I have been reading “Wisdom of Crowds” and have been wondering how the idea of ‘Wisdom of Crowds’  would work out in a world’s most populous country of the world. One thing which is very popular in India are movies. There a hell a lot of movies that get released every Friday. I would not be surprised that India is the largest movie make in the world.

So here is an idea to combine these 3 things:

1. Wisdom of Crowds
2. Lot’s of population
3. Movies

I have been a great fan of the site called Movie Mistakes. I love the idea. But in India anything about finding mistakes in movies won’t work because in the first place the whole movie is a mistake! Just kidding. But I don’t think the technical standards here are on par with Hollywood so that we can have some site which can be a watch dog for movie mistakes. So, what else can we do?

Why not use the good opinion about movies? So, here is how it’s going to work. Every week, the site would add in all the released movies that week. Some one would review the movie just like regular newspaper. But this is where it differs. Once the user logs in, he can point out the mistakes in the plot and if he/she is creative enough can propose an alternate plot line. This in turn can be voted by other users and in the end (usually after 1 week) when others have found the loop holes in the plot line – basically we would end up with almost an alternative plot line which could be actually better than the actual movie.

This would make the movie writers to get more creative as a bunch of people can get together and find loop holes in his/her story. Also, this could find hidden talent in people who can come up with more stories.

It is very important to have an open mind to be successful in life. The ability to have a open mind helps one to be open to new ideas and new options. I often keep a tab on TED talks and watch them now and then. These talks are an amazing insight into the best brains on the planet. These talks expand my understanding and bring in fresh ideas.

Success in this world depends up on Clarity. A lot of people don’t understand that if only they could just be clear of what they want – then they can achieve it. We live our lives wanting and fantasizing a lot of things. But very few make a list and out of them a minority makes a very specific list. After becoming aware of The Secret, I have been planning on to have a “Vision Book” for myself. Sangita already created one for herself and it looks so good. So here is an idea for creating a vision book site.

1. A user would open an account and can select a book type.
2. This is a book made in software but looks like any themed notebook from any country
3. Once the book is created, the person can start creating pages. Vision pages.
4. One goal may have many, many pages.
5. It’s all about getting visual. If you have ever done scrap book then you get the idea.
6. Then the user chooses to install a browser extension
7. So whenever I visit a site, I like something – it could be a video, audio, image text etc – I can take a snapshot of it using my browser extension
8. Once the snapshot is taken, the user can insert it  anywhere in his vision book and rotate it, play with it.
9. It would be cool if the snapshots are in SVG format then the user can stretch it or skew it and it would still be the same.
10. In the end, it all about sharing and spreading the vision. So, the user can choose to share his/her Vision book with his friends.
11. If the user wants to print the vision book – it can be printed at Ink2

I was always fascinated by books. I read, buy and collect so many of them every month. I believe a person’s bookshelf tells a lot about a person. When I see pictures of famous people sitting in their library or holding a book – I am more interested to see their book collection or what books are they reading right now. That is one way of knowing what their thinking(at least) for that period of time. May even tell a lot about their tastes if you get a list of the books they are reading. So, following this idea I think there should be an easy way to maintain a virtual book shelf online. So, here is an idea…

1. Registered users will key in the ISBN # for the books they have or own.
2. The site would create a virtual book shelf and store it online
3. We will also have small widgets, for blogs so that I can show off my book shelf on my blog
4. The books in my book shelf (that is being shown on my blog) link to my choice of book seller (amazon/bn) there by if someone follows the link and makes purchase I would get an incentive.
5. I should be able to mark the book public or private or protective meaning only people I choose can see that I own that book
6. Whenever you make a online purchase, you are also given a choice of adding it to your virtual bookshelf.
7. Ideally I should also be able to keep my e-books and audio books in my book shelf.
8. Amazon can advertise, discount and sell a whole row of a bookshelf from any popular person’s bookshelf.

I am sure someone must have thought about this. There must be a site which already does this. But I have never seen one so far and also this could be a great pet project to do in Ruby on Rails.

Long long time back, (at least 2 years I guess) – I came up with an idea of how we can create software for creating a montage of images. I mean not just a montage, but a montage that would looks like some picture in a bigger perspective. So, the steps for this would be something like this..

• You would pick a end result picture. For example – a close up of your favorite movie star.
• Then you would go ahead and pick all the photo’s from your personal collection.
• Then you would tell the software – what would be the size of the image you want to create.
• Then the software would re-arrange all the images depending on the lightning and colors etc, in such a way that the bigger picture would look like your end result image.
• The software can tune up the colors a bit if it can’t find an image that would match a corner of the montage, but it’s changes to the photos should be minimal.
• You can take it up a bit if you want to get the images from public domain or from Flickr
• The final Montage can be saved and printed at any print shop like Ink2

Just to give you a perspective of what I have in mind, if you have seen the movie – “Dream Girls” in there somewhere there is a scene which shows Beyonce’s picture on the wall. The whole wall is covered with her picture. Imagine, if we collected all our photographs and created Beyonce’s photo instead of lowing up a regular photo.

Update: What a coincidence? The day I blog about Montage creating idea, I come across something that does what I described. http://imagemosaicgenerator.click42.com/