Ideas We’d Like to Fund

Zvi –
Great list – thanks for posting it.
Some things I’d like to see:
1. Easy and seamless text-to-audio converting device: so you could read something on the subway, then listen to it while walking home, then start reading it again at home, then listen to it while walking the dog, etc. – with the audio picking up at the place where you stopped reading and vice versa.
2. Something that built a knowledge base (expert system, wiki, etc.) for an organization out of its existing materials. I’m thinking of something that would work for a law firm, medical group practice, volunteer organization, etc. – where a lot of time is spent training new people or not being able to remember, access, or build on useful information and knowledge from previous work. This tool would take all of the existing paper and digital materials from the organization – work products, memos, manuals, emails, presentations, etc. – and turn it into a knowledgebase that was structured and classified and searchable.
3. more sophisticated tools for extracting information from images
4. for the ADD in all of us, something that worked well to keep your place in everything you get interrupted from – so that when you went back to each thing, there would be a marker there showing where you left off reading or doing it, so that you could get back into it more quickly (maybe built off of eyetracking?)
5. power tools for learning – some tools that helped get information into our brains fast. Like say that there was a specific subject you wanted to learn, this tool would help by organizing the information (electronic versions of outlines, flashcards, etc.) and then finding a way (tests or equivalent) to continuously figure out what you had mastered and what you still needed to learn, and then continuously re-organizing the learning material to focus on the parts you had not yet mastered.
6. easy ways for organizations of people without technical abilities to work collaboratively (I’m thinking of people who are intimidated even by simple tools like Basecamp) – but could benefit from solutions that created to-do lists out of their information, or connected them up remotely to work on documents simultaneously, or found best available times for their meetings, or all the other organizational needs – many of which there are good existing solutions for, but only for groups which are more technically-savvy.

“How could things get more simple than basecamp?” – of course you are right, the whole premise of Basecamp is its utter simplicity. But there is a vast population of people who shy away from any technological tool aside from the basic “adult” needs – email, Amazon, online movie tickets, plane and hotel reservations, Netflix, maybe Ebay or Yahoo list-serves – and won’t try anything else new unless it is already in widespread use among their peers. This makes group collaboration very old-fashioned and clumsy compared to what could be accomplished with tools like Basecamp, etc. What I’m thinking about is a way to get Basecamp-like results in a different way – almost an automatically-running Basecamp in the background. Like you dump all of an associations’ minutes in a special file drawer and it automatically scans them and extracts Basecamp-like to-do lists and whiteboards from it, or a tape recorder that you set up at a meeting and it automatically converts the conversation to the equivalent Basecamp results. And then it outputs the results to Word documents, which is the only format that you can count on everyone in a mixed-age group feeling comfortable with.