Ideas for communities we might serve (on London server):

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Idea for online service: Meta-search: For example, department stores:
Get list of department stores, select just one to search first. If no
match then allowed to search two more, then four more, etc. until item
found. This way avoids wasting time searching hundreds of stores for
common items that have many hits at each store, but supports
multi-store search for rare items.

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- Haters of junk ads (e-mail, snail-mail, telemarketing on phone),
with FAX machines near sources of spam (ADVO's customers, ISPs, actual
scammers, etc.)
- People wishing to perform piecework for pay online and people
wishing to hire them, also barter services in lieu of money. Have
abstract description of task in public view for allowing bidding for
least amount of time required, then upon acceptance of a bid the
worker clicks on button to download specific task requirements and the
clock starts then, and the worker must complete the task and upload
the results (or post results in secret place on private Web site and
upload URL to it), and then the clock ends, and a check is made
whether the worker completed the task within the bid time. If so,
he/she is paid for the *full* time that was bid, not just the time
actually used, so finishing early doesn't get penalized.
- Community of people who don't want to receive advertisements in
snail-mail or e-mail, to pool complaints against whoever is sending
them, to send those complaints via FAX from anywhere local to there.
Send complaints about all old e-mail spam to CTW address, but include
warning that any spam we received after such-and-such date will be
reported to their FAX machine instead, and list that FAX# in the
complaint. Also send formletter to FAX machine alerting them to the
many complaints to CTW address, listing menu of them, repeating the
warning that full text of spam, instead of just the menu, will be
FAXed if any spam is received after this date.
- Unified-menu mail&news system combining multiple e-mail accounts,
multiple threads in multiple newsgroups, multiple Yahoo! Groups etc.,
and with prioritization to show most urgent items most prominently and
beep alert when anything more urgent than before shows up.
- Specific auto-tracker for followups in newsgroups.
- Community of people collecting "prior art" for various kinds of
problems (which the art solves in various ways) and organizing the
references in tidy form to make it easy for the US Patent Office and
also for inventors to use it for efficient software patent searches.
- Host JSP for me.

- Tracker for updates such as (1) newsgroup followups (2) Yahoo! Groups
new messages (3) new e-mail (4) Wiki edits, etc. with standard way to
send event across net to where all a user's alerts are pooled together
and prioritized for presentation in toplevel menu with most urgent at
top, also live bleep alerts whenever a new event occurs with
significantly higher priority than anything already alerted and higher
than threshold.


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