You are free to steal these ideas for yourself or work with me on them. If you make a million bucks please buy me a burrito.
Table of Contents
- 1 Next-generation live video streaming system
- 2 Economic data overlay for Google Earth
- 3 IOT security certification biz
- 4 AWS consulting biz
- 5 Resell AWS functionality (rekognition, polly)
- 6 COBOL modernization biz
- 7 Reality capture * VR
- 8 Hardware projectM
- 9 dancar
1 Next-generation live video streaming system
- Use WebRTC
- WebRTC is a new standard defining peer-to-peer (usually) live video/audio streaming. It can be easily used in web browsers with JavaScript. It is brand new and not fully deployed yet (supported in all browsers except Safari, with Safari support coming soon).
- It is a way to do streaming live video without Flash or HLS, both of which suck.
- Janus
- Janus is a two-faced server written in C that speaks RTP and RTSP on one side, and WebRTC on the other. It acts like a WebRTC peer and can be used to turn WebRTC into a client/server model, or facilitate client/client communications. It is an awesome project and will enable all kinds of cool, standards-based, real-time video and audio communication in web browsers and other things.
- Your own peer-to-peer Skype replacement website
- With Janus and a couple hundred lines of JavaScript you could make a peer-to-peer video calling web page. It’s really not that hard. Why not make something to replace the piece of shit that is Skype. It’ll be insanely popular and you barely need any infrastructure.
- References
- WebRTC https://webrtc.org/
- Janus https://janus.conf.meetecho.com/
- IP camera system https://github.com/revmischa/cloudcam
- RTP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_Transport_Protocol
- Flash and codec suckage https://spiegelmock.wordpress.com/2015/07/24/flash/
2 Economic data overlay for Google Earth
- I’ve always thought it’d be really cool to have a geospatial visualization of different economic measurements like GDP, PPP, happiness, Gini coeffecient, core and non-core inflation, unemployment, corruption, etc. This would give anyone in the world the ability to visualize how different countries (and regions?) stack up to each other in an intuitive way. Graphs and data are not accessible to most people, but visually seeing their country be obviously shittier compared to neighboring countries could help increase demand for measures to improve the quality of life of their citizenry.
- Maps and visualizations can convey information and affect people a lot more than articles and numbers can.
- Trick is finding good, comparable sources of data. Probably the CIA world factbook and Shadow Govt Stats would be good places to start.
- References
- Google Earth KML https://developers.google.com/kml/documentation/kml_tut
- CIA World Factbook https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/
- Shadow Govt Stats http://www.shadowstats.com/
3 IOT security certification biz
4 AWS consulting biz
- AWS is awesome and can save companies gazillions of dollars on capex, datacenter, personnel, development and operations costs. If you aren’t using AWS you’re an idiot. Really. You just don’t know it yet.
- Doing AWS The Right Way isn’t hard but requires some experience or just reading how to do it The Right Way.
- References
5 Resell AWS functionality (rekognition, polly)
- Be really lazy and do gigs that are just making API calls to https://aws.amazon.com/amazon-ai/
6 COBOL modernization biz
- So many businesses have important applications that are built on old systems like COBOL and JCL.
- They are desperate to modernize these codebases and not be reliant on impossible-to-replace hardware and systems that nobody understands and cannot hire anyone to do.
- COBOL is incredibly unsexy-sounding and most young people have never heard of it and want to build apps or screw around with JavaScript.
- Everyone who is qualified to do this is dead or retired.
- Companies and governments are unable to hire anyone to fix their crap.
- COBOL is incredibly easy to read. Probably hard to write, but you wouldn’t need to write any.
- Porting legacy applications to modern systems could be extremely fun and lucrative.
7 Reality capture * VR
- Someone is going to have a lot of fun and make a ton of money making games or whatever by buying reality capture devices and scanning in real-world environment (or built sets, theater-style) for photo-realistic VR applications.
- References
8 Hardware projectM
- I maintain a nifty music visualizer project called projectM. It is an open-source re-implementation of the venerable WinAmp Milkdrop visualizer.
- It needs some software work to port it to be OpenGL-ES compatible.
- Once it works with GLES you could easily make an embedded linux system (probably a Rasberry Pi or something more beefy) that would have audio in and HDMI out.
- References
9 dancar
- An open-source uber clone. Uses PostGIS spatial database extension to do all the hard work.
- References
Mischa Spiegelmock 