rumblestiltskin
Submit ideas for the 2009 Rails Rumble and try to win the championship belt sponsored by thoughtbot. Vote for good ideas. Find teammates.
BLOGALIZER (good idea)
Don't waste time broadcasting your posts anymore, Blogalizer will do it for you.
This application will allow users to send messages to be broadcasted over the most popular blog directories, social networks, and other spreading sites every time you post.
Also, owners of starting blog directories would be able to register his site as endpoint for messages.
spastorino, joseicosta, smartinez87, wyeworks, draix, and nartub want to rumble this idea.
KANGAROO COURT (good idea)
All-digital version of Y Combinator or Tech Stars. Funded by the masses.
* Teams must be at least two Rails developers with a workingwithrails account and one published plugin or gem.
* The team asks for $5,000 for round one investment in their web app. They describe how the money will be used (designer, servers) and what the app will do.
* At a specified time (noon every Wednesday), teams go on the open market for investment. Anyone can invest any amount from $1 to the full $5,000. The total must equal exactly $5,000, however (it can not be over)
* The team cannot access the money until it reaches exactly the target number. If it does not get there by a certain time (30 days after announcement), all investors get their money back.
* If the team wants to, they may enter a round two of $10,000 anytime after they have launched version one of their web app under the same rules as round one.
* $1,000 equals 1% ownership in the company. Fully legal.
* Kangaroo Court gets 1% ownership in every successfully company or a flat rate of $500 for each successfully funded Round One company and $1000 for Round Two companies.
amerine, jayroh, rubycsruby, jayunit, foundint, jjcalleiro, jrallison, and 53k want to rumble this idea.
IMPEACH (good idea)
Apparently, it’s not really clear what an impeachable offense is for the President, Vice President, etc. (“treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.”)
This app lets users define impeachable offenses and lists which Presidents and others would be or would have been impeached under said criteria.
INTERNET PIE (good idea)
* What % of internet users use RSS?
* What % of internet users visit Wikipedia daily?
It’s not easy enough to find this kind of data.
I don’t know how this app would be designed to answer the questions, but I guess user-generated, with citation.
rubycsruby wants to rumble this idea.
STARTUP GREASE (good idea)
Process management for web startups.
* Founders create Concepts.
* Founders include a Prototype URL, Designs, or User Stories for Concepts.
* Founders request Proposals from Technologists on their Concepts.
* Technologists send Proposals to Founders.
* Founders request Amendments to the Proposal.
* Technologists make Amandments & send new Version of Proposal to Founders.
* Founders accept Proposal from Technologist, making a Payment for the first Iteration.
* Founders prioritize User Stories.
* Two-week Iterations are automatically determined by User Stories.
* Technologists & Founders maintain a Glossary.
* Founders publicly announce Releases of the Project.
* Investors contact Founders to make Investments in Projects.
Basically, we enforce a strict process for web startup founders to follow, connecting with Technologists such as ourselves. We take a 1% commission on all Payments between Founders & Technologists. The service is totally free to use otherwise.
We also enforce good legal contracts, making the process easy for freelancers.
We have some nice interfaces to help Founders pick Technologists in their price range.
Croaky, amerine, jayroh, rubycsruby, jqr, phildarnowsky, and GarrettGee7 want to rumble this idea.
DIME BAG (good idea)
One-page site that consists of a queue of products at the top of the page, and a credit card form at the bottom.
When you submit the form, you purchase whatever happens to be at the front of the queue at that moment. If somebody submits the form before you do, you'll end up with the next item in the queue (and so on).
Every item in the queue would have a set price (like $10). Most items would be very low in value, but an occasional expensive item would make it like a lottery.
jayunit, bradly, jayroh, shakaiyo, joeferris, jrallison, and papucho86 want to rumble this idea.
MEERKAT (good idea)
I create an account. I list people who get notified when I die. It gets hooked into some U.S. state records systems of some kind and pings the people I specify when I die.
Myriad of uses for this. Everyone dies. Population’s increasing. Big market.
papucho86, NASA, and The Indian Government want to rumble this idea.
CASTAWAY (good idea)
CASTAWAY is a traffle (a travel raffle).
You pay $5 for a chance for a trip anywhere in the world, hotel and flight paid for.
