Fwd: Idea for a Six Hour Startup
anders conbere
From: anders conbere <acon...@gmail.com>
Date: Tue, Jul 29, 2008 at 11:19 AM
Subject: Re: Idea for a Six Hour Startup
To: Barnaby Dorfman <bdor...@gmail.com>
On Tue, Jul 22, 2008 at 11:45 AM, Barnaby Dorfman <bdor...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Anders,
>
> The challenge of how to use the 1 parking space made me think of a six hour
> startup idea. I think there is a general need for sharing limited resources
> that could be done via the Internet. There are a number of use cases where a
> group of folks either doesn't share because it's hard or you have a tragedy
> of the commons problem where the resource gets over-utilized.
>
> I'm thinking of a website where:
>
> -People can list resources
> -Schedule their use
> -Have a point system or virtual currency
> -Bid for timeslots to deal with different utility/time profiles
> -Trade/exchange across resources, e.g. my 3 of my X, for 5 of your Y
>
> Examples:
>
> -Parking (also across locations, sort of a community Zip-Parking)
> -Use of conference room/office space
> -Babysitting
> -Use of tools (imagine a neighborhood pool of lawnmovers and moving
> services)
> -Car sharing (Peer/community-based Zipcar)
> -Share discounted volume tickets: Season tickets to Sports/Arts, Museum
> membership, Bus Ticket book
> -Share bulk purchases of physical items: Costco (Their min purchase of milk
> is 3 gallons!), case of fruit from distributor, etc.
>
> Features:
>
> -Calendaring
> -User accounts/reputation system
> -Share calculation (assuming the item shared has a clear monetary value) and
> maybe payments integration.
> -Item/Resource Db
> -Messaging system
> -Mobile version, location aware, SMS updates
>
> I'd start the whole thing with problem statement : "How do we share and
> maximize use of our 1 parking space?"
>
> Seems like a nice natural evolution of Glabs and could become something
> more. A simple version of this could be built entirely on the Google
> platform in six hours.
>
> Thoughts?
Awesome, I can imagine this being used for shared study space in
college (or other college activities). And my limited experience with
this stuff tells me the root problem is a good fit for a six hour
startup project. The full spec is way to ambitious (you would be
surprised how little you can get done in a day of programming with a
bunch of people). But I think the sentiment of narrowing the problem
down to "How do we share and maximize use of our 1 parking space?" is
exactly right. I would just take that a step further, and take
everything you wrote, store it somewhere and break simply that problem
down into requirements.
* user registration / login
* resource descriptions (the parking space!)
* calendering (can we use google calender for this... can we automate
it for multiple resources?)
* some programing to find schedule conflicts
Questions you'll want to have answered before moving forward
1) what will it be built on / written in? (Django, AppEngine, Rails,
Random Google Tech?)
2) Who will be heading up the actual programming?
Finally, this last one we did, brian and I built out a little
scaffolding for the project ahead of time, this worked GREAT. So my
recommendation is that whatever tech you choose to build it on, you
have something that's download-able by everyone and can run right off
the bat (even if all it does is display a hello world). If you know
you need GCal access, find the libs and have them in there as well,
etc. It's a tricky balancing act between doing too much for developers
and lubricating the process.
~ Anders
P.S. If it's alright with you I'd like to send this to the
SixHourStartup mailing list, it will get some eyeballs on it at that
point.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Barnaby
>
> --
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