Innovation in Software

There’s a lot of interesting things happening out there right now. HTML 5 is about to make a whole suite of new applications possible thanks to:

• Much better rendering of graphics on the fly
• Client-side storage of application data
• Drag-and-drop interfaces that make web apps feel more desktop-like

But there has to be something we are missing out on that is niggling us all at the back of our collective group-think mind. Perhaps watching the Google Wave introduction got you psyched about something that suddenly became possible. Perhaps the very way the web inherently works bothers you, and you envisage a new platform.

I’m interested in hearing about it now the comments are getting a little bit of love across articles. Go crazy. Throw them in there…

Development is a creative pursuit. Whilst many think of it as a purely technical challenge, it requires a level of lateral thinking about the World that is a cross between doing a crossword puzzle, composing a symphony and having an argument with people who don’t exist. It’s not surprising some of us are a little eccentric.

It reminds me of the writing process a lot. You sit down at a blank screen after having conducted your research and you have to just dig in and find some way of making progress. Many a developer struggles with a blank IDE screen much in the same way many a writer struggles to find influence. When I was learning how to write properly, I was told that “a professional writer can not be like the poet who spends a morning taking out a comma, and the afternoon putting it back in”. We need to work hard. Same with code. A block then is a real problem.

Slashdot this weekend asked How to Get Out of Developer’s Block?, or rather a user asked:

I have spent the past six months working on a software project, and while I can come up with ideas, I just can’t seem to sit down in front of the computer to code. I sit there and I just can’t concentrate. I don’t know whether this is akin to writer’s block, but it feels like it. Have any other Slashdotters run into this and if so how did you get out of it? It is bothering me since the project has ground to a halt and I really want to get started again. I am the sole developer on the project, if that makes a difference.

The comments that follow in the thread that range from the sensible to the bizarre. I have a bunch of tricks I use when I’m struggling, so thought I’d put them together

1. Get enough sleep – you have no idea how sleep deprivation can mess you up when you’re trying to concentrate. When I’m working on code, I take a minimum of 10 hours sleep a night. Anything less, and I’m not going to be able to think in purely abstract terms for 8 hours straight during the day.
2. Exercise – and whilst those of you who know me might laugh, it’s important. I actually do get regular exercise when I’m coding full-time. Just a long walk at the start or end of the day can be enough. Something that gets the hear rate up helps though (perhaps explaining why I always code better the day after… errr… private stuff that gets my heart rate up!).
3. Don’t drink alcohol – this was something I got when I was trying to sort out my pilot’s license. When you’re going flying, I don’t drink for 24 hours before getting into the plane. I found my workload was easier, my writing got more fluid and my code went up a gear. On big client projects I don’t drink at all on school nights. If I’m drinking in the evenings whilst on a project, it’s because the project isn’t challenging me and I’m bored.
4. Clear your environment out – I’m currently sat at a desk with perhaps 150 items of paperwork on it. In this environment, I can not focus on code. My mental processes are cluttered because my physical processes are. Tidying up might seem like a stupid way to get out of a block, but I genuinely find that a clear working environment leads to much clearer mental processes. I don’t know how or why, it fascinates me, but just get your physical environment fixed up and suddenly your mental environment starts to fire a little better than before.
5. Write a trivial test – this is the code version of “free-writing” that I sometimes use to unblock on writing an article. Basically write a small test (or spec if you’re BDD) for something almost trivial and then get it to pass. Repeat. Now you’re back in the game.
6. Work on the design – it’s amazing how bad we collectively are at really thinking through a problem. Go and work on some wireframes or develop some sketches of the underlying schemas and try and simplify them. Reduce things down, and suddenly you’ll see areas you can work on right away outside of the problem you’re blocked on. If you’re not able to delve into design or architecture because of the nature of the project, quite frankly you need another bunch of guys to work with.
7. Try and find it done already – I once spent a lot of time trying to work out how to solve a particular problem. The answer was non-trivial to implement in my mind. I kept putting it off. I was scared of how bad I could end up making my solution. In a fit of procrastination I spent an hour digging around the problem area and eventually found an open-source tool that did exactly what I needed, out of the box. Well, that solves that problem…
8. Are you scared of success? It might sound like a stupid question because success is good, right? But when we succeed at something, we conquer some barrier we have worked to overcome for a period, things change. Suddenly people might look at you differently. Perhaps you end up having to work on a less interesting project. You might want your current project to be a success for other reasons. Ask yourself whether you really want this project to succeed. And then realise there’s no getting out of it: failing, or staying where you are is just as bad an outcome and harms you, your self-confidence and your reputation.
9. Find a SCRUM meeting somewhere – one of the very best things about daily stand-up meetings in SCRUM projects is that the meeting only has three topics of conversation: outcomes from stuff you agreed to do in the last meeting; what you plan to do today to further the project, if anything; and obstacles in your way. Not everybody has a team (and sole development is the hardest form there is, trust me), so find a SCRUM somewhere else. Use Twitter, your blog, a group of friends down the pub, anything. Just talk about what’s stopping you and see if anybody can help you in any way, or offer suggestions. Obviously asking a friend about a tricky problem relating to class inheritance isn’t going to yield results if they don’t know what you’re on about, but ask around more liberally than you have done to date.
10. Work on something else – we all have other projects on the go. If the above isn’t working, just go and get on with something else. Your subconscious is dealing with the problem and will come up with a solution. Just make sure you hit your deliverables schedule if you have one!