RADIOMAN (good idea)
Using Adhearsion, get a phone call when tickets you want go on sale. You’re automatically connected to a ticket agent who can process your ticket order.
amerine, rubycsruby, anildigital, and levicole want to rumble this idea.
GUNWALES (good idea)
Your company’s hiring process will be streamlined and lightweight with Gunwales.
For free, you can:
* Schedule interviews.
* Write private interview questions that can be shared internally.
For $10/month, you can:
* Use other companies’ interview questions that they’ve shared.
* Rate the effectiveness of interview questions.
* Share your interview questions with other Gunwale companies. The companies with most highly rated questions for each position receive $10 off their next month’s bill.
For $20/month, you can:
* Post a job publicly.
* Collect resumes.
For $30/month, you can:
* Run public competitions for a position, such as designers submitting designs.
* Schedule day(s) for applicants to work on-site at your company as a trial run.
Croaky, amerine, jayroh, techpickles, phildarnowsky, and jrallison want to rumble this idea.
BRASS COLLAR (good idea)
Campaign web app for candidates to elected office (targeting state representatives, state Senators, candidates for city council). Glorified, simplified mailing list, blog that makes it clear and easy to post YouTube clips, photos, and text, and donation system (maybe leverage Auburn Quad for this? Do they have an open API?). Subscription model.
mark_menard and 53k want to rumble this idea.
BISCUITS (good idea)
"Next generation Pragmatic Programmers" or "Lulu for PDFs".
No paper ever published. Books are in a format (PDF?) that can be read on a computer, Kindle, or iPhone.
Books are short. Hard upper limit of 100 pages.
Authors get huge percentage of sales. Also get advice from editors and network of authors. Invite friends to provide feedback, edits. Integrate with github somehow.
Rumbler wants to rumble this idea.
CLAIRVOYANCE (good idea)
You are able to collect real time information in Google Reader, Delicious and Netvibes.
You can even add semantics and see all the links of a subject in one page.
That's the input.
As output you can copy and paste snippets, ideas from the aggregated articles into a separate application, blog post, wiki, mindmapper.
And that's all. It's far from providing you clairvoyance to your subject of interests -- business.
Create your personal news agency! All inputs and your outputs in one application.
. Aggregate news using existing tools (GReader).
. Add filters / semantics based on source, content, category using cascading tags and meta-tags
. Add one-paragraph summaries / distilled knowledge to your semantic tags, subject of interests
. Visualize your subjects as trends, predictions, overviews, know-how
. Monetize the final output
rubycsruby wants to rumble this idea.
JUMP THE QUEUE (good idea)
People waiting in line at amusement parks(Cedar Point, Six Flags, Universal Studios, etc.) can use an SMS interface to a Rails app to report on wait times for rides.
Conversely they can also ping the service for the wait times of a specific ride, the shortest lines, or the longest lines.
Zillions of people have text messaging on their cell phones and darn near everyone has a cell phone these days. This could be pretty sweet.
hernan43, papucho86, and obama want to rumble this idea.
PERESTROIKA (good idea)
Lets user re-organize the American economy as you see fit providing some kind of object interface from the perspective of the federal government.
Pull levers like “stock injection plan” and “cut interest rates” and see the economic effects.
GarrettGee7 wants to rumble this idea.
BO KNOWS (good idea)
The athletic SAT. Quantify how athletic you are. Users enter data such as mile time, bench press, etc. The app gives you a single, SAT-style score. Only people like Rajon Rondo get 800s. College athletes of major sports should be in the 600s somewhere.
The catch is you can enter in your information but can’t see your own score until you pay a few dollars.
Hype it with “who’s the best athlete in Boston” or “who was more athletic: Bill Russell or Joe Montana?”.
This would take off because all guys think they're great athletes.
Croaky, moonfruit, and jayroh want to rumble this idea.
SOFT BELLIES (good idea)
The web app wireframing web app.
* provides a limited number of palette sizes (960 pixels wide by 1000 pixels high or something), white background.
* gives me a text tool. The text is black and a set size (13 pt). I can place it anywhere on the palette.
* gives me a box tool. The box can be any size up to the size of the palette. When I hold “Shift” while reshaping the box, it maintains its current height/width ratio.
