bottle design
There are very few books out there on the subject:
Art of Perfume
Bottle Design: Beer Wine and Spirits
Absolut: Biography of a Bottle
But really, the pickings are very thin.
Someone needs to come out with a definitive, glossy, yummy book. Let's say based on the last 50 years of bottle design around the world (hell, even limited to North America it would be a fascinating book). Alcohol botttles, perfume bottles, non-alcoholic beverage bottles, maybe even other product bottles like food, shampoo, etc.
Cases in point:
Romance by Ralph Lauren - love the packaging too.
Evian bottle
Lucia Gary's Pinot Noir 2000
And while I'm at it, I think a supporting web site would be wonderful too.
Why?
Because while I was looking around for related links like the ones above, I realized the web also has pretty slim pickings when it comes to this sort of thing.
chickflicks dot com
I spent the weekend in Yentl mode, and that's what started it.
Allow me to explain. You know when you get a certain song, book, movie in your head and you just can't get it out? For me, the best way to fix this was always to OD on the thing for a few days and satisfy the bizarre craving in a major way. Yentl has been my obsession of late, so I spent the weekend watching the film, looking up everything I could about the film on the Internet, and listening to the soundtrack.
Which was right about the time that I realized that there are no good web sites devoted to chick flicks. Oh, sure, the major players (iVillage, etc.) each have a small section on the genre but there's no one site devoted completely to the concept.
What fun that would be, hm? Polls and reviews and tongue-in-cheek articles, a blog with links to recent interviews for upcoming chick flicks, lots of “girl power” floating around, top ten lists like:
- Top 10 chick flicks of 2003
- Top 10 chick flicks to watch with your boyfriend
- Top 10 chick flicks to watch right after you've broken up with someone
I'm working on a couple of my girlfriends to maybe give this a try with me. Install a nice easy to use CMS system to manage the thing and everyone could play.
Could I safely add one more web site to work on without my head exploding? We'll see.
2003.01.28 06:57 AM | Comments
Man, do I feel your pain
It's not that I haven't had ideas lately - I have. I just keep finding out someone else has already done it - most of it, all of it, or even better than I had in my head.
I was zinging for a full week on an idea I had recently for a ecomm consolidator web app thingie that would consolidate results from hundreds of sites devoted to home decorating. It would allow you to set up decorating lists for yourself - dream house stuff, new apartment wants, things my Aunt Joan would like for her house, whatever. Oh, the plans I sketched out. You wouldn't believe. Or maybe you would. I was going to quit my job, raise money, do whatever it took to make this idea fly. I searched all over the web and couldn't find anything similar. And then I stopped by a blog one day the second week (don't even remember which blog it was) and found a link to HomePortfolio and my dream of working for myself died again.
Damn.
So when I ran across this post on Defective Yeti I felt his pain. Do I ever know what that feels like. On the other hand, I appreciate Google more than he does - because it's saved me from going thousands into debt over an idea that someone else already had.
The quest for ideas goes on.
my ultimate dream job
It's a well known and documented fact that I am a freak about Christmas. My friends know this, and prepare themselves for the endless happy Christmasness that generally begins, well, about this time every year.
It's also a well known and documented fact that I am a web freak. No other reason to explain why else I would have all these personal web sites. On top of my day job.
Combining the two is the ultimate dream for me. Maybe a Christmas decorating business with a web site on the side. Maybe a Christmas web site with a decorating business on the side.
I wish the market could bear the kind of saturation I'd love to bring to it. A full-out, Martha-Stewart like web site with decorating tips but all very chi-chi. Not just crafts, though I would have a few. Mainly full-out decorating features.
Features on collecting Christmas treasures - one on some of the different collectible ornaments, one on Coca-Cola Christmas collectibles, one on collecting Santas (my personal collection has over 36 to date... I'm getting there slowly!), you get the idea. Ideas on proper floral arrangements, how to start collecting a Dickens village, Christmas art and vintage postcards.
Reviews of new products as they come out - like when icicle lights suddenly rocked the world a few years ago. Every year there are new, great decorating products.
Trends and retrospectives on decorating trends in history. Interviews with talented professionals - like the ones who did the White House last year (oh, yum).
And of course, there would be a store. Such an online store you could not imagine, but oh I can.
Maybe a spin-off television special. Books. Interviews with Christmas magazines. Maybe my own magazine.
One day, maybe I could get asked to decorate the White House for Christmas.
Imagine getting paid for that. Like I said, my ultimate dream job.
2002.09.19 09:45 PM | Comments
buildaguy.com
And again, I actually own this domain. Not that I'll likely ever have time to play with it...
Came up with this one while brainstorming with a coworker. We were talking about those occasionally great, mainly useless sites you get from work colleagues every so often. Test Your Love Potential. What Every Guy Needs To Know. Your Tantric Horoscope Of The Day. You know what I mean.
