Firstly, apologies to my many fans for such a long break. I have been eating pizza at Bricco Cafe, Huaihai Lu, Shanghai. Join me. I will be there on Monday wearing an inside-out-watermelon-coloured jumper.

Secondly, have you ever considered your certain and impending death? I bet you have!

More specifically, have you ever considered what will happen to your digital assets when you die? I bet you haven’t!

What do I mean, digital assets? I mean all the emails you’ve poured your living heart into, all your hard-earned PayPal money, your soulful blog posts, your countless, pouting, one-armed profile pics, pictures of your one-armed dog, all those Google Docs overflowing with world-changing ideas…

Yes. All that.

What you need, my son (be you a man), is a digital will.

Yes, email providers might let relatives access your email if shown your death certificate (the Yahoo scandal where a dead Marine’s wife was refused access to his email probably helped put this policy on the agenda). But maybe you don’t want everyone to read your private emails when you’re dead? Maybe you’ve been a liar and a cheat?

What’s more, most of the online services with which you’re forging your digital self don’t have much of a death policy:

Facebook offers to memorialize a page by freezing it in time, but Flickr refuses all access to an account and Twitter does not even address death directly in its FAQ. (BBC)

Like I say, you need a digital will.

There are a few companies already offering something like this. Legacy Locker is a storage service for passwords to online accounts, so people you choose can have access to them when you depart the Twittering world. Swiss DNA Bank will let you store your files on their server and self-swab your DNA, both of which will be kept – forever – in a nuclear bunker under a mountain in the Swiss Alps. Sensitively-named Death Switch…

…prompts you for your password on a regular schedule to make sure you are still alive. When you do not enter your password for some period of time, the system prompts you again several times. With no reply, the computer deduces you are dead or critically disabled, and your pre-scripted messages are automatically emailed to those named by you.

"Well, I don't hear from anyone much anymore but it's nice to get those password checks."

These services are fine and dandy, but you’d be well advised to set up your own, for three reasons:

1. Over the next few decades, the digital corpses are going to pile up in ever-greater numbers, as we see the looming deaths of people who were not too old to learn about the internet in the 90s.
2. The existing services are not sophisticated. Maybe people want to divide up their digital assets within a service, e.g. leave different sets of photos to different people. You don’t want your grandchildren to see the drunken, semi-naked tomfoolery you got up to at their age, but you might want them to see your Iraq war videos.
3. There is nothing legally binding about the existing services. Ok, so Deathswitch sends an email. What if it misfires?  That’s your only chance at an encore, ruined! You want this digital will to be part of a legal structure, like a full-on Last Will and Testament don’t you? Pioneer it!

If all this talk of death has got you down, get up – there is hope: according to Ray Kurzweil (whose book The Singularity Is Near
I’m reading at the moment) et al, before we die we’ll be able to create our minds in digital form, and thus outlive the withering of our bodies.

I’m with him, but if you don’t buy into that, buy DigitalWill.net (it’s available) and become a legal executor on behalf of lost digital souls before the domain becomes occupied by the uploaded mind of someone called William.

Rule number one for a successful business start-up: Give people something they love.

Rule number two for a successful business start-up: Give people something they can’t get anywhere else.

(There are, of course, 386 other rules, but I don’t know what they are.)

Now before you dismiss me as an aimless pretender, have you ever heard this:

“Everyone loves surprises.”

?

Ah ha! Yes, you have! Now then, people love surprises do they..? Wait a minute – that fits the first rule for a successful business start-up!

Now, I wonder… How about the second rule? Can people get surprises anywhere else (other than the business I am obviously going to suggest you set up in a minute)?

“Of course,” you are saying, “I get surprises every Christmas from a fat, bearded, foreign burglar.” Yes, very good. And you have to wait all year. But in the meantime, where can you get surprises for yourself?

Nowhere.

Until now…

(Go to Intense Experiences and look at the ridiculous signs!)

Idea #15: Sell surprises

Set up a business that sells surprises. The idea is that people don’t find out exactly what they’re getting until they’ve bought it.

There are different ways to approach this. The Something Store is an online shop that sells you ’something’ for ten $10. I mean it could be anything… apart from these. (Great if it could be some of those though – imagine getting severed hand in the post! That would be a surprise!)