* Boxes have an optional text property. The text is 13pt and centered (cannot be changed).
* I can copy and paste the box and text instances, preferably with keyboard shortcuts.
* I can save multiple versions of the same wireframe
* Wireframes are collected in a project, shared among users of my choice.
* You can create one wireframe, up to 10 versions for the free account. Subscription model afterward.
techpickles and keithnorm want to rumble this idea.
BOOZEBAG (good idea)
iPhone app. $5. Location-aware. Talks to Rails app on the backend.
You give it a bar and a thumbs up or thumbs down.
View a listing of bars within a few miles of you with the best ratings in the last hour, day, week, month, and year.
techpickles, haruska, mlitwiniuk, and papucho86 want to rumble this idea.
ICHIBON (good idea)
Automatically translate tweets into English. This could be done using the Twitter Search API and the iso_language_code attribute on returned Tweets.
aussiegeek and techpickles want to rumble this idea.
ED FRIENDLY (good idea)
Ed Friendly is the world's greatest web development environment.
It is a web service with a browser-based windows for each of your common tasks.
For free, you get:
* a test runner
* a text editor with no key bindings
* a one-click deployer
* a direct markup & style manipulator
Bronze Plan: for $9.95/month, you get those features plus:
* a performance improvement hinter
* a searcher
* a code class browser
* a Hoptoad integrator
* a full-screen toggler
* a test coverer
Silver Plan: for $19.95/month, you get those features plus:
* a Smalltalk-like debugger
* an image cropper
* an image resizer
* an image rotator
* an image flipper
* a color editor
* a text editor with vim key bindings
* a staging environment
Gold Plan: for $29.95/month, you get those features plus:
* an image layerer
* a continuous integrator
* a patterns identifier
* a refactoring hinter
* an online/offline syncronizer
* an A/B tester
Croaky wants to rumble this idea.
POCKETS (good idea)
Pockets is voicemail for your Twitter account.
* Connect your Twitter account to the Pockets iPhone app.
* Send Audio Tweets from your iPhone to your friends’ Pockets.
* Listen to Audio Tweets in the Pocket of your iPhone.
Your Audio Tweets are always private, never public.
Croaky wants to rumble this idea.
WORKSWITHVERSH.IN (good idea)
A set of Sinatra apps that are only URLs. Depending on the yes/no answer to the question you type into the URL, you get redirected to the answer.
http://shoulda.workwithversh.in?2.3=rails
http://pacecar.workswithversh.in?2.3=rails
http://paperclip.workswithversh.in/2.3/of/rails
http://quietbacktrace.workswithversh.in/2.2.2/of/rails
http://quietbacktrace.doesnotworkwithversh.in/2.3.2/of/rails
http://urlnotfoun.de
rubycsruby, techpickles, bjeanes, and orlin want to rumble this idea.
SLAMMA JAMMA (good idea)
NBA player data app. Find a data provider, run some programs on winning percentage, +/- ratios, etc. Keep it in real-time. Would somebody like a big pro athlete agency pay for this to help land million dollar contracts for their players? Maybe contact Leon Powe's agent? I'm convinced he would be #1 in charges taken.
Basically, I want to have a high-profile Basketball Prospectus crunching numbers on a Ruby platform, funded by some people with skin in the game.
Very Moneyball style. Various rankings list depending on which metrics you think are most valuable. Save various combinations and weightings.
Could someone like the Celtics be convinced to pay for this? Maybe help open up access to player data?
This data is clearly valuable - data like it drives all baseball decisions. Also very lucrative fantasy sports market.
Croaky wants to rumble this idea.
FAMILY FOOD PLAN (good idea)
To give a family simple, fun software to manage their in home food storage and creatively plan meals.
Use the Inventory to keep track of the food your family has (and when it expires.)
Use the Meal Planner to create a menu for the week and help you figure out what you need to add to your Shopping List which you can print off and take to the store with you.
Then when you come home, click Add Shopping List to Inventory and you've updated your Inventory.
Eating at home can help families save money and keep closer to each other by sharing a meal.
filmprog, keithnorm, and levicole want to rumble this idea.
IWASDRUNK (good idea)
People would expose what they did the night before and friends could add to the stories. You/they could also submit photos, videos, and voicemails from the night.
