Mobile White Labeled News App

Another business idea I won't be pursuing.

Mobile White Labeled News App

Site that allows you to pull in numerous feeds, select on an article basis which you want, output a feed with those articles, your blog posts, with your own logo, feed description and code for inserting ads.

1. Register
2. Select feeds
3. Select articles from feeds that you want published
4. Your own blog content is in as well
5. Select your logo graphic and descriptive text and ad code
6. Output is App for Android/iPhone made from template

Twitter workflow for large organization

I have tons of business ideas. This was one I had that I knew I'd need help on, and I didn't get an excited response about. If you'd like to use it, feel free.

Organizations that want to participate on Twitter do not always have one person who should craft and send out all tweets.

-multiple people/departments might want to send messages out, possibly through one account
-there may be a need for approval from managers or PR or legal
-companies need a way of tracking who authored and who approved each message

No Twitter clients provide a workflow approval of this sort. Hootsuite allows users to post to other Twitter accounts if you authorize, but there's no approval process. It's not much different from giving your password out to a bunch of people.

Cotweet also allows multiple users to use one Twitter account.


The solution:
A site where users will see a Twitter accounts tweets (from friends or searches). Users can respond on the site or post original content to be sent out via Twitter, optionally scheduling when it should post. Every post would go through an approval workflow tailored for that user. Every tweet would get signoff from all necessary people and there would be a paper trail.

If there are messages that need approval by you (you're a manager, attorney, etc) you'll be notified by email.

If your message needs editing (as decided by manager, attorney, etc) you'll be notified.

There would be many possible views of streams based on searches, autotagging, hashes, users, etc.

This would be a backend and a web front end. Making other front ends (iphone, Flash, Air, etc.) would not require redoing all the functionality.

Next steps:
Add approval for posts to other sites.
Add preview/approval for pages hosted on 3rd party sites (Facebook pages, Twitter user pages, etc).


Who pays for this:
This could be sold in a number of ways:
1. One site that various companies pay a license for.
2. One site with a subdomain for each company (http://companyname.thesite.com)
3. We custom install and configure this for individual companies and support them. They run their own Twitter approval system, in other words.
4. License this to ad agencies and PR firms for them to use with their clients in one of the methods above, meaning either they'd:
-have all their clients go through their site (http://www.wk.com/twittermanager)
-they have subdomains for each of their clients (http://nike.wk.com)
-they sell custom installations and we handle the integration and management under their name

Unions and Class

The Wisconsin collective bargaining protests have raised awareness not only of unions, it seems, but also of possible class differences.

Everyone seems to think they are part of the middle class, regardless of their wealth. Everyone thinks they have rights that should be protected, and of course they're not taking more from society than they should. Along with this is the idea that someone else - whether it's the 500 richest people in America or corporations or somebody has too much of a piece of the pie.

I think unions serve a purpose, but I have my issues with them, too. They do seem to strangle businesses. And they seem to force options on people, which runs contrary to my beliefs about freedom. But perhaps most of all, it puts people into a class, and that I object to greatly.

I don't like people thinking they are better than others by birth or wealth or education. I also don't want people thinking they are lesser. No one is in a working caste, incapable of being in 'management' or running their own business. Increasingly as work is not a lifelong assignment but on contracts it seems to be anachronistic. I'm not proposing unions should be broken, but I'm questioning the logic of the arguments that say they are essential, or beneficial.

In Las Vegas it's illegal to win at gambling

The laws regarding gambling, both the 'real' laws and those apparently allowed established and carried out by casinos themselves, have often intrigued people and been the subject of movies. While it's understandable that you're not allowed to tamper with machinery or have teams of people in a game communicating information about the game, other things that seem astounding to me are rules against counting cards and similar winning strategies.

Gambling is risk with money, and favoring the house seems wrong. I'm no gambler, as you may have guessed. The idea of almost certainly losing my money doesn't give me any sense of well being. Quite the opposite. But if I were a gambler, I think I'd want the freedom to win. That part is fun, isn't it?

In this recent new article, 2 men were arrested for figuring out some video poker machines had a bug in them, and without tampering with anything, they were able to exploit that.

"John Kane, 52, of Las Vegas, and Andre Nestor, 39, of western Pennsylvania, allegedly pulled the caper in Las Vegas casinos over six weeks in the Spring of 2009. According to a criminal complaint filed in Las Vegas (PDF) on Monday, the men would make small bets over and over again until finally winning a hand, then use a special button sequence to change the credits to a higher denomination and "access the previous winning hand of cards," triggering a jackpot."

They're accused of conspiracy to commit computer fraud. To bottom line this, because they found a way to win with their advantage they have broken some law. If the casino has advantages of some sort by distracting or disorienting you, this is apparently allowed. Let's assume this world isn't entirely crazy and owned by casinos and they at some point are cleared of those charges. By that point the exploit will be cleaned up and these guys will be banned from every casino for life for being smart enough that they win.