Now comments are back up, I look forward to hearing of any other tips people might have.

Many moons ago I worked in the world of ISP systems administration. That broadly meant I had to be intimately familiar with the inner workings of mail, DNS and Radius servers (the latter still gives me cold shivers when I think back), as well as connectivity issues. Back then, broadband but was a distant dream but thanks to my knowledge of AAA protocols – Authentication, Authorisation & Accounting – I gradually had to become familiar with modem racks and being able to diagnose a problem purely by listening to the screeching noise of a 56K modem negotiating with its telephone-connected partner.

Since then, I have gradually moved away from all that jazz and more into development. Occasionally I pop my head back into that market and see where things are, and am constantly surprised how stagnant the market is. It’s still at a place where it expects people to know much more than they probably want to, just to get started.

And I still remain surprised at how bad support offerings are around connectivity, especially for SoHo customers. Business users pay a premium for their broadband, but still have to spend either a lot of time learning how to configure routers, or pay over-inflated support contracts for others to do it for them.

Add into the mix the growing area of cloud services like EC2 and its competitors and things get more complex. Setting up and managing cloud services so that they automatically scale and adapt to your application’s needs (burstable needs, even), is complex and expensive. There is the inkling of an idea within me to build toolkits that would dramatically reduce the pain of moving to cloud services and managing/supporting burst-tolerant applications.

The issue for me is, do I work on any of these ideas? Some of them are labour intensive, but clearly ideas I can easily recruit people into once a critical mass of customers are on board. There are also other ideas kicking around the Vagueware workshop and I’m sure many of you who know me can think of areas I should be working in that I’m not.

So, I’ve decided to kick the tires of UserVoice, a competitor (considerably more polished) than the toolkit I had here at vagueware.com for a number of years.

In the Services & Products Forum I’ve seeded half a dozen things I could be working on right now, but for various reasons are mostly on hold. I want you, dear reader, to vote on the ones you like. Even better, I want you to suggest ideas that if popular will benefit from dedicated resource – time, cash and sleepless nights – to bring them to fruition. It’s a little like how I started all those years ago, but far more organised.

Once some of the products and services I’m working on right now get launched, they will benefit from their own forums as well. Watch this space, etc.

I’m on the verge of renaming this blog “Reactions to Guy Dickinson” as once again I find myself responding to one of his posts, this time regarding the process of opening up ideas.

