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Silly Startup Stories

 Also see scary business models
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The Car Insurance Meter

The next time a maniacal driver cuts you off, reflect that he or she probably pays the same auto insurance rates that you do. Unless the maniac is too cheap to buy a decent radar detector, or has actually crashed into someone recently, insurance companies can't tell the difference between the maniac and you. In effect, as a safe driver you're subsidizing all the maniacs out there.

If you want to rectify this injustice, install our free insurance meter and get a discount from most leading insurers. The meter will warn you when you're driving unsafely at only $0.50 per warning. (If this sounds expensive you're probably one of those maniacs, and this meter isn't for you.)

How does it work? The meter includes a hookup to your car's spedometer, a front rangefinder to detect tail-gating, a hookup to your car's rear rangefinder (if it has one) to detect unsafe lane changes, a G-force sensor for general recklessness, a hookup to your car's traction control system to detect skids, a GIS system to detect driving on mountain roads and in red-lined neighborhoods, and an RF sensor for excessive cell phone use.

Hurry up and get metered now, before insurers increase prices for drivers without a proven insurance meter history! Lest you be concerned about your privacy, please note that the meter can only divulge the number of warnings you receive, and all the details of where/how you've been driving will remain secret.

Unless, that is, you're a teenager. Parents can receive up-to-the-minute reports of their children's driving whereabouts and manuevers by installing the meter transceiver. The transceiver sends messages by email, pager, cell phone, and/or fax, all for only $100 up front and $10.00/mo.

Rock climbers and those practicing unsafe sex beware, the life insurance meter is coming soon.

Big Sister

Back in the good old days, most Americans lived in small towns or closely-knit neighborhoods. Important civic servants with time on their hands (otherwise known as "gossips") watched from the windows, listened on the streets, and generally kept track of what everyone was doing. And they shared this information with anyone who would listen.

Today, sadly, we've lost this important form of social capital. People don't even know who their neighbors are, let alone what they're doing. The consequences are diverse and dire: loss of a sense of community, high crime rates, etc. etc.

To rebuild America's social capital, Big Sister provides discussion lists organized by time and place. If you see something interesting happening, you can go to the discussion list for your block - or even your apartment building - and tell people your version of the story. If you (or the police) want to know what happened on your block yesterday afternoon, you can look it up. If something exciting happens on your block we can send you email, or put a geographically targeted ad on whatever page you're browsing.

Once Big Sister takes off, whoever you are, wherever you are, someone will likely be watching. But just in case no one is there to watch, we'll be installing a WebCam and an audio recorder on every street corner in the country. We are also working with the CIA's "daggers to plowshares" program to repurpose their face recognition technology so that recordings and discussion groups can be accessed by social security number. Do you know how your spouse spent his or her afternoon?

Program Trading for the Masses

Once upon a time, stock market trading was the purview of Wall Street. The Internet changed that: now anyone can trade stocks cheaply and quickly, and millions of daytraders are gambling their life savings every day!

But Wall Street still has an unfair advantage: program trading. Instead of watching stock market movements and making decisions by hand, they program a computer to make trading decisions. This way they can make decisions much more quickly (before the competition), and they can make many more trades.

Our company will take popular stock market speculation to the next level by letting anyone do program trading. We've built easy-to-use tools so that anyone can build trading models. We'll also let people share or sell information about their trading models, so that they can build the best possible models.

Macroeconomic Statistics in Real Time

Every month, large government bureaucracies compile the latest statistics on our economy - unemployment rate, trade deficit, growth rate, etc. They gather data from diverse sources for a few weeks, assemble a report, and sit on it for a couple days.

How quaint! The moment the report is released, stock markets, bond markets, currency markets, all go into a frenzy, as the price of every financial instrument adjusts to the latest data, which is already weeks out of date!

Our company assembes real-time economic data from credit card transactions, Internet purchases (both e-retail business-to-business), bank wire transfers, even Internet surveys, and uses this data to tell us what the next macroeconomic report will say. And no, we won't tell you what it will say, because we're predicting the markets ourselves.

Survivore, the new corporate training game

Based on the hit TV show, Survivore (pronounced with emphasis on the first syllable) teaches your employees how to form political conditions, back-stab, and finger-point in a fun, tropical setting. Leverage the hours your employees have spent watching TV to energize your company's politics! Eliminate the political mistakes that lead to manager turnover and change! Foster consensus in your organization and reduce the harmful effects of competition.

Also check out Omnivore, another politics training game, based on Silence of the Lambs.

Internet Vasectomies

Avoid embarrassment: get a vasectomy in the privacy of your own home. Please hold still. Very still.

:-)
Thanks to Ray Hagstrom, Rajan Lukose, and Bill Schilit for helping me generate these concepts.