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dreams, ideas, projects yet to be

I made a huge list of ideas, projects, and dreams yet to be implemented if ever.  Here's a beginning list.  I hope this list inspires some creativity and maybe some conversation on how to implement:

  1. Vertical Village.  Instead of mowing down farmland and forests to make way for single family homes, let's try piling everyone on top of each other in vertical villages.  Basically replace these vast spreads of cookiecutter houses and replace them with one or two luxury condo high rise towers and keep the all the extra space for farmland and gardens and parks.  Imagine having all the conveniences of living in downtown with a rural landscape.
  2. Christian Commune with high-tech community service.  I'm almost living this now with YWAM.  They are a great tight knit Christian community but I haven't had access to the really cool mercy ministry projects related to economic development.
  3. Group investing/Investor cooperative.  I tried this back in 2005 but didn't get much off the ground.  The basic idea is get a bunch of friends together and buy investment properties or businesses that have good rates of return.
  4. Cell phones with embedded VOIP, SIP and voice chat capabilities.   We should all have by now a phone that can route calls over the internet when we are near a wireless router.  It's a no brainer, but I haven't seen any implementations yet.
  5. Online database of videos of Christians sharing their story of how they became Christian. 
  6. "The Green Bear".  A novel not written by Darian Hickman-  a thriller pseudo science fiction story about what happens when computers start replacing jobs way faster than they create jobs.  People start selling off homes and moving in with other families, a very distinct recession for the middle class ensues.  Eventually someone catches on and forms a group to purchase investment properties.
  7. "Mach Velli"-  The brutally honest politician.  Probably just a Saturday Night Live skit, about what would happen if politicians were just overwhelming honest about their motivations for making things happen.
  8. Googleopoly.  Like Monopoly except all the properties are big internet companies that would be good to swallow up to create an internet monopoly.
  9. Automated Education Software for learning languages.  Using some of the algorithms and techniques I learned back at Hopkins, create a proxy server that turns any web page into a quiz where people could practice language skills like choosing the prepositions or pronouns to use.
  10. Automated translation guide using news articles.  Build some smart software that matches up articles in different languages that are talking about the same event.  Then use these articles to create a rough translation guide between the two languages.
  11. Pick a city in Brasil and implement all the relevant business models that are listed in Ashoka.org
  12. Computer with nonvisual interface for use while driving.  Check email using a talking computer, browse sound files too.  This idea was inspired by Jeff Watkins
  13. Dream: Invest $625000 in mutual funds and live off it.
  14. Build an online service that makes it ridiculously easy to rent stuff out.  Kinda like the ebay of rental management.  Potential markets: car rentals, lawn gear, computer rentals, apartment rentals.
  15. SimVillage for rich people except it's not Sim.  Make a website where people can pick a village in some remote poverty stricken country to develop and setup microcredit programs, or sustainable development, renewable energy sources like solar or biodiesel.  Let them watch via webcams how the village is prospering. 
  16. Build smart software for renovating ugly websites. Crawl web find ugly sites and offer them an upgraded version. Should also offer blogger templates.
  17. WIKI version of Rosetta Stone.  Create an online forum of picture dictionaries with tests.
  18. Port Rosetta Stone to PDA.
  19. Open source versions of the credit bureau.  Create a nonprofit cooperative for managing credit history information.  Create api for the database to allow for custom weigtings of different events within the persons history.
  20. Organize a church within the game the SIMS or some other online world.

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