I think it’s pretty obvious that I care about this. Instead of a corporate brochure-ware website, Vagueware has to date had an idea bank that I have shamefully neglected. Innovation is what I started the company to do – I have only managed to scrape the surface so far, but I think many will be surprised about what is around the corner.

The plan is to move to a more corporate site very soon, but what to do with the idea bank concept? Where to take it? I think I have an answer, but I’d rather see what other people are thinking in terms of open idea banks and how they could work.

What about allowing for better collaboration or even finding a way of producing bounties for ideas that have proved so popular in recent years in areas like space travel and medical research.

I particularly like the idea of bounty prizes – if you pay a company $10 million to develop something, you get $8 million worth of research (with $2 million kept for profit). If you put up a $10 million prize and get a dozen companies working to win it, society gets nearly $100 million worth of research and at least half a dozen new companies doing amazing research.

The fact that idea didn’t get much enthusiasm on Vagueware is probably the reason I stopped posting ideas – it disheartened me that maybe the concept of innovative economic models for R&D wouldn’t be enthused about, and therefore everything else I was trying to do would fail.

Why not sign up and post your ideas on how to improve the “development, storage and transmission of ideas”? Or vote for ideas you like (there aren’t many in there right now). The code behind vagueware.com is about to get re-cast into Rails 2.0 and then released under an MIT license, so perhaps I’ll have time to incorporate some of these ideas before the next release.

When Niels Bohr made the quip I use in the title, it’s unclear if he was intentionally or accidentally witty, or simply making an assertion about the weirdness of the quantum World.

Regardless, the Turing Lecture – an annual lecture given in London and Manchester – last night concerned itself with the future. Specifically, “The Meaning of the 21st Century”, as interpreted by Dr James Martin, a man of some considerable repute.

I absolutely hate being critical and scathing of anybody, but on this occasion I find I have no choice. If Dr Martin should find himself reading this one day, I’d ask that he note that I am not attacking him as a person, but purely his ideas and his execution of those ideas.

I attended the showing of his film before the talk, and discussions afterwards confirmed I was not the only person who considered walking out. In fact, my companion during the film decided he had better places to be rather than hang around for the talk.

The reasons for finding it so annoying are many. I actually stopped counting mistakes I found in the film after about half an hour (never mind the sound mixing being bodged and the long pauses at points), but it could be summarised as saying the tone was patronising and arrogant.

The thesis was heavily planted in the realms of Liberal Conservatism – two of the more prominent politicians interviewed were Chris Patten and John McCain with no counter-argument offered from anybody involved in “Leftist” politics. His answer to solving the problems of the World could effectively be described as US foreign policy for the last 60 years: export democracy and literacy and make foreigners realise they’re a bit thick – a policy which so far has led to where we are today.

Rather more disturbing for me was his attitude towards religion. Once in the film and once in the talk he talked about the “problems of Islam and religious fundamentalism”. He seems to think that the problems in the Middle East are purely rooted in Islamic fundamentalism and no blame can be apportioned to Christian fundamentalism driving a neo-Conservative agenda in the US, or that Israel has ever lifted a finger in anger or in error. He generalises a point about “all religions needing to learn the true values of their founders” but does not offer a method by which that can happen.

At one point in the film he makes a point after an Indian farmer has stated “God will help us” that “poor people need to be taught rational thought”. Sorry Jimmy, that’s just fundamentalism in another flavour.

I use this word carefully, but politically his arguments stray into what can only be described as a fascism, albeit a fascism he would want conducted by what Marx would have called “the proletariat”.

There is also something absurdly hypocritical about a film discussing the obscenity of the Californian lifestyle narrated by Michael Douglas, or the dangers of global warming being described by Martin appearing in a different city in a different country every 30 seconds. I stopped counting at 15 countries I think he visited to make the film, and in his talk he made a reference to “a few days ago I was in Cape Town” – it’s good to know he’s doing his bit for sorting out CO2 emissions!

