Well, the last week or so has seen Peter get something like seven job offers (including one from me 
). The most interesting offer of which was from Cambrian House, the stealth startup that he, erm… “discovered” a few weeks before their actual launch.
So… Cambrian House. Which, to avoid confusion with Candle Hill (the biggest city in my game world, also abbreviated as CH) has been arbitrarily assigned the internal codename of “Turtle”. Because I like turtles. And because the Cambrian Period was all about hard-shelled critters, and turtles wear their own houses. But I digress.
Cambrian House is a sort of mobocratic (they use the word “crowdsourced”) software project development/marketing engine. The basic business model is as follows:
- Random people submit ideas.
- The general public is given an opportunity to vote for their favorite ideas.
- Those ideas that do well get the green light and begin production.
- By production, I mean open source type development model.
- When the project goes live and starts pulling in money, contributors get a cut of the royalties based on the amount of time/work/creativity they put in.
All in all, I think it’s a pretty interesting idea, and I hope they do well. I’ve even posted three ideas. One of my ideas is even doing well in the polls so far.
one chat
So, you ask, what is my amazing idea that everyone loves and stuff? Well, it’s not that amazing, really, but it’s a service that I’ve never seen offered well enough to write home about. To quote the brief idea description that I submitted to the Turtle:
Instant messaging service that aggregates multiple protocols and SMS text messaging into a single, easy to configure and easy to use network.
Allow people to register their numerous IM accounts with the service. They then log in to the single network and are able to transparently communicate with any of their friends on their other contact lists, without worrying about trivial things like which chat protocol each friend might happen to use or trying to configure things like a traditional multi-protocol IM client or Jabber transports.
In other words, we’re looking at a centralized service that handles any number of IM account logins on the server side of things. The end-user would then simply log in to our service in order to get access to all of their existing accounts – without having to keep multiple sockets open or having to worry about the problems just mentioned.
I would like to see the client for this service offer a few extra special little features (including some I didn’t have room to mention in my original post):
- Server-side contact lists. – Not all protocols support them (like ICQ), some probably never will, and some that do don’t support them well (like MSN).
- Associated contacts. – Any decent multi-protocol IM client allows you to say that any number of your contacts actually point to the same person. If you’re lucky, you can even stack the contacts together so they only show up on one line of your buddy list.
- Email gateway. – For really desperate situations, you should be able to treat email addresses just like IM accounts. Click a contact for whom you’ve specified an email address and it should be able to mail them if they’re not logged in to any IM’s at the moment.
- SMS text messaging. – In addition to traditional IM and email gateways, as an added service to our customers, we should allow them to send text messages to arbitrary cell phone numbers. Ideally, this should be able to work regardless of the recipient’s phone company.
- Encryption. – Since you’re only ever talking to our server, all communication with our server should be encrypted – regardless of the chat protocol we might wind up using to talk to your friends for you. If you’re chatting with friends who are using protocols that support further encryption, you should get that too. If your friends don’t use a protocol that offers encryption then only their end of the communications will be broadcast in the clear – unless they’re using our service of course.
- Platform independance. – The client should be available for all major systems (Windows, Mac OSX, Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, PocketPC, Palm).
To vote for my idea, click the icon below and then click the “add my support” link. No obligation or registration or anything is required.
