Believe or not, I had the grandcentral idea ( ok it was almost like it ) way before the company launch. I am not saying I had it before they did, but when I start researching the idea and talking to developers, I did not find anything quite like it.
About 5 years back I had an idea for a free wireless system. I'd go and offer places like Starbucks and Chapters free wireless for their customers. The hardware at their end would be a simple DSL/Cable modem hooked up through a small form factor unix box with a wireless card in it and a fairly anal set of firewall rules to prevent deep abuse.
The business model was to be setting up in line ad replacement on websites with a focus on local businesses. You're sitting in the coffee shop and an ad comes up for 10% off your next purchase at the book store across the corner, or a two for one this day only at the diner down the street.
I was working at Telus (big canadian telecom) at the time and they had just started cracking down on employees running side businesses that crossed over their product and service lines. I would've been fired and sued if I would've started it up, too broke to do it alone, and didn't have a clue where to go for investors or the like. I'm still tempted to do this, but free wireless has spread so much it would be hard to penetrate the market and convince people my way was the best way.
I regret not having the balls to say that three months living expenses was good enough, lets make a prototype and get a test going and pray I can find some business minded investors in time.
"... I'd go and offer places like Starbucks and Chapters free wireless for their customers. ..."
I wouldn't regret the decision that much if your idea revolved around Starbucks or even other large aggregators of customers. Joseph Park of Kozmo fame (see e-Dreams DVD) had a similiar idea back in Web 1. The deal went down requiring Kozmo paying Starbucks for the big bucks for the rights to serve their customers with a drop-off facility in what was meant to be a partnership. That's right they had to pay for the right to access customers. (You can see more on e-Dreams here ~ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0262021/ )
So it might be a good idea but those with the customers aren't too interested in others servicing their customers. I don't know how you get around this.
Besides, any time you have to ask permission you are in trouble.
Ideas are overrated. Execution matters far more. GrandCentral is very similar to a company called ThinkLink which preceded it by about five years. Facebook coopted ConnectU's ideas. The history of high technology is replete with similar examples. Yet GrandCentral and Facebook deserve their success. They weren't the most innovative in their respective spaces, but they executed best. That's what counts.
Agree. Far more interesting question is what ideas you've implemented and why they failed. (but please, be more creative than "no one really wanted it")
For me, an idea is very thorough and well thought out. The execution is then trivial, except for publicity and other stuff that's really hard to control.
Ideas are far from worthless. I'll give anyone $2000 right now for a good idea that investors like enough to get me out of this near debt I'm struggling through.
Investors don't fund people from what I've seen. Most fund based on the past experience of the people, how much they like them, how well they can pitch themselves. But investors rarely actually fund based on the people.
I totally agree with you. However, "coopted" might be portraying it in a slightly differetn light than is warranted. There is a difference between being better at execution and walking away with the code that was being used to implement one idea, and implementing it yourself.
I came up with essentially the same idea as inviteshare about 2 years ago. It all started with a "damn, where the hell are these guys getting all these invitations."
My version was a bit different in that users would have to give feedback to sites whose invitations weren't ridiculously rare, and as you gave feedback, you would earn points. Then, when the really hot invitations would roll around, users could bid on them using the points they've accumulated. Either that, or the more your feedback was rated positively, the higher up a ladder you climb, giving you priority/ more points.
That all ended with me pitching the idea to a friend of mine and having him reply "Eh, sounds cool, but I don't think anyone would use it."
Looks like my $25k was meant for another bunch. Oh how impressionable I was.
Anyways, everyday I have to put up with my co-founder's whining about Meebo. I don't really know what they do or how they make money, but now I'm starting to see their name everywhere.
My co-founder is convinced that he had the idea behind meebo in undergrad but just was too lazy implement it.
In fact, I am going to send this link to my co-founder so he can see me go on the record in saying that he is the laziest SOB in our time zone.
That's right, I'm hating on my own co-founder. Go Meebo.
A lot of people had the idea behind Meebo. A friend and I were doing AIM bots back in 2000. Essentially we'd implemented SmarterChild before it became popular. Then when AJAX was all the rage in late 2004 and 2005, I said "Oh, wouldn't it be cool if you could put live chat up on a web page and update the display through AJAX?"
I was actually thinking in terms of the social-networking angle - you ever notice how many conversations on LiveJournal comments or FaceBook walls start out as asynchronous messages and then become conversations when both/all parties get online? There's room to make that interaction a lot more frictionless, and I have actually seen anyone go through with it. Maybe I'll be saying "Damn, I regret not implementing that idea" in another 2 years.
Anyway, it's not who thinks up the idea that matters, it's who actually goes and does it. Most successful ideas are pretty obvious, they're just overlooked because people think "If it were that easy, somebody would've done it already".
I was thinking of a keyboard that has displays on keys, long before Art.Lebedev came out with the Optimus keyboard concept. I didn't think of all the functionality they came up with, I just thought of rearranging/reconfiguring the key layout to suit one's typing style. Well, I don't really regret not implementing it, because I couldn't have done it, and it's not really practical.
I have ideas I executed on but didn't release due to copyright worries. They were niche but very good.
The thing that impresses me most about stuff like YouTube is not the tech (which is no mystery) but how they managed to keep going in the face of massive legal concerns. I never worry about the technical side, only the red tape.
FYI, GrandCentral's concept isn't at all original. Other companies, like uReach.com, have had similar offerings (often called "Follow Me") for many years. But they're probably the first to offer it for free, and definitely the first to offer it with your choice of area code for free.
I had the idea of creating a social stock market type thing a couple of years ago. There appear to be a few that are moderately successful, but it's a pretty obvious idea in any case, so I'm not too worried about it.
It's not a good question to think about - nothing positive can result.
Anyway, I had the idea for throwback sports jerseys way back when. I was so mad when they became a hit. Now I realize execution is much more important.
I think it's a bad idea. I would not have released it until the torrent sharing was decentralized.
Or maybe he had no problems knowing that many of his users would have their lives ruined and many more would be scared away from using it. His reason for this shortcoming, along with lack of effective stenography in the protocol is now clear, he wanted to build a business around it.
Bittorrent grew out of MojoNation, a "distributed, peer to peer, file store", per wikipedia. So it already had a business sponsoring it.
Distributing content tracking is much harder than distributing the content, and if they'd waiting to solve that problem before publishing code, it probably would have died. I think there's a lesson here: don't wait to solve all your problems before you launch, because even if some of them are insoluble, the parts you have solved might be useful enough to be successful. I suppose other people have more concisely summed that up as "release early; release often", eh?
The business model was to be setting up in line ad replacement on websites with a focus on local businesses. You're sitting in the coffee shop and an ad comes up for 10% off your next purchase at the book store across the corner, or a two for one this day only at the diner down the street.
I was working at Telus (big canadian telecom) at the time and they had just started cracking down on employees running side businesses that crossed over their product and service lines. I would've been fired and sued if I would've started it up, too broke to do it alone, and didn't have a clue where to go for investors or the like. I'm still tempted to do this, but free wireless has spread so much it would be hard to penetrate the market and convince people my way was the best way.
I regret not having the balls to say that three months living expenses was good enough, lets make a prototype and get a test going and pray I can find some business minded investors in time.