Making a business of finding and sharing information

The issue

You know the constant FYI-emails, IM's and so on, from people in your network, just letting you know they found some interesting stuff for you to look at. Based on their perception of you and what you'd be interested in. Sometimes you'll receive the same FYI 3-4 times - from different people, just adding to the information overload / spam!! The FYI's combined with your own information scouting can take up quite a substantial time during a day... some days you might feel behind on information, because you aren't able to cope with the large amount.

The Combination

I do my share of FYI's to people in my network, being sales leads, or input to projects I know people are working on, to plain old spare time interests. And some (of us) are just better at finding the information than others. Combine this with the "Personal shopper" concept, found in various implementations around the world. Best known in Denmark as a Christmas event in bigger retail stores - helping the men picking presents for the entire family - and wife.

The new concept

Through customizable categories on a website and personal meetings, defining people profiles, making sure that only the right and relevant information comes at a time YOU want it. Having scoters keeping an eye on the information’s of interest in numerous places, giving you the update you need when you need it. The amount of information and time between each update should be highly agile, enabling for quick shifts depending on the current state of "need of knowledge" Maybe topping the information update with information summary’s on requested subjects. Enabling a company to have a start-up meeting on a subject, which is to be attacked?

Inner city beeing space for D-I-Y people

I recently moved to the "big" city of Copenhagen. Comming from the comfort of a house with adjacent garden, toolsheet and plenty of room for my powertools, i suddently found myself having trouble dooing the simplest things. No room for my workbench, and no place where i can make a bit of a mess without the girlfriend gooing through the roof.

Then i remembered this:

http://www.springwise.com/lifestyle_leisure/sewing_cafe_in_berlin/

The idea i simple, in this sweing cafe you get multiple things: Social network, help, machinery (if you don't have your own), space and storage.

Projecting this idea onto my missing garage/work-space i'm thinking of a Work-café where you can come in to make the new shelf, fixing your bike, reparing the chairs and so on.

The place should provide:

- Storage space for your projects and own powertools

- Crowd ordering of materials to get good prices

- Ordering from house-suppliers to get special deals

- Tools to lend if you don't have the rigth tool for the job yourself

- Community workstations for everybody to use (maybe book online)

The cafe will provide a social network you seldomly get in your own garage, and the comfort and safty of collective skils to ensure you in undertaking large/new projects.

Merging Work and Family life

Share selected photos from the weekend trip to the forrest, child birthday or yesterdays party with your co-workers on a public digital photo-wall showing your photos alongside your co-workers.

This is done to spark co-worker relationships and a great way to get to know your co-workers in depth. Rather than just hearing about the kayak trip - see it. Use the photos as an offset to a much more personalized conversation with the person next to you.


So now i've put a feed from my own personal online photo-wall - look at the bottom of the page, or click here
Also i put a del.icio.us tag-cloud up, wich features tags from my favorite links - and a link to the collection. - to the right...

All done in the name of merging ;)

Open-space brainstorming

Imagine if a brainstorm was not carried out in a closed office-spaced, only for the invited...
Imagine an open-space - hallway space, where brainstorm topic and boundaries are posted on the walls, enabling the team brainstorming to get even more input from people passing through... what if that one person that came by your brainstorm was the one with the key input to launch you to the next level ?=!

One topic at a time of cause
The brainstorm owners present of cause
And an active core of people brainstorming, making it into an active environment...

Visible work load

I'm a yes man... and that is not allways good, because i tend to have a lot of tasks on my table at all times.
But it's not always visible how many or if they are looked at in a timely manner...
Thinking about the red and green balls you see in a lot of "innovative" offices, where you put a green one in a bowl if you have a good day or a red if you have a bad...

Having a clear tube where you stack a ball for each current task , making it very easy to see how many you have.
The stacking of the balls makes a first-in-first-out approach to task solving easy to controll. Different colors can represent different types of tasks. A task can be worked on over a number of days, putting the ball back in the stack when done for the day. A DAY ball, making it visible how many tasks you have for that day...

Public idea-bank...

Why is it companies keep their ideas so tight that they tend to die or get overtaken by others before they are developed into quality products ?!

I've meet more than one person that was good at brainstorming and getting bright new ideas, but only one or two had the same passion for DIVERSITY as I do.

It's with ideas as it is with solution-solving and development in general - it only gets better if more eyes look at it.

So why not have a simple public idea-bank ? - Imaginatory if you will ;)
The thing is - I know that most of my ideas might never develop much further than what you see on core.makebelieve.dk - BUT having a public idea inventory where ideas flourish and idea creators are complemented on their ideas, now that would truly set the scene for an innovative country...

Thinking i Creative Commons can be used to controll use of ones ideas ?

Is this what i mean...
http://www.globalideasbank.org/site/home/