the Wikipedia of Ideas

Hello all,

Being frustrated as an entrepreneur that I don't have any real developing skills - programming, front-end, UI, or UX, and a little homesick, last weekend I decided to do something spontaneous - fly out to Shanghai and participate in Startup Weekend. I didn't tell anyone and just dipped out for this 3 day weekend to work on this side project idea I've had.

Startup Weekend is a little 3 day weekend competition where people pitch their ideas, organize teams, and possibly gain media exposure and/or seed investment. I flew out there to Shanghai to pitch my idea.

So here was my pitch:

"What's the most resilient parasite? A virus? a bacterium? an intestinal worm?

An idea. A single idea from the human mind can build cities. An idea can transform the world, and rewrite the rules."

This quote from the movie Inception provides a compelling description of the power of ideas.

The problem is, people don't share ideas. Why? Because they think they have the next billion-dollar idea and that someone will steal it from them. But truth is, ideas are worthless without proper execution -- and that requires competence and collaboration. Ideas are meant to be shared so they can grow and mature to provide clearer direction.

So IdeaHub (IdeaTank, IdeaForge or whatever) bridges the gap between Wikipedia and TED, two successful sharing technologies. People go to Wikipedia to learn how things came to be; people go to TED to gain insights and learn about the possibilities. And then people will go to IdeaHub to turn ideas into reality, by identifying societal and industry issues, collaborating with others and coming up with innovative solutions, and creating a community that connects competent people to execute on
them.

An ambitious project I know, which is why (stating my needs) I need two developers, a designer, and possibly a marketing specialist.

I want to end with this quote: "Competition leads to incremental growth; collaboration leads to exponential growth" and I think that's what this world needs: exponential growth through collaboration to improve the human experience and create a sustainable and brighter
future for the world. Thank you.
(end pitch)

It was very ambiguous, I know... and we didn't work on it because it was too ambiguous to begin with. BUT it was well received, with a lot of follow-up interactions when we were forming teams. And there's also a lot of douche bag international entrepreneurs who think they're the ****, but they have no charisma or effective people skills.

The thing that many entrepreneurs aren't good at is effectively communicating their ideas with enthusiasm to persuade and inspire others to work with them and help create their vision of the future. So I went to Shanghai's Startup Weekend to fail fast, learn from others, and network. At the event, we had this badass programmer from Japan who can build a site like Facebook in a day -- he's written 2 books on programming and made his own ERP software to help manage business systems.

Summary of the event:

We ended up building a product called "Goal Circles" which is a social collaborative platform in which you can create and share goals, as well as the steps leading up to those goals (called "sets of disciplines"). Those sets of disciplines were divided into daily, weekly, and monthly disciplines. For example, if your goal was to "eat healthy" or lose weight, you could share that with your friends (to keep each other accountable) and the steps would probably include for daily like "drink 1 cup of water 8x daily," "eat salad," "take multivitamin" and it would turn