US Dept of Ed budget equal to more than $2100 per kid under 18

According to The US Dept of Ed's Budget Office website  they have a budget of roughly $160 billion ($63.7 billion plus $96.8 billion). According to the US Census Bureau there are about 75 million kids under 18 in the US. That means that the US Dept of Ed budget is equal to more than $2100 per kid under 18.

As the US Dept of Ed says themselves on their site "...it is important to point out that education in America is primarily a State and local responsibility." So instead of them taxing all that money away from people, and spending money on figuring out how to redistribute it from far off in Washington, and making local schools jump through hoops to get that money, why not either not tax people for it, or give it back as vouchers so people can afford to send their kids to good schools? Instead of sacrificing children in hopes of eventually fixing schools allow parents to right away find a school that meets their kids needs.

Taxing people on a Federal and State (and possibly local) level for schools and then only providing money to public schools makes for a system that favors the wealthy, who can afford to send their children to private schools or move if need be. Poorer people are forced to keep their kids in worse schools while their money is put toward improving schools in ways their kids probably won't be around to benefit from.

The current public school system benefits beareaucrats and union members at the expense of students and poor parents. It assumes people potentially thousands of miles away know what your kids need better than you. And with their redistribution of your tax money, they exert influence, too. They take your money and then graciously give it back with conditions.

The auto industry is so predictable and boring and linear it almost seems like a cartel at times.

The auto industry is so predictable and boring and linear it almost seems like a cartel at times.


I wish cars were just made more reliable, rather than have new fancy features. I don't need wifi, satellite radio, automatically adjusting temperature controlled seats. I don't even want power windows. Give me the crank thing for windows so it doesn't break. Give me space for an actual tire, not a donut.

Don't come out with boring looking cars that look different from the boring looking cars of previous years. Might as well go full steam ahead for the sake of cheapness and don't change the design at all for 25 years at a time, and paint them all the same color. Would sure makes parts cheap. Or don't even have a body. Some models of Lotus and other cars are stock engines &/or frames from a manufacturer like Toyota and custom bodies. That way the cost of the functional parts would be lower and people could customize however they'd like. More of a motorcycle feel to it, I think. I don't mean the Scion model where you can choose rims and bumpers. Not even close.







Having standardized parts might mean that you could easily get books that would document how to fix things. I'm not mechanically inclined, so maybe this is just me, but I find those Chilton books very confusing, particularly when they show you a photo and it may have a ton of differences from what you have based on different years and models.  Here's a crazy thought, you could even put labels on parts in the car, so if I look under the hood I'd see what's the head gasket and what the serpentine belt and what not are.

I know it seems hugely controversial for some reason to have a car that can get all it's power from an outlet. But how about if I could just plug my car in so that my regular battery could be fully charged every morning.

And if a car were standardized, I think mods to it that didn't just apply to the exterior or aesthetic elements would be easier to do and more importantly, to repeat. This might allow people to switch out how their car gets its power, for instance. Why is it anyone's business how you power your car? I don't think we need some national referendum if you want to make your car powered by charcoal and you can car-b-que while you drive. And if there was some consistency in cars, better documentation, tons of cheap parts, this would be possible. Encourage dealerships to do it, if you want to try to keep it in the family.

There are a million computers in cars now? How about a USB cord so I could plug it into a laptop, run some diagnostic program, and I could be told what's not working properly?

An Alternative to our current US tax system?

I don't think I'm alone in thinking the US tax system seems overly complicated. It doesn't look like it really works. It discourages savings, makes running a business too complicated for some to consider, seems to favor those who can trick the system, and it requires an army of people in the IRS as well as a comparably large army of accountants.

"The President requested $12.6 billion to fund IRS's fiscal year (FY) 2011 operations, including $5.8 billion for enforcement, $4.1 billion for operations support, and $2.3 billion for taxpayer services." - U.S. Government Accountability Office

There have been a lot of ideas for simplifying the tax system. Criticisms are typically that they wouldn't generate enough revenue, they'd tax the poor unreasonably, or they too would be overly complicated.

The X Tax: The Progressive Consumption Tax America Needs? looks like a well thought out, interesting alternative that keeps these criticisms in mind. I'd be interested in hearing what others think of it.


"Good tax policy should be pro-growth, simple, and fair. An income tax, unlike a consumption tax, penalizes saving, which undermines economic growth and introduces complexity. An income tax is often thought to be fairer than a consumption tax, however, because it taxes saving, which is disproportionately done by higher-income individuals. In reality, however, a consumption tax can be designed to be as progressive as the current income tax. The Bradford X tax offers an attractive, if little-known, form of progressive consumption taxation."
- December 2008