Sounds great for a novelty, but I think selling surprises can be practical as well. Personally, I get overwhelmed by the amount of choice available in every circumstance. While my mind has evolved to choose between hitting another ape with a stick, or hitting him with a rock (still actually a key decision in some Newcastle bars), I am more likely to be faced with the sandwich selection in Tesco Express. And break down in tears.

(Closer to the truth in Shanghai is that I’ll be faced with the choice of rice or noodles, pork or beef, and everything will be just fine.)

Nightmare

The Hipstery makes more practical sense. It’s an online T-shirt store that’ll sell you a T-shirt with a hip and mystery style – you just give them your size. It’s genuinely a good option for someone who just wants a cool T-shirt but can’t be bothered to shop.

The Hipstery

That’s spiritual peace. Leave the soul to worry about something other than BLT or Christmas Turkey Special. This is the kind of thing I have in mind for your surprise shop, but you’ll sell a lot more stuff:

Surprise Food

Ideal! Who wants to stand choosing between pasta salads for 35 minutes of a half hour lunch break? Not me. Supply me with a lunch bag please, and let me have that in-flight meal excitement every day of the working week.

Same in the evening. I am wasting my home time in Tesco Express! Put my dinner in a brown bag and let’s be done with it. Perhaps you could offer me a token of autonomy by labelling bags “Healthy”, “For Gluttons” or “An Indian”. And make them good, or I won’t trust you next time!

Surprise Clothes

Outfits. I want whole outfits. Whatever I’m not suited with in terms of style, will be more than made up for by the fact that I did not make this mess of myself – as fashion dictates that everyone do – plus the thrill of the surprise! I’d say some labels like ‘Gansta Outfit’, “Person With “Unique” Style’ or ‘Middle-aged Man On Mediterranean Holiday’, will ensure I get more or less what I’m looking for. What a terrible shame.

Of course, you could just do individual items like ‘T-shirt’ or ‘jacket’, but that would be a weak move.

Better

Surprise Music

We all know that music should be free, and largely is, but how about making monthly mix CDs of some random upcoming artists so people can give them as presents (e.g. ‘Rock’, ‘Hip hop’). The artists would be pleased to be featured and may not even want royalties.

Alternatively, providing these mixes as podcasts or for free download on your website would be a good way to draw traffic.

Surprise Experiences

Red Letter Day style. People who book it just turn up at your store and you take them away to do something for the day. Obvious things would be paintballing or racing cars. Less obvious would be blindfolding everyone and leaving them in a forest. (Easy way to make money though.) Horses for courses.

Surprise Holidays

The most extreme, and best, part of the business. You sell holidays with surprise destinations. Preferably charter a flight and get the airport to put the destination code as ‘SUR’.

I did this with some friends at university when Ryan Air started offering free flights. We scrolled down the list and bought tickets to the first place we hadn’t heard of. Ended up going to Klagenfurt. Great trip!

Not to say my mother hasn’t been trying. For the past three years she’s managed to keep me informed about every single wedding invitation I’ve received. It’s just that when something does eventually slip through the crack it could be a notice of hefty penalty charges to be debited from my bank account weekly, until my mother discovers it 10 weeks later. Thanks Barclays, my former employer. Thank you mother.

Another solution is needed here…

Idea #14: Remote mail service for digital nomads

What we need is somebody – actually, you – to set up a company that will receive the mail of vagabonds such as I, scan it, and email to us so we can receive it in exotic locations. Scotland, for instance.

Actually, while you’re on, you can receive parcels as well. Nomads can just use your address as their permanent mailing address so they don’t get tangled up with their multitude of online accounts every time they change to another beachside hut.

Listen, all you need is an address and a scanner to set up this business. You can receive payments through PayPal on your website, which you can build here in 5 minutes.

You should probably offer the service for a monthly subscription of $10-$20 per month for your standard model digital nomads.

(Why not also create a ‘premium’ branded service – basically the same thing but for rich people. You’ll probably have to call it something like ‘Mail Concierge’. Set it up on a different website so it’s not obvious that it’s the same thing.)

A bit more about the cheeky little digital nomads…

You may think that marketing to a disparate bunch of global wanderers might be difficult, but you’d be surprised. Digital nomads have already begun to converge in some dark corners of the web:

DigitalNomads.com – quick-fingered Dell have grabbed the prime URL.

Location Independent Professionals is an agency that helps set people up with a location independent lifestyle.

Exile Lifestyle is Colin Wright’s experiment in being a digital nomad.

