Projects and Fresh Ideas

Jennifer and I were sitting at the kitchen table after a stellar egg breakfast this morning talking about vacation and other stuff. We were also discussing where we saw ourselves in a couple of years, etc... You know, husband and wife talk.

We came up with some really cool ideas that would generate some steady income outside of the ol' 9-5. Jennifer came up with an idea that got my wheels spinning. It got me excited, and I decided to post something about it. The idea is to fill a gap that no other website has done yet and trust me we've looked. It would not only benefit local home owners, like ourselves, but would also benefit local businesses in the area. If we could advertise it and exploit it enough here in Newark, then there's no reason it wouldn't work in Columbus, or any other big city for that matter. I need to do a little more research to see what other gaps we could fill with it, but for now, the idea is very slick, and (most importantly) extremely valuable to all users that would log on. Remember, eBay was started up from a wacky idea to auction off a broken laser pointer. The underlying code was built in a weekend:

Omidyar was 28 when he sat down over a long holiday weekend to write the original computer code for what eventually became an internet superbrand — the auction site eBay. - Wikipedia: Pierre Omidyar

Twitter began in a "daylong brainstorming session"... - Wikipedia: Twitter

Check out the first sketch an idea that later became Twitter: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bf/Twttr_sketch-Dorsey-2006.jpg

Stories like this keep me believing that our idea isn't so far fetched... Our idea is a service that everybody would be able to use, and would have a cool little twist on it that would keep people logged and coming back, much like they do on any other addictive site (eBay, CraigsList, Facebook, Twitter, My blog :), etc..). I'm very excited to sit down and visualize it's underlying architecture and start building the first set of pages. This will be my perfect excuse to master Ruby on Rails and MySql in my spare time. I also need to interview some of my friends and family who own their own businesses to see what I'm missing...

If I can come back from vacation with this much excitement, then it WILL happen. Sorry no more information right now. Feel free to post comments of ideas for such a website though. If that's no a vague request, then I don't know what is. :)