- Siri
- The New Newspaper
- More Ways to Make Money for Restaurant City
- The Zynga Gaming World
- Artificial intelligence
Want me to brainstorm something? Email Me.
Question: what can you do with Siri?
Apple never cease to amaze and create “buzz” after their product launch. This time, with the launch of their iPhone 4S, Siri, the virtual assistant, seems to have taken the world by storm.
Here are some of my thoughts on it:
- Should Yelp be worried? I think so. They’d better act fast to either come up with a better solution or team up with Apple. Imagine when I tell Siri: “Langer’s has the best pastrami sandwich in the world! You’ve gotta to try their #19.” And a friend of mine asks: “Pastrami sandwiches in LA?”
- Traveling. Airlines, hotels, car rentals. They should all be salivating at this platform. How cool would it be if someone asks her phone to “plan my trip to Paris” and Siri puts your name first on the list?
- Deals. “What’s the best deal on Sony Nex-5N in my area/online?” “Who has happy hours now?” A side note: If you are a product manager, you ought to really think hard now about naming your product.
- Social. “I am free this Friday night. Who wants to hang out?” “Who among my friends are free this Friday night?”
Once again, the possibilities are pretty endless, and I can’t wait to see what people can come up with.
Question: what if newspapers had never existed? Where would you get your news from everyday?
TV? Not flexible enough: I don’t get to watch different sections of the news on my own terms.
Radio? Worse than TV, and I don’t even get to see any pictures/videos.
Websites? This seems to be obviously solution. It has all the advantages of the two sources above (plus a lot more) and not the disadvantages. But the thing is, not everyone enjoys the company of a desktop/laptop at the breakfast table. Plus, there are people who simply don’t trust them websites, and I can’t blame them. After all, just putting the words “New York Times” on a piece of paper means a heck lot more than some underlined blue text.
So let’s brainstorm. what we are looking is a handheld device that’s…
1. wireless, light weight and easy to operate and maintain (even for the not so “tech-savvy” people like my grandparents);
2. made by and with contents coming from a trustworthy publisher; (oh, i don’t know, maybe…the New York Times?)
3. focused only on delivering the news (possibly from several different publishers) and advertisements.
Better yet, how about…
4. Let me sort my favorite sections and rearrange my reading preferences whenever I feel like to. Let multiple users setting their own preferences on a single device. And yes, I would like to be able to read half of the story on my laptop in the living room then finish it up in bed on this device.
5. Let me give my feedback on the stories and it could go back to the news providers and/or all the other readers reading the same story, real-time. Oh yeah, I would love to see what others are saying, too.
6. Let me connect with my friends and my favorite reporters.
7. Let me recommend a story or a reporter to my friends.
8. Give me the ability to dig up “old news” as references or just for fun.
9. Let me choose which advertisements I’d like to see based on my subscription. I also get the option to pay more for the subscription if I want no ads at all.
10. I would like to have the device for free if I am willing to subscribe to you for X number of years. (X being the number that makes sense for both the reader and the publisher).
I am sure you can think of a lot more than what’s on the list here. The real question then becomes: who can make such a device called newspaper?
My answer: if Amazon can, so can the Times.
Question: How can the popular Facebook Game Restaurant City make more money?
I like Restaurant City (RC) by Playfish.
It’s the only game that I play on Facebook, probably because I like to eat, and the game itself doesn’t take up much of my time — usually 10 to 15 minutes a day is more than enough to keep my virtual restaurant running smoothly.
I am guessing that the way Playfish is making money with the game right now is to sell “Playfish Money” to “hardcore” players so that they could purchase special items (that can’t be obtained through any other methods) which make their virtual restaurants better than the rest.
The problem with that approach is obvious: except for those “hardcore” RC players, not many people are willing to spend real money on a fake restaurant.
I think there is a little more that Playfish could do with the game, and maybe it could eventually create a powerful community for them.
- Select some of the generic and popular dishes within the game: fried chicken, hamburgers, spaghetti and meat balls, pastrami sandwich, fish tacos, stinky tofu, whatever.
- Allow users to recommend their local restaurants who serve those dishes.
- Allow other users to rate those dishes.
- With enough recommendations/reviews, you now have a platform a little bit like Yelp, except you are dish-oriented (as opposed to restaurant-oriented).
- So now whenever someone is craving a certain dish (because they see it in the game), they can click on the dish within the game to see if any of their local restaurants have it, and which ones are the most popular and/or best-rated.
- Two ways to monetize this: a) sell restaurant ads and b) sell groupons.
Question: How to make Zynga games on Facebook even cooler and more addictive?
I personally think it would be super cool…
- if I can hire my friends’ characters in Special Forces to attack my enemies in my Mafia War;
- if I can use vampires in Vampire Wars to raid someone’s farm in Farmville;
- if I can purchase super cool cars in Street Racing and use them to finish special jobs in Mafia Wars;
- if I can use the money I have in Mafia Wars to play in mega Hold’em Poker tournaments.
As you can see, the list goes on and the possibilities are pretty endless.
The best part of building Zynga Gaming World is that not only will it add instant variety and expansion to the existing games, it will also cause traffic to flow both ways, and thus helping Zynga to better utilize the popularity of their best games.
Question: How Watson could change the way we deal with emails and Social Networks?
Watching Watson, the IBM supercomputer, destroying humans on Jeopardy was pretty refreshing. However, for our average human being, artificial intelligence (AI) like that still seems to be a little far fetched.
Let’s not go into the argument of whether or not computers could replace human. At this moment, our computers still make all of their decision based on some kind of logic, whereas humans could decide solely based on emotions and/or imaginations.
That said, I believe AI can (and probably should) play a bigger part in our everyday life, especially when it comes to dealing with computers/Internet.
Earlier this week I read an interesting article on Techcrunch titled, “What I Want in My New Google“.
Here is an quote:
I want my new Google to automatically make a dinner reservation for me, buy me a ticket to a movie that I may want to watch, or place an order on the cheapest and most reliable shopping site.
I think the automation could be one of the key steps.
- I want AI to automatically reply my emails for me. Not decide, but reply.
To begin, it could use my previous sent messages to learn my vocabularies, grammar, tone, knowledge, etc. In time, if it was asked to write about some random topic, the computer should sound just like me — the content of the writing may be completely off, but the writings should “sound” similar.
Now, if it reads and interprets an email from a friend and ask me several key questions, preferably with very short and simple answers, in theory, it then can reply the message as if I was the one who is writing it.
- The same thing could be applied to Facebook or Twitter.
- I want AI to fight spam on the Web. If it’s smart enough to answer questions on Jeopardy, it should be smart enough to distinguish garbage from valuable content online.
- I want AI to study me and recommend restaurants to me. It shouldn’t always be the cheapest one. It could base its recommendation using one of my comments on a Facebook pictures or an email message I wrote several years ago.