At Free Pursuits, Corbett Barr blogs about alternative lifestyle design.

Chris Guillebeau is a pioneer of non-conformity.

Tim Ferriss is author of The 4-Hour Work Week, and seems to be a gentleman after my own heart, with more ambition and larger muscles.

Further to your advantage, this is an emerging niche consumer group that more and more people will be joining as employers realise it’s a good way to cut costs and workers realise that sitting in a storm-battered, wifi-enabled caravan in Scotland is actually a surprisingly pleasant environment in which to write, albeit aimlessly, about remote postal services for themselves.

UPDATE: Just saw the exact reverse of this idea! Read about it at Springwise: http://www.springwise.com/life_hacks/sendsocial/

alarms are admittedly fairly useful.

If you’re like me, you not only use them for getting you out of bed, you use them for reminding you to do stuff.

Fine. That’s fine. Yet another brain function replaced by technology. But I suppose the Neolithic days when the brain was invented weren’t filled with business meetings…

…I mean, that’s what everyone uses reminders for, right? Appointments, business meetings?

Err… No. I don’t. Normally, for me it’s more like this: “Right, I need to remember to pay that fine next time I’m in the library.” Or, “When I’m in town I have to pick up my suit from the dry cleaners.” (Actually, the last one’s a lie – I never do that – but that is what people do, right?)

Then I have to guess when I’ll be in the right place to do these things. Guess! I thought I wasn’t supposed to be using my brain here?!

iBrain

We all know that’s not how things should work.

Idea #13: GPS alarm

A location-based alarm will change all that.

It’ll be an smartphone app that lets you highlight an address or area on Google Maps, and set an alarm to go off when the GPS detects that you’re in that location.

I’d be surprised if someone hasn’t had this idea already, but I haven’t been able to find one in the App Store. (There are a few iPhone ‘car alarms‘, which set off an alarm if your phone is moved at all, so this could presumably be easily modified to create the infinitely more useful GPS alarm).

It’s also got me thinking about

Idea #13.5: Pre-call reminders:

You know when you’ve just hung up the phone and you think, “Shit, I forgot to tell him about that great idea I had”? What about an app that detects who’s calling you, which you can set to display relevant reminders on the screen before you pick up?

You could probably charge money for either of these apps and make yourself moderately rich. I would obviously expect the app for free as I gave you the idea – that, plus the knowledge that you have made your life plentiful and carefree, is all the reward I need.

What am I thinking?!

The 20th century music industry continues to perform one of the most dramatic death scenes ever witnessed. For years it has been stumbling around like a wounded bull in an empty record shop, occasionally charging outside to gore a passerby caught Napstering – for instance, Jammie Thomas-Rasset, mother-of-four (shared 24 songs, fined $1.92 million).

The Death of the Record Industry

Ok, so CD sales might be finished, but what about concerts? They’re still going to happen. In fact, live events are probably going to rise in value, because they provide a unique experience that can’t be effortlessly replicated on the web (like everything else can). But the model is probably set to change, and you can be the one to change it…

eHow’s article on how to organise an international concert tour starts like this:

Start planning at least a year in advance. You’ll save money and have a better choice of destinations and venues. Poll your members about their interests before you start planning.

Sorry, eHow – in fact, record industry – sorry, let me stop you there. That’s not how things are done anymore. You don’t need to poll fans – the fans can arrange a tour all by themselves:

Idea #12: Crowdsourced band booking

The basic idea is to create a website where fans can club together to book their favourite band for a concert in their hometown.

If I was going to do it I’d nab Nababand.com for the domain name – it’s available.

Do I have to do ALL the work here?!

How do members nab a band?

It’s simple:

1. Someone proposes a band they’d like to see and where they’d like to see them. This is effectively a promise that if the band decides to play, this person will buy a ticket.
2. Other members can then add their support by voting for the event – like saying “I’d buy a ticket too”.
3. Members can spread the message themselves by inviting friends to add their support. It’d be a similar system to Pledgebank.com (…go and sign my pledge on there!) Members could even get a discount on their own ticket or a share of revenue from the concert if they get a lot of people interested.
4. Venues list themselves on the website, stating their rental price and capacity when they register. Nababand can use this to rate the venues for relative cost, allowing fans to vote for their favoured venue.
5. When the support for a particular concert reaches a certain level – say, 75% capacity of the favoured venue – the band is contacted on behalf of the fans and invited to play.
6. The band has the option to accept the invitation and name their price, offer an alternative date / venue… or even negotiate with the fans about things like the length of concert and set list!
7. Nababand handles the bookings and ticket sales, taking a service fee from every customer. In other words: the website makes a disgusting amount of profit for very little work, and no risk.

