Month: June 2007

Listening to The Secret has changed my life. The whole idea how “The Secret” came to me was mystical. My brother-in-law talked about it to my wife and then I never heard of it till we were visiting one of our friends in SF and plan to spend an afternoon with them. They happen to have the movie and they invited us to watch it with them. I was immediately drawn to it. I bought the audio book and since then it has changed my life so much.

It’s a little bit difficult to follow it on a daily basis. It takes time and discipline. But as my day gets busier and crazier, I often lose perspective and get pulled into the day. I get controlled by circumstances instead controlling them. I was thinking on those lines as to how I can fix that. How can I be always aware? I need to tie that up with something which I do all the time. I work all my day on my laptop and I listen to my music collection all the time. Bingo! I know how I can be aware at least when I am working on my laptop.

So, the idea is to create a online affirmation generator. So, you basically build a site with pre-populated affirmations. You can pick one of the affirmations and then you can say whether you like a male or female voice. You can also pick a celebrity’s voice saying your affirmation. This needs to worked out and I am sure there are celebrities out there would lend their voices for such a nice thing. Then you can pick up your background music – this could be classical, guitar strings or some mantras – something mellow not over powering the affirmation. Pick a duration – how long you want your affirmations to last? 10 mins, 20 mins.

Then once you submit it – this would generate a .mp3 file dynamically with all the affirmations you picked and with all the settings you selected. Then I can save this mp3 on my iPod and listen to it whenever I want and reinforce my affirmations!

I have a sample screen grab, if you have no idea what I am talking about.

As I was talking to my colleague about how a modern job site should be like – the conversation moved into a very innovative direction. We have seen regular job search sites like, Monster, Dice which cater to a wide array of needs. But if you see ads on those sites, you would observe they mostly deal with full time jobs. That too, they consider a ‘person’ as an entity. Wouldn’t it be cool if you drill it down to a ‘skill’ rather than a person? Let me explain. On the other end of the spectrum, you would find Craigslist which also has job openings, but more informal and cheap options. There too, a lowest level you can drill down to is a ‘person’.

So, here is an idea about a job search engine which would treat ‘skills’ as an exchange commodity. And looking at how fast Globalization is changing the world, I really don’t care if the skills are from India, Estonia, or Ukraine. So, a person who wants to get a project done will approach this ‘job site’ and go through a step by step process to describe his needs. So, for example – I need a project to be done in 2 months – the skill sets I am looking at are: C++, Oracle, Javascript and Adobe Photoshop. Now to find a person who has these skills would be very difficult. But to find people who have these skills individually is easy. So, I can also select my budget for the project and how much share I am willing to give it to C++ skills when compared to Javascript skills.

The second step would be – the intelligent job search agent would look at all the skilled people registered at the site and look at their conditions. Like if I am a developer then I would say – I can only work for 30$/hour rate and I can only spend 20 hours per week. So, look at the project – the site would intimate all the relevant skills people and show them how much share of monies they would get for that gig.

It’s like you are assembling a dynamic team which is based in any part of the world and who can spend certain amount of their time for that particular skill set.  An intelligent algorithm would also keep other candidates(developers) in queue, in case the first round of people default or say No.

Using this site, a Javascript programmer can spend all his time just doing a Javascript on different projects and make money out of it. I kinda vaguely remember that I sort of have come across something like this – but can’t put my finger on it now. But I do think, it’s about time we look at job market rather as skills than people. I am pretty sure that this won’t work out in a full time employee job situation. This is cool and useful to people like me who wants to be traveling and  still keep making money through computer gigs.

Here is an idea I was thinking about. I am planning on to have a creative idea every day of my life. A major one every week and a minor small improv every day. So, the idea goes. It’s for people who are learning a new language like me (learning Arabic). It would be a site which would create a visual flash cards for the words you want to get translated. It’s not what you imagine, let me explain.

1. The user types in a word he wants it to be translated in some foreign language she is learning. For example, “Book” and I am trying to create a visual flash card for me.
2. The program would then fetch the translation for that word. Which would be “kitab”. Or in Arabic – كتاب
3. Then the program would go and fetch a CC licensed images for “book” from Flickr. This is what you would be seeing.
4. Now the user can associate this Arabic word with the image she would pick.
5. And it gets saved into the user’s learning queue, which they can look at it anytime they want to.
6. To add a community touch to it, you can pick out the most selected image for any given word by other people. Something like what Amazon would do suggesting a book.
7. So, over a period of time, with enough users – the site would have established a very certain amount of images which represent a word in any particular language.
8. Now to take it to a next level – Say I have collected these 200 words with best images that match them and I want to print them and carry them so that I can read it on my commute to my work. Bingo, the site would generate a “xml” of your learning queue and you can take it to Ink2 (disclaimer – I work at Ink2) and upload your xml and get a print of all your flash cards.
9. Now let’s take it to another step. You must have heard about Google Gears. So what you can do is to make this app offline and sync it to the main server when it connects online. Meaning a user can create his own visual flash cards queue locally with her own photos and then sync it up with the server.

Now, I need to get back to put this idea into action and convince my boss to see gold in this! 😉