There’d be a social networking aspect to it — you’d have a profile, friends, various products that could be your friends (Jack Daniels, Coors, etc), and various bars that could be your friends (think what MySpace has done to the music scene — artists publish their tour dates to their MySpace page; well, this proposed idea of mine could mean a profile for every bar that gets updated with what’s going on that week at each bar, drink/food specials, etc). Eventually this website would have evites (so you could plan happy hours with friends/co-workers) — and people could specify that they’ll be at “bar A, restaurant B, and bar C, tonight”.
Essentially, it’s the website where people keep track of (and plan) their fun times out with friends — in a central online repository/archive. Your night would be tied to various bars — and then you could even see who else was at the bar that night.
It’s a very focused idea on a multi-billion dollar industry — booze connect people.
josespinal, cor3d, jrallison, binitbhatia, and jayunit want to rumble this idea.
EMPLACE (good idea)
I have all these cousins who are moving to the suburbs with their young kids. They all look for the same things in the following descending order of importance
* quality of public schools in the town
* price of the home
* x total time for each parent’s commute
An app that narrows down their choices to 3 towns, ranked would be helpful.
SUBMENTAL (good idea)
Groups of friends often share season tickets to one of their local sports team’s home games. The process of divvying up the tickets, collecting money, and then trading games as conflicts inevitably come up is a hassle.
Submental organizes that process. Handles “snake-style” drafts, compensating for members of the group who want different number of games, taking into account their preferred rankings, etc.
keithnorm wants to rumble this idea.
CLOUGH (good idea)
“A sluice used in returning water to a channel after depositing its sediment on the flooded land.”
I create a Topic. I create a Test that evaluates and qualifies Geniuses. For every satisfactory Call, I get a percentage of the Payment.
Susie is looking to make some extra cash in these hard-pressed times. She looks through the existing Topics and realizes she is relatively knowledgeable in Knitting, Medieval History, and where to buy children’s clothes in Boston, all of which are current topics.
Susie pays $5 to take the Tests in her areas of knowledge and. She takes the Test. She passes the Test, becoming a Genius for those topics.
Susie sets her times when she is available to take Calls for her Topics. If she’s in the mood to talk about knitting, she can set her Schedule to just knitting for an hour, etc. If no one calls her, no one calls her. If someone calls her, and she satisfies them, they can decide to Pay her a Bonus in addition to the Payment per Phone Minute.
phildarnowsky and techpickles want to rumble this idea.
DEAD CELEB (good idea)
Cookie cutter celebrity memorial site. At the rate that celebrities are dropping atm, this could be huge. Add twitter notifications, of course. And 3) profit.
CHIPMUNK ACOUSTICS (good idea)
For who?
—> Girl Talk-wannabees
What?
—> An app that plays a huge collection of songs into the Jott API, which translates the lyrics into text. The text is matched up to sections of the song, and the song is spliced into reasonable pieces based upon paragraph breaks in the text. Girl Talk-wannabee now has a huge, searchable database of sections of great songs to sample.
Version 2?
—> Contact the Pandora / Music Genome Project people and use their technologies instead of the Jott hack to really analysis and separate samples.
Technologies
—> EC2, S3, Starling, Bitorrent, Merb.
ELFSHIP (good idea)
Famous guitarists (Eric Clapton, Slash, John Mayer) can sell their guitars publicly to raise money for charity or privately to one another as collector items.
ANTIBANK (good idea)
Shows you places you can put your money (mutual funds, T Bills) and lets you put your money there.
SLEUTHDOG (good idea)
I create a profile that no one will ever see. It is private to me. I add in my favorite magazines, websites, foods, home goods. This is free. I see products pitched to me based on how I just filled in my profile. I can remove things I’m not interested in and the app gets smarter over time, learning from what I don’t like.
Advertisers pay to sell their ads to targeted people. If I’m publishing a PDF book on the last week of the McCain campaign, I should be able to target my ad to people who like “The Atlantic.”
ABSENTEE (good idea)
Twitter direct message auto-responder.
When I'm away, I set my phone to “absentee.” When I receive text messages, the sender receives an auto-response of my choosing.
OPENLEDGER (good idea)
A system similar to http://www.timebanks.org/software-tour.htm which allows local community-based currencies to create online ledger systems.
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