When you think about it, this is a natural way for band bookings to work. But it doesn’t exist yet. It’s up to you to create it.

Similar idea = huge success

Sellaband helps to illustrate how successful crowdsourced band bookings could be. It’s a site where fans can buy shares in bands, who use the the crowdsourced funds to create an album. Fans pledge a certain amount of money towards a band, and can withdraw the money at any point until the band has reached it’s goal – at which point they get the money (which could be a good model for Nababand’s crowdfunded concerts). Once the album is complete, the shareholders (‘Believers’) get their slice of the revenue.

Since it launched in 2006, Sellaband has already amassed a following of 62,000 fans, 3,000 artists and $2,500,000 in revenue. Public Enemy are currently using it to crowdfund their next album.

Crowdsourced everything

Crowdsourcing is already a huge trend that is changing the relationship between companies and consumers. You can find everything from a crowdfunded cycling team (currently seeking members) to crowdsourced ideas while you sleep (if you want to come up with some ideas while I sleep, send them to me here).

Music fans everywhere would fall over themselves to band together and Nababand!

Before you set it up you’d do well to read these books:

You may or may not have noticed, but the present is beginning to move so fast it’s starting to catch up with the future. One consequence of this warping of space-time is that the virtual world is beginning to merge with the real one in an increasingly tangible way.

This new stage in the relationship between the two worlds we live in has got a name: augmented reality.

Augmented reality applications such as Wikitude and the recently released Layar are available for Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android. When you to point the camera-phone at a street, Layar, for example, will ‘augment’ the scene by bringing up links to relevant information from Wikipedia, Google, Yelp, Twitter, Flickr and different local services. The so-called ‘augmented reality browser’ is still in its early stages, so expect a lot more layers (equivalent to different websites) to superimpose over your reality in the future.

That’s all well and good, the world’s information even closer to the very tips of your fingers once again, nobody has to think anymore, I’ll have to buy an iPhone etc. But I want more than this… I want:

Idea #11: Augmented reality Facebook recognition

You already know what it is and you already want it too. It’s simple: you’re in a saloon and you want to know who all these cowboys are. Just whip your iPhone out of its holster, slap on the Facebook recognition and have yourself a little browse around. As the iPhone camera registers the faces, the facial recognition application is searching for them on Facebook (or Twitter, or Flickr…), putting little boxes around them. You click on a face and another little box tells you who the person is, like so:

(Well, admittedly pulling up George Bush’s Facebook profile by pointing your facial recognition device at a doll is not necessarily a standard application of the tool – but I bet it would be possible!)

Anyway, I noticed another guy, Mike Arauz (classic made-up name), has had a similar idea to this on his blog. He’s come up with another representation of how it could look:

All the technology for this is out there now. A facial recognition app to search through Facebook / Flickr photos has already been developed by Polar Rose. It makes tagging photos easy by recognising you or your friends and pulling up all the photos you appear in. An augmented reality browser such as Layar could integrate this, or it could be developed as a stand-alone application (as many AR apps already have been).

Done.

Ok, privacy, privacy, I know. That’s an issue Facebook will have to address, I suppose. (Another example of moral arbitration by an internet giant (see also: Google)). An opt-in clause might be enough, although I’m not sure how many people would actually be keen on having anyone, anywhere know who they are…

Still, it’s going to happen, somehow, isn’t it?

Some people see increasingly invasive advertising and marketing as being a negative trend. Future visions like this scene in Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report fill many with a cold dread in so far as their future ventures into the outside world are concerned:

Not the most pleasant of shopping trips. But couldn’t invasive, targeted advertising could actually have positive side-effects for the person on the receiving end? Sound like a dream? Not one of mine. Perhaps one of yours?

Ever dreamt about emotion-targeted marketing?

Careful now. This idea might cause too violent a jolt in the region of your nervous system that deals with advertising. There’s a chance of that. Let’s just consider the background for a moment, to postpone such an event, should one be about to occur.

Basically, the reason advertising is getting more and more personal is that as individuals our connection to the world is becoming more and more intimate. Think about it, with newspapers our great-grandparents (or whatever) got access to a lot more information than before, but companies also found a new way into the homes of consumers.

