Oh wait, I also did the stalker ads idea, or sort of. I believe that someone will come up with a successful solution for location-based mobile coupons. What we have seen with our project is that this idea clicks with customers, but it is hard to develop a scalable model to acquire local advertisers. Local business owners seems extremely reluctant to embrace the internet medium for some reason (even with some free limited service, free pilot programs, etc.).
It's interesting that customers like it. I started working on something like that, but the thought of being on the receiving end of constant advertising through my phone as I walked around really bugged me so I dropped the idea.
An explicitly opt-in version I could go along with, but the legwork to acquire advertisers was more than I wanted to do.
I hate to play devil's advocate, but that kind of crap is the reason Facebook apps exploded. You don't get viral growth without supporting friend-spam.
It's actually not required for signup. You would still receive coupons for free up to a face value of $5 (which is the vast majority in volume).
That was an incentive to foster virality, but your comments are very much appreciated.
In a weekend I coded the virtual business card idea a few months ago, but it didn't catch up at all. Basically the click-through rate of the tiny link in email signatures is below 0.1% so its virality is basically none.
http://www.tinyvcard.com i thought it was a brilliant name :-)
That is a cool name, but it seemed really hard to actually see someone's business card. The codes didn't support vanity URLs and it looked like there was a $10 signup fee. Physical business cards are designed to be read easily and shared easily. They are even pretty cheap.
Heh. Got a side project that does exactly that (twitter-forum, NOT a chat room), and everyone that saw it first thought it was a (lousy) chat room.
I believe there is use in micro-forums (or group-twitters) different than chats; it's a group timeline, it's meant to be persistent, not real-time conversation (though faster than doing blog/forum posts) of group of people publishing related tidbits of information (or replying to / referencing it).
(Shameless plug, my project is http://speeka.net/ , one-tech-guy side project that's practically dormant atm because of lack of spare time and biz/marketing efforts).
As someone who recently moved to an apartment sight unseen (it worked out) and will be moving again soon under the same conditions, a decent rental site would be most welcome. CL doesn't cut it.
We've been working on this for quite some time and have hundreds of thousands of rental listings on our site (don't want to spam, if interested look at my profile). We're doing well, but it's still amazing how well craigslist dominates all the verticals it covers.
Pretty much being done already or a good way to go broke. Free rental listings? That's how CL pays the bills. On demand super computer weather forecasting. Ah, these mothers are expensive.