So, onto the talk proper and I think the best way to rip this one to shreds is to go through the predictions he made. Many of you know that I think futurology is about as accurate as long-term weather forecasting, but with a difference: futurologists are exhibiting their hopes and fears. It’s hard to say whether he just collected predictions he considered credible for scientific reasons, or whether these form a good poll on his inner hopes and fears, but I’ll let you make your own mind up.

• Near-infinite bandwidth: in the future we will have bandwidth – “many thousands of a terabytes a second” – so fast that it may as well be considered infinite. Never mind history has always shown that we find a way to use nearly all of it almost immediately, there will be plenty to go around.
• Nanotechnology widespread: virtually everything manufactured in the 21st century will have nanotech in it somewhere. Some aspects of this I can see, but the extent he has predicted would be like suggesting in 1875 that every home in the World would have a steam engine in it by 1975.
• Ultra-intelligent computing but not human-like intelligence: this one confused me. He’s giving the Turing lecture. Turing described a successful AI as being one that passed “The Turing Test” – it would be indistinguishable from humans. He asserts that this is wrong, that intelligence will be “more alien”. Humans define intelligence, and therefore the only AI we will recognise as intelligent is one that which mimics our own. Even weirder though is how he thought this would combine with nanotech and by the end of the 21st century some humans would have millions of nanobots in their brain fluid using a “Brain Computer Interface” enhancing our mental function to “do the equivalent work of a PhD in 3 minutes” all communicating with each other via “wireless networks”.
• Automated evolution and genetic engineering: yes, I know evolution is already automated. What he means is that we will be able to kick-start it again for certain functions in plant, animal and human life. One prediction in the film is that 20 years from now people will be able to buy DIY gene modification kits for plants and they will design new forms of plant life.
• Use of quantum entanglement: cryptography moving to quantum? Well, yes. He doesn’t seem to have considered the true consequences of quantum computing though, specifically in the realms of breaking cryptography, or it’s use in science in a broader sense. His thoughts on “a friend who is a physicist” using quantum entanglement for more accurate brain scans were interesting though.
• Transhumanism: in effect, using technology to improve humanity in any way possible. Think rejuvenation technology currently being researched, the brain/computer interface, evolving ourselves, using stem cell research to “reset” our immune systems, and so on.
• Pebble bed nuclear reactors: I think he got confused at one point here because he suggested such a reactor could produce 180W of energy – enough to power three lightbulbs. I think he meant MW. Anyway, the idea is that this uses 10%-enriched uranium (which can’t be used for weapons) in a form that is impossible to extract, and using a design that makes it impossible to meltdown. The science looks interesting, and I’m prepared to go and research it but when he talks about pebble bed, it sounds like he might have shares in a company developing the technology. Apparently “there are Indians very interested in Thorium pebbles” – lovely.

Now, let’s talk about “Lovelock city”, his predicted “city of the future”. If the temperature rises by 4C we will need to build new cities somewhere cooler in which to live. This is reasonable according to Martin because we have seen the building work in Dubai over the last seven years prove that such cities are possible. It’s left as an exercise to the reader to work out the CO2 impact of building a new city the size of Dubai in the Arctic circle.

• Hydroponics: given the predictions he’s made about the lack of water available to us in the future, he thought hydroponics was the answer. Most students will be familiar with hydroponics thanks to their use for growing crops with which they’re more familiar.
• Magnetic Levitation Trains: which will run at “440km/h” back to our normal cities. You can always spot a crackpot futurologist when they get excited by Maglev trains. They’re horrendously expensive, stupidly noisy, hard to maintain, potentially quite dangerous, difficult to build and there is only one commercial maglev train running anywhere in the World. Still, the World will be full of them soon enough.
• Grand Masked Balls: I’m not making this up. Apparently the winters will be so dark in Lovelock city we will all attend masked balls. No, I don’t know why either.