With TV, advertisers were able to regularly exhibit their wares in our sitting rooms – they could even make sure it would be placed next to a programme their target market would be watching. Now, the internet’s context-related advertising (Google Ads, Facebook Ads) almost guarantees that we are shown ads that are relevant to us as individuals. Part of the reason it’s so successful is that it’s actually becoming more useful. You are getting links to things you might actually want!

But is that all we are – creatures of want, with tasks to perform? No! Let it not be said! We have emotional needs too, and this is something advertisers have not fully recognised.

Advertisers want to be your friend so they can sell you something. But real friends are not just people we think are cool, they also do things for us. Think about when you are feeling down, what do your friends do? They try to cheer you up, right? They don’t try to sell you a product.

This is the kind of thing advertisers need to learn how to do. And learn they will, I’m sure. Now’s your chance to get in there ahead of the pack.

All right, so here’s the idea – careful with that nervous system:

Idea #8: Emotion-targeted marketing. Create a spider program or Facebook app that harvests the email addresses of people who have blogged that they feel (for example) low, down, depressed etc. Send a bulk email to the email addresses, something like this:

Hi, we noticed you were feeling down.

Here’s something to cheer you up:

All the best,

Ideas Exist

Wouldn’t that be nice to get?

Wouldn’t you visit the advertiser’s website to see who had sent you such a considerate message?

Wouldn’t you tell your friends about it, and forward the whole email to them – plus the website link – if you thought the video was funny?

Yes.

Well, actually, let’s see. I sent the above email to some random people who blogged that they were feeling in a bad mood/feeling sad/feeling like shit. I just searched for the keywords manually on Google blogsearch rather than using a spider program to find thousands. (Actually, it was surprisingly difficult to find depressed bloggers over the past 12 hours!) 

Anyway, if you’re one of those people who received the email, hope it cheered you up a bit. It’d be great to hear your comments.

This idea was partially inspired by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar’s great internet art project We Feel Fine. Have a look.

If you just fancy spreading a little happiness, Acts of Kindness.org and linked Foundation for a better life have some inspiration and tools to help.

Or have a look at the esteemed Mr. Danny Wallace’s book:

This idea is the solution to a problem. As individuals we all suffer from this problem, and as a society it holds us back. The problem is wasted creativity. The problem is the death of great and original ideas.

Personally, I’ve experienced this all too often since I started having ideas at the age of two. You know what it’s like – you’re getting on the bus, fumbling your ticket, bag and phone as you try to finish your text message while one arm flails wildly for a handrail before the bus moves off. Failing, in the end, to locate the handrail in time, you are pitched backwards into the lap of an elderly lady. Embarrassing. She begins to beat you about the head with her handbag. You notice your fly is open. Then it hits you – a texting glove! This would never have happened if only I’d been using a texting glove! Why on earth hasn’t someone invented this yet? You fall unconscious.

And when you come to, that great idea – that great, world-changing, original idea! – has completely gone from your head. No sooner was it born, than it died. It has happened to us all.

What a tragedy! So much wasted creativity! Think how many great and original ideas are dying every day, every minute. Why do we let this happen? Are so many people really falling unconscious at the hands of the elderly? I say to you no. Probably, in fact, most of us are lacking one of the key ingredients needed to sustain an idea after it is born:

• Money
• Time
• Relevant expertise

But do not distress, there is a simple solution to these woes, and that is: SHARE IDEAS.

That’s what this blog is all about. From now on, instead of keeping all my ideas to myself in the vain hope that one day I’ll have enough time, money and knowledge to make them happen, I’m just going to post them on here for everybody to read. I’d also like to invite you to do the same  - submit ideas here. I’ll give you the credit.

Ideas are not limited to any particular category. They might be inventions, projects, business models, experiments. Some of them may have already been put into practice and just be in here for inspiration.

You can rate the ideas, or just leave a comment to say what you think. Comments are particularly encouraged if you’ve seen a similar idea elsewhere, or if you want to suggest refinements to an idea.

I will also be aiming to get some of these ideas going, hopefully with the help of readers, and will report on progress in this blog. Potentially many of these ideas could be successful. Some of them could even make a lot of money. If you want to use any of these ideas yourself, feel free to do so, and good luck. And if you make a lot of money, please give me some.