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.