So: Build A Guy.
Tongue-in-cheek mainly, a fun site targeted at women. You'd go, you'd fill out some personal information, and out would pop the ideal guy, targeted just for you. Think Weird Science in reverse, only the guy wouldn't actually crash through the door.
The premise being that women have a Very Hard Time finding Mr. Right. So why not build yourself one?
The results you'd get would be a profile like this:
* 3D-generated picture of the guy, face and full-body
* personality profile
* likes and dislikes
* his idea of a romantic evening
* books he likes
* movies he likes
* favourite foods
* favourite music
* astrological profile
I mean, a huge resulting profile, pulled from a sheer ton of available data in the DB, based on the answers given in the questionnaire. Lots of intelligent matching in the backend. You get the idea.
You could send them to friends who have just broken up with a guy, can't find Mr. Right, married anyway but are curious, the whole gamut.
I think women would love it, same way they love those personality tests and other bits on the web. It could go viral. Women sending it to office mates who in turn send it to other office mates, and so on. Sending each other profiles. Laughing over the results. Making profiles for their friend's birthdays. Et cetera.
The matching software and 3D model generation would really be the key here to being able to actually have a revenue model down the road.
Maybe you could have a “light” profile for free; charge 50 cents or a dollar through PayPal for the 5-page full profile.
Spin off a sister site for teen girls. Different data, different interests, different 3D models.
Spin off localized versions for Japan, other countries.
For that matter, build intelligent enough matching software and spin it off into a real personals site.
Or one better, package the matching software and related bits as turnkey personals software for other websites.
I could keep going like this all night.
Ah, for unlimited time and funds. :)
voices in a chorus
On a lazy Saturday afternoon, I find myself compelled by NextBlog. Keep clicking on it, and it keeps taking you to different places, different people, different points of view. In my first five clicks, I found two personal journals, one blog railing against the establishment and the war on terrorism, and a circle of women who blog together and think interesting things.
I'm reminded of a film called Pump Up the Volume. Teenagers taking to the airwaves and making it their own. One voice in a chorus of voices, each unique and with something special to say. NextBlog is like that. It's a metaphor for why we love the web. Everyone can have a voice if they want to. Only trouble with NextBlog is it's limited to Blogger users only.
A really great idea would be a site that pulls from all kinds of blogs - MT, Blogger, Greymatter, Radio, etc. Maybe one big random button that takes you to any blog and then also the ability to configure to show only tech blogs, only journals, etc.
Of course, the best way to accomplish this would be to get the blog software makers to agree on a meta tag standard that could hold keywords like tech, or journal, or politics, you get the idea. The spider could then pick up the keywords and make note of them so that would be able to customize their randomness.
Customized randomness. Sounds like fun.
torontoIT
This idea has been kicking around for a few years now; I'll admit it came to me during the dot-com craze. But I still think it's an entirely workable idea.
torontoIT would be a resource site for IT professionals in the Greater Toronto Area. Toronto's a great place for something like this; there are a ton of IT workers in the area. Even today, doing a search on IT-related jobs at monster.ca or workopolis.com brings up more results for Toronto than anywhere else in Canada.
It would have job postings (part of the revenue model) but with some extra twists; in addition to all the usual searches you can do on most sites, this would also have information like available parking (Y/N), close to TTC (Y/N), near a major subway station, front and back-end technologies used, etc. It could have mapping tools available to help you find the location of the company's offices. In short, the idea was to build a job posting service so extraordinary that IT people would find it an invaluable local resource with much more relevant information, and begin to use it over and above the usual job sites.
In addition to job postings, it would house the most comprehensive regional education database available online; every local IT-related school, course or program would be listed with as much detail as possible. In time, again, such a resource would make the site invaluable to IT workers (enough so that perhaps TO companies would make it a priority to get listed in the database — a possible revenue source?).
Eventually I had planned to integrate e-learning through the site itself, pehaps co-branded with or sponsored by Toronto training schools. Perhaps license some e-learning software and offer it to smaller training facilities so their courses could be available online, with torontoIT acting as a portal.
Rounding out the site would be Toronto IT event listings (SIG meetings, conferences, visiting speakers) and coverage of those events, as well as IT-focused career articles.
But wait! There's more.
Since I can't think anything halfway (you'll see this more and more as ideaBlog grows) I thought that once the site got well established that the idea could easily extend to other regional IT resource sites; chicagoIT, houstonIT, vancouverIT, etc.
In time citiesIT would be a conglomerate of all these regional sites.
As usual, my eyes are bigger than my stomach, and this idea was so huge that it would take MAJOR funding and a full-time staff to implement.
So here it sits in the ideaBlog, unused. For now. One day...