A Betting System for Drivers

Occured to me this morning in cab while cabbie and I discussed which way to take:

There's always more than one way to go to Rome. There's also almost always a debate about which one's fastest.

So why not put our money where our mouth is and bet on it?

It would work like this:

1. I decide to take route a over route b.
2. I tell my onboard computer that I bet 5 pounds that route a is faster.
3. onboard computer tries to find cars in my vicinity that go to same place (or roughly same place)
4. onboard computer sees if any of those use different route
5. onboard computer sees if any of those are betting
6. both onboard computers transfer bets to central server
7. cars go to destination
8. at destination, first to arrive wins money

Now obviously there's some hardware needed in the cars, but I'm pretty sure that'll be around fairly soon. GPS is fairly widespread already, so all we need is inter-vehicle communications. Let's wait a year or so and see...

Or is this a stupid idea?

A "mix tape" site for MP3 play lists

So you have 5000+ songs on your iPod. But which one do you want to listen to next?

Remember the days when we would make tapes?

In those days, everybody had at least one friend who made really good tapes. For me, it was my friend Arne. Somehow, he knew the good music. And somehow, he knew what I wanted to listen to. I still have a couple of his tapes. Never mind that I don't actually own a cassette player anymore.

I would bet that he has more than one play list these days. While I usually listen to my music using "Shuffle Songs", he is probably creating play lists for different occasions or moods. For different genres or artists. For different times of the day or seasons of the year. And most likely for different people.

So where is the site that brings his play lists to me?

The way I see it, a plugin would scan my music library, then go out and search for play lists that match my songs. I would select some of them, probably based on their name and a short description provided by the creator. I would have my favourite creators in a short list, and I would probably automatically download new lists they made.

(Marketers: the site would of course have a "buy missing tracks" button)

What's in it for play list makers? Well, they would really be DJs. Create good lists, and you'll create yourself some fans...

Somehow I think there must be something like this out there already. No?

A backup tool that is completely independent of any hardware

My friend Arnd and I were thinking about this some time ago:

Backup solutions have one bottleneck - the hardware. CDs rot, tapes lose information eventually, the neccessary readers are difficult to come by. So the ideal backup solution would be completely hardware independent.

There is such a thing: the Internet.

Here's how it would work: my data would be split into pieces. Those pieces would then be transfered to the machines of some of my friends. I would keep a .torrent file (for example in an email saved on GMail). With that torrent file I could download all of my data using a standard BitTorrent client.

For added security, I would advise the tool to store some of my data more than once.

Now what if one of my friends buys a new machine or loses his disk? Well, as soon as his new machine would be back online, the data would be retransfered to his disk automatically. And if he chooses not to join the group again, my data would be stored somewhere else.

I would obviously donate a chunk of my disk to other people in my group.

There are some solutions out there that work like this, but not free, and not using BitTorrent for the restore process.