Whose Faulty Vision

Idea File: “Timesourcing” Business Model

Idea File: Anyone who has ever had any kind of wire-based service (Cable TV, DSL, power, etc) knows that sometimes there’s a big outage. What’s your first instinct when there’s a big outage? Call the company to see what’s up. But everyone’s first instinct is to call the company to see what’s up, so there’s a massive peak in traffic, and you end up waiting on hold for an hour in order to have a two-minute conversation with a tech.

The problem here is, if the company paid enough people to keep the hold times reasonable during these sudden spikes, then most of those people would be sitting around doing nothing most of the time, and they’d lose a lot of money.

Meanwhile, on the flip side, there are probably a lot of people sitting around at home who wouldn’t mind an opportunity to make a little extra cash without leaving home.

So here’s the idea. A “timesourcing” company that would hire a bunch of people to fill in for these temporary spikes. The way it would work if you’re an employee is, when you’re available (which is to say, near your phone and near your computer), you log in to the timesourcing company’s website and notify it that you’re available. When a company needed you, you’d get a quick automated call letting you know that you were now “on the job”. A script would automatically pop up on your computer, showing you what to say on the phone in response to customer queries. You’d handle only very basic stuff (like “yes, there’s an outage in your area, we expect to have it cleared in 2 hours” or “reboot your modem and try again”), and refer anything beyond that to the company’s real employees. You’d be paid only for the time you spent “on the job”, but hey, you were just sitting around watching TV during that time anyway.

The way it would work if you’re a large company is, you’d pay the timesourcing company a monthly retainer, and set up your phone system so that when the average hold time went above a certain line, the timesourcing company would automatically start activating employees until the average hold time went back below that line. Then your phone system would start handing off calls to the timesourced employees. Your company would provide the scripts that the timesourced employees would follow. That way, you could satisfy your customers for a much lower cost than all of those employees would cost to hire on full-time.

Isn’t that a great idea? Now, granted, a lot of the basic stuff like “yes, there’s an outage in your area” could be handled by completely automated systems, but the fact is, a lot of people hate to talk to those things, and simply won’t listen to what they say until it’s repeated by a real human. So this would fill that gap.

If anyone out there reads this and actually starts such a company, I hope you’ll give me a chunk of the proceeds, for my brilliant idea.

Idea File: Outlook (The Movie)

Idea File: A man discovers that his computer’s calendar software, instead of showing what he has scheduled, is showing him what’s really going to happen. (9:30: Get caught by a talkative co-worker who wants to discuss her weekend. 9:45: Finally arrive at the meeting you were supposed to be in at 9:30. That sort of thing.)

But when the calendar ends with a cryptic final appointment, and refuses to display any appointments after that date, the man has to figure out what’s going to happen, and change it.

Idea File: Misguided Reviews

You know what would be funny? Writing reviews of movies as though you thought they were in a completely different genre than they actually are. Like reviewing “Iron Man” as a romantic comedy. I think there could be a lot of comedy mileage in that.

You know, kind of like those re-edited trailers you see online occasionally, that portray the movie as being in a different genre. “The Shining” as a Nora Ephron-style comedy, that sort of thing.

Idea File: Social Network Rom-com

Idea File: A romantic comedy built around social networking. I don’t have a plot, or characters, or a clever situation, or anything, but I do have a bang-up title:

“It’s Complicated.”

Isn’t that great? If someone in Hollywood isn’t working on a rom-com with that title yet, they should be.

Idea File: Blackmailed Celeb

This is another one of those ones that’s so obvious that it’s probably been done already, but I figured I’d throw it out there anyway.

A young starlet has risen to fame, thanks in part to scandalous rumors about her in the tabloids. She’s blackmailed by someone who’s found out that, not only is she arranging to have the rumors planted herself, but they’re all false–she actually leads a completely modest life, but she doesn’t want anyone to find out or it’ll wreck her career.

Idea File: The Schoolyard Album

This one’s inspired by a Simpsons episode I saw last night, that had Robert Goulet singing the “Jingle Bells, Batman Smells” song…wouldn’t it be cool to have an album of real musicians doing covers of schoolyard songs? I would totally buy that. I already have (well, ripped to my computer, don’t actually own) an album of bands doing covers of Saturday morning cartoon theme songs, but this would be even better.

Idea File: “Parents are Coming” card game

I came up with this great idea for a card game while sitting in a meeting this morning.

The premise is, the players are all college students or twentysomethings who are living together. Their parents are all coming for a visit at the same time, and they’re frantically trying to hide everything they don’t want them to see–porn, drug stuff, whatever. Trouble is, there are only so many places to hide things, and everyone has stuff they want to hide…

There’s no board. The hiding places are a set of cards, shuffled and placed in a grid face down, like “concentration.” Each hiding place has a room that it’s in (bedroom, bathroom, kitchen or “other”), and a size from 1 to 10. Each player is given a stack of 10 object cards, which they turn over one at a time. Each object has two rooms it can be hidden in, and a size from 1 to 5. Each hiding place can hold up to its size, so in a hiding place of size 8 (that’s a big one, like “under the bed”), you could put a size 5, a size 2 and a size 1 object. But each player can only put one object in any given place.

Normally the hiding places are all face down, and you turn over one place at a time to look at it and decide if you want to hide something there. But once you’ve hidden something in a place, it gets turned face up, so other players can easily see if there’s room there to hide more things.

Sounds pretty simplistic, right? Here’s the cool part–there are no turns. Everyone’s playing all the time. So there’s a frantic scramble for the best hiding places, peering under cards, trying to figure out where the best place to put your stuff is. For instance, if you have a small object you need to hide, and you find a big hiding place, you may want to remember where it is and save it, because if you hide your small object there then other players can use the remaining space for their big objects, and you’ve helped them out.

A round ends when the first player runs out of things to hide. At that point, the parents show up, and each player who still has cards remaining scores humiliation points equal to the total size of the remaining objects. After a pre-determined number of rounds, the player with the lowest score wins.

I think it’ll be fast-paced, use some memory and a little bit of strategy, and should be fun.