Chicken on the other hand, can be eaten with a regular knife (sometimes without a knife at all!). Steak can be seen as first class meat in a sense because it has its own knife. If you want to truly enjoy a steak, you must buy a steak knife.

This relegates chicken as second class meat. It is so easy to eat that anyone can eat it easily without investing into fancy knives.

So think about your business idea. Do you want to cater to people who won’t mind buying but also investing more money in your own product (as they see the extra value) or do you want to focus on people who don’t want to invest at all? In other words, is your idea so interesting that people won’t mind paying for it AND for extraneous services/add-ons just like they won’t mind buying a nice set of steak knives to truly enjoy their steak?

I believe you want customers who not only want to buy steaks, but also want to buy steak knives. These people are experts and truly appreciate your service or product.

In other words, if your product is not top quality, you’re basically trying to sell chicken knives. No one wants to buy a chicken knife :)

I want to map and inventory humans.

Huh? Yes you read it right. I want to have the largest human database in the world. This database would include pictures and statistics contributed by people from all around the world. These pictures and statistics will be used for medical, research and other academic use. Now I don’t want to simply collect human pictures, I want to collect and inventory body parts associated to specific data like age, measurements, ethnicity, diseases affecting a person/body part, country, sex and so on.

Imagine searching for pictures of skin cancer affecting a hand. It is pretty hard to find decent information right now, let alone extra data such as the cancer stage, the size of the affected area, the age of the person and so on. Google images will probably give you very unpredictable results and will point you to a different site every time. Also, if you are a researcher, you will find the statistical data very handy. Which country has the longest feet in the world? What skin tones can you find in Europe? What is the most predominant hair color in Russia? What is the average nail length worldwide? Which country has the highest level of psoriasis? How tall are 9 years old kids in Finland? What if you want to see pictures of warts on a lip? How about pictures of bee stings on a nose?

Of course, all this would be anonymous to the contributor. Not only you wouldn’t be able to find out who the person is, but you wouldn’t be able to reconstruct the person using a series of images.

I think it’s time to have an online, worldwide map of the human body. Think Google Earth for the human body. Think Wiki and the human body. I present you: wikibody.org

I want this project to be just like Wikipedia: a non-profit organization using an open source platform build by volunteers. Sounds interesting? I think it is. I always wanted to start a great initiative like Wikipedia and I guess this project is interesting enough to get started. What I need from you is to help spread the word and get the ball rolling. It’s for a good cause! If you want to contribute part or full time, please contact me at denis@quebecvalley.com

This is great news and the price is very affordable. It’s cheaper to go there than to go to a noisy cafe where Internet access is often slow.  I wish Patrick a lot of luck with this project. Pass the word around!