The Dominic System

I recently read (skimmed) a book called “Moonwalking with Einstein” by Joshua Foer which caused me to confront a problem I have. I suck at remembering “things”. Things like my visa number, birthdays, appointments, directions or 2000+ digits of random numbers. In "Moonwalking with Einstein" Josh tells the story about his journey to becoming the 2006 USA Memory champion. By learning a series of mnemonic techniques he was able to, among many other things, memorize the exact order of a shuffled deck of cards in under two minutes. As it turns out, you don’t need an astronomical IQ to pull off this feat; you just need an instruction book and some free time (or a lack of motivation to do all the real work you have to do). The way it works to remember a bank card number (using the Dominic System) for example is as follows:

Each number from 0 – 9 has a letter associated with it, and for large numbers, letters are grouped in pairs. My old bank number is 6018871025738825 and encoded it would read SO AH HG AO BE GC HH BE. In order to remember this, you create a story where each pair of letters represents a memorable (does not need to be memorable in a positive way) person that plays a role in the plot. The point is to create the most ridiculous and thus memorable story so it is easy to recall. My bank card story goes as follows:

“I walk into my office holding my bank card and am greeted by Shaquille O’Neal with a moustache dressed in a german WWII uniform (hint: Adolf Hitler) who leads me to the board room where Hermione Granger is dancing to Steve AOki. Over the music I hear fighting in the next room and see Bruce lEe fighting George Clooney while Hugh Hefner is chanting “Bruce lEe!” repeatedly.”

This may seem way too complicated for everyday use, but as you start training your mind, the associations eventually become as automatic like a trained musician reading sheet music... or so I’m told.

My favourite TED talks - part 1

For a year now, I've been completely obsessed with TED.com. For a while I was content with just enjoying the videos myself, but recently I've been trying to share the magic with others as well. Hence this post. Here is the first part of a list of my favourite TED talks (in no particular order):

Craig Venter creating (synthetic) life. No big deal or anything.

David Deutsch on our place in the cosmos. This man just knows how to speak.

Hans Rosling and his statistics magic. There are several TED talks by Hans Rosling. This was the first one I saw by him and really gave me some perspective on global development.

Theo Jansen building beach "creatures". I can't really explain what makes this talk great, but it blew my mind.

Sixth Sense Technology. This talk aired in 2009. Why on earth can I not buy one of these at Best Buy yet?

Growing Organs. This one is a bit slow in the beginning, but well worth it once it shows you living heart cells being printed from a standard desktop printer (around 11 minutes in).

Looking Inside the Brain. I wonder about the potential of this technology. Perhaps there are certain things better left alone?

Better Animations. Any video game fan (and normal people as well, of course) will will enjoy this talk.

Amazing Inventions. The title says it all. This guy actually invented a device that allows you to "aim" sound. It will be interesting to see what this does to the headphone industry.

Silk. Who would've thought silk was this cool!

Feel free to suggest any talks I may have missed, but know that there will be many more parts to this post.

Business Idea #3 - OnMyTab

 
This is an idea I (very informally) presented to the Queen's Entrepreneurship Club (QEC) in the spring of 2011. I got mostly positive feedback, though there were a lot of concerns regarding whether or not anyone would ever use this thing. Please note that the idea was still in the concept stage and with the launch of lemon.com is likely no longer viable.

Need:

To properly organize and manage personal and shared expenses and more specifically dealing with paper receipts and informal IOU's among friends, roommates, coworkers etc...

Solution:

OnMyTab - a smartphone application to manage your "tabs" (a collection of transactions between you and other parties). For example, say you are having dinner with two financially constrained friends (perhaps “Occupy Baystreet” protestors?) and you end up paying for the bill with a promise of being paid back immediately upon a redistribution of wealth in Canada. In this situation, you would open your OnMyTab application on your phone and snap a picture of the receipt. You can then tag the meals on the receipt (like you would tag a Facebook picture) that belong to your friends and label the amount that they owe. This would then create a tab for your friends in which you can track the balances oh who owes (who you owe), with photo evidence. The key to this working out in my mind is to make it possible to capture these transactions with as few keystrokes as possible, so I envisioned the steps as following:

1. Open the application and take a photo of the receipt (or whatever else captures the essence of the transaction)
2. Tag the receipt with your friends – if they are in your contacts on your phone, it will automatically create their “tabs” and populate them with the balance owed once they are tagged
3. (Optional) Write a short description for the transaction, set a reminder for when you would like to collect this money, put it into a category (in this case “meals”)

Once the tab is set up, you can link to your paypal account (or another payment system) and request/send payment. 

Competitors:

Expensify – Allows you to take pictures of receipts and manage your expenses – aimed at professionals who have to submit expense reports.

Niggle It – Allows you to take pictures of receipts, warranties and contracts and manage these – targeted at consumers.
Lemon.com – Allows you to take pictures of receipts (uses OCR to automatically identify the content) and manage these – targeted at consumers.
PayItSquare – allows you to create a bill, share it with whomever and accept payment.

At the time I was putting this idea together, none of the companies advertized the ability to split bills or share them with friends. You would have to use one service to keep track (such as Niggle It), and one service to split the bills/collect the money (such as PayItSquare). The result to me looked like using MS Word and a Calculator to recreate the experience of using MS Excel, leaving a nice niche for OnMyTab.

Some of the applications include:
-          Splitting rent and housing related costs with roommates
-          Splitting travel costs with fellow travellers
-          Keeping track of personal expenses

Here are some additional pictures to illustrate the concept (from a quick powerpoint I threw together):
Link

Business Idea #2 – Electronic Marking

Need:

To eliminate the need of having to print out assignments in order to have them marked. I.e. saving the rain forest.

Solution:

An app that allows teachers/instructors to “write” (with a stylus) comments onto an electronic version of a document on a tablet or PC. Once the document has been fully marked up, you assign a grade and upload the document to a server where students can access their work from anywhere. This eliminates the need for drop boxes and eliminates the risk of losing a marked document.

Additional Potential Features:

• Input recognition – i.e. when someone writes -1 or -2 it will start subtracting those points from 100
• Real-time tracking of performance in any one course

Potential Business Models:

• Selling the hardware
• Leasing out the hardware
• Charging a monthly fee to license the software
• Charging per document volume
• Charging per megabyte of storage
• Charging per number of students enrolled

Business Idea #1 - Surf inconspicuously

Need:
To surf the internet/procrastinate in places where this is generally frowned upon (work, library) without being obvious about it.

Solution:
A website (like a proxy) which takes content from popular web destinations e.g. reddit.com, nhl.com etc… and displays these in text (images will be shown as hyperlinks) formatted as a research report, or some other official looking document. Alternately, it could also keep the same layout, but remove the images, remove any colour and make the font uniform.

Additional Potential Features:

• Customizable profile that allows you to determine what the sites will look like e.g. what text appears in the title bar, whether images will be shown etc…
• Taking the layout from a site related to what you are doing e.g. CapitalIQ, and applying the CapitalIQ fonts, colours etc… to the site you actually want to look at.

Business Model:
There could be a variety of business models including

• Google text ads
• A premium version with additional settings that adapt to your workplace
• Promoted sites