One of my biggest concerns was that Martin had ideas, but no sense of execution. Ideas are worthless without some plan to bring them about. A political idea without a policy to drive it is effectively useless. At the end of his talk, he suggested 12 “policies” that would fix the World. The issue here is how you would bring about these “policies”.

• Manage the ecology of the planet: given we don’t really understand the climate models, ecological models and water cycle properly I don’t see how he can develop policies around this. Just because this is “the age of management” it doesn’t mean we can manage unknowns. Even when they’re known, the one group of people who know how to screw things up are managers.
• Decline in population to 4 billion: the World has too many people, apparently. Specifically too many Chinese and Indian people. But no matter, Martin has found an answer: women who are taught to read have fewer children. I figured his slogan for this could be “Women who read don’t breed!” – what did I tell you about straying into fascism? Anyway, a falling population is a good thing according to Martin, but I wonder who is going to tell the World population that this would mean all in this generation have to work until we were in our 80s in order to produce enough food for everybody and it would be the end of the state pension until the population had normalised down to his “ideal” 4 billion?
• Save water and improve soil: do you know how you save water and improve soil? You don’t eat meat. You don’t, I don’t, nobody does. It’s sensible, sane advice at an ecological level, but how are you going to convert a global population they can’t eat meat any more?
• Ocean management: we also need to reduce the amount of fish we eat in order to get fish stocks back up. If you avoid fishing certain parts of the ocean for a decade or more, we can fix the current depletion levels. Seems reasonable, but again how do you bring this about? It requires international consensus which can’t even be achieved at the moment around whaling!
• Millennium goals refined annually: do you have any idea how long it took to get the original goals agreed? Evaluation of progress against an objective is one thing, but annual debate is just going to lead to a quagmire of international politics
• Build up food reserves: politicians call those “food mountains”. They’re not very popular.
• Closing down of shanty towns: and move the people where? Let’s take a “shanty town” in a modern Western country: England. In Salford, “experts” decided that back-to-back terrace housing was inappropriate. So families who have paid off their mortgages are finding themselves in a position of compulsory purchase orders for their £60,000 houses and are being told they need to move. Don’t worry though – the new houses will be much nicer, albeit at a cost of £120,000. For a retired couple, this is just untenable. They’re happy where they are. They like their house. They want more neighbours. They want their community. If it’s happening in Salford, I’ll guarantee it’ll happen in developing nations.
• Religious tolerance: see above. Good luck, but Martin’s current theological ideas seem to favour neo-Conservative Christian fundamentalism.
• Tight non-proliferation controls: what more can be done? We’ve seen the NPT abandoned because any game theorist will tell you that Prisoner’s dilemma applies.
• Control of enriched uranium: that’s working wonderfully right now isn’t it? Look how friendly relations are between the US and Iran. How about this instead: develop foreign policies that don’t provoke other nations into wanting to attack you. Ron Paul in the US has a cracking little foreign policy that would stop all threats against the US – get the US army bases around the globe shut down, and if Iran wants nukes well, that’s its right. It sounds dangerous, but why exactly would anybody attack the US if they no longer looked like imperial conquering aggressors? This is obviously too insane for Dr Martin, who prefers an option that hasn’t worked so far and never will.
• Elimination of nukes: again, prisoner’s dilemma applies.
• “Understanding of dangers”: in other words, listen to Dr Martin some more

The truly sad part of all this is that in 2005 he gave $100 million to Oxford University to create The James Martin 21st Century School at Oxford. How many schools could he have built in Africa with that money? How many pebble bed reactors could he have built? How many alternative energy sources could he have invested in?

Yet he spent the money establishing a school named after himself, so that he could talk about his flawed ideas with some sense of credibility. His ideas aren’t just silly: they’re dangerous.

I expect Manchester University will ask him to invest in a center here, and given their uncritical view of his ideas he might accept.

If he turns up in Manchester again, I’m now prepared for an argument.

Let’s imagine you are a toymaker. No, not some carpenter in a little workshop deep in Old Europe – a multinational that commissions studies on “pester-power” and are only slightly embarrassed by the fact some of your toys contain lead paint.

You have a trademark over a game, that quite frankly went out of fashion in the 1980s. Nobody wants to play it any more because it’s seen as dull, boring and just a little bit “fuddy”.

Then, one day, you notice sales are starting to rise. People are buying the game again. You can’t understand why, so you commission another report (hey, that’s your job) to find out where this new interest is coming from. A few months later, you have an answer – somebody has created an electronic copy of your game and made it available as an application in a social networking site. People are so crazy for it as a result, your brand is now gaining value and you’re going to have to think about how to cater for this new generation of players.

What do you do?

Well, if you’re Mattel or Hasbro and your games is Scrabble and the online app is Scrabulous on Facebook, you naturally send out cease & desist letters and hack off your new fan base.

The idiocy of this decision is monumental. Yes, you need to protect your trademark. Yes, you need to show that you’ve acted to protect it otherwise you can end up losing it anyway. Do they really think this is the way forward though?

I have to admit I’m a tad biased here. Here’s my Scrabulous stats screen:

As you can see, I’m one of those people who plays daily, and plays a lot. I’d hate to see it go. But that’s not why I’m writing about it here.

There is something new about the economy that is spreading around us. In the past ideas, trademarks, patents all were treated as if they had some inherent power that should not be discussed. People say they won’t discuss things because they need to be secret, that they fear the legal consequences. People don’t give up ideas until they’re “protected”. People guard words they invented as if they alone are the secret sauce to great riches.

Here’s the thing: that’s all bullshit now.

You want people to talk about your product, your ideas. You want them to talk, talk, talk, talk all day long. You want people to stand up and shout from the rooftops about your products, your patents, your trademarks. You want them to share their ideas of how your products could be made better. When they start doing that, especially when other people are providing them the tools to do it, you should think very carefully about whether you want to tell them to shut up.

The New York Times has posted a story about prize models as a source of open innovation. Those who have spoken to me personally about my plans know I like this concept a lot, but I have to consider some of the criticisms within the article as valid:

“These prizes tend to attract those people who have resources to begin with,” said Mr. Burns, the consultant, referring to space exploration contests and the like. “It doesn’t serve everyone, nor does it solve social ills. I’m not as excited about these prizes that seem to be nothing more than the pursuit of awards for capitalist happiness.”

Can’t disagree with that. However, I think one of the problems is that the models being persued by the X Prize is that the goals are so monumental, you would have to spend a considerable amount of time and money in achieving them. I think more modest prizes and more modest goals are easier to start with.

For example, it’s been a while since I last checked out InnoCentive – long enough ago that the last time I checked them out, they were only handling chemistry problems. These days there are business and computer science problems even I’d feel comfortable having a go at, and the prize funds are modest enough and the goals achievable enough that most with a few weeks of spare time could probably develop something.

What if you don’t win? Well, you still have something useful to somebody in your hands – you just need to find a way of developing it yourself.

I considered this approach with the idea bank, but where the money would come from the community and the prizes would be won by FLOSS solutions anybody could take and run with and the community as a whole would benefit. We might all add £20 each to an idea to be solved in software, but if there were 1,000 of us doing it the money would be enough to create a whole new mini-economy in the FLOSS community.

On the train back from BarCamp Leeds today, Manoj Ranaweera and I were talking about various things. One of the points he made was that he found it very confusing what the difference between “Vagueware Ltd” and “vagueware.com” was.

In his head, Vagueware Ltd is a development consultancy, but vagueware.com was the idea bank, a place for people to share and collaborate ideas. He was convinced I should move the idea bank somewhere else and give its own separate identity. Give it a new name, a new purpose and have Vagueware as a consultancy and holding company for that site (and the others like Kagtum and Fluxish I’m hoping to launch soon).

At the start of the conversation I was adamant he was talking rubbish, but I reflected on it and within 10 minutes had changed my mind completely.

This then crossed over into another thought that Guy Dickinson led me to a while ago. Guy said the site as it was lacked focus, and it wasn’t immediately clear what type of ideas were suitable. He suggested narrowing it down.

So now the two ideas merge, and I’m thinking of something completely different.

What if you could have your own idea bank like Vagueware? What if for your company you were able to get customers to add ideas and let other customers vote on them? What if you could set up idea banks for open source projects, or private space for developing new product ideas with colleagues inside your company? What if you could have access to a clean idea bank in a few seconds? What if you’re running a BarCamp and you wanted to vote on talks as we did today (but ultimately abandoned as somebody was gaming the system)?

My vagueware ideas would have their own place, and that would be open. I might have a closed version for products I work on with clients in private, and I might have more public idea banks around specific products. You could get access to one if you wanted, and you could choose who has access and moderate it yourself.

This would all be under a new name (yet to be decided), and at the start it would be free.

Is this worth going on with? I’m now almost completely convinced a new name needs to be found, but what about a new kind of product?

Thoughts welcome in the comments. I’ll make a decision mid-week and by Friday “Decisions Will Be Made”, so speak up now or forever hold your peace.

There are two kinds of innovation I want to talk about on vagueware:

• Ideas for whole new products and services that can be delivered with software
• Incremental changes to existing software products and services

I spend most of my time thinking about new products and services, the kind of thing that you can start a business off. Those ideas are generally jealously guarded by the people who think they thought of them first, but the simple truth is they have little value without execution: vagueware.com is about trying to get people executing on those ideas.

I have hundreds of ideas on my desk, on my wall, in my head, on my laptop, in notebooks, everywhere. They’re not going anywhere where they are. I do not have the time or the capital to make every single one of them happen. By placing them in the public domain over the coming months, I hope to do a couple of things:

• Somebody, somewhere will do something with them
• I will get the satisfaction that whilst not benefiting monetarily, I helped an entrepreneur and his customers

I hope that if you have an idea that you realise you’re never going to make happen, you’re going to have the courage to place it in the public domain and allow open source developers, start-ups and hobbyists in need of a way to spend their evening get started with it. They might even give you money, you never know.

Then there’s the second kind of idea – the incremental idea. The idea where you see a product or service out on the web or on your machine and you think “that’s great, but if it did…”

I’ve started cataloguing ideas I’ve had for vagueware and tagging them ‘vagueware’ – you can add ideas for vagueware too, and tag them so I see them – and as votes move up and down I’ll see what’s popular and what isn’t. I’ll use the tool itself to decide what to work on next within the tool. Yay for recursion!

I hope other developers use the site to do the same. By putting up ideas on the site for your own product and asking customers to go along and vote, you can get an assessment of what is going to fly and what isn’t.

Every page is editable, wiki-style, so your customers can improve your idea. Every idea has comments so you can have a little conversation around an individual idea.

By looking at a list of ideas in vote order, you can decide what is going to make customers happiest. By putting it on a 3rd-party site like vagueware, you get exposure to a whole bunch of people interested in people like you – innovative developers – who might not have heard of you anywhere else.

Or maybe you can just put an idea up and tag it with a publisher or product name in the hope that somebody at HQ will see it one day and act on it.

Erick Schonfeld writes up a quick synopsis of day 2 (day 1 here if you care) of the TechCrunch 40 and I have to say, I’m a little so-so about the level of ingenuity out there.

Maybe it’s because I’m spending so much time these days reading research papers and looking at things from 5-10 years out, but I really do think that we’re lacking genuine innovation in the start-up space. Don’t get me started on how braind-dead most of the larger companies are right now with regards to innovation.

I’m curious as to where the really interesting stuff is right now. I just can’t see it past the file-sharing/twitter clones/social networking/remix sites that are out there clogging the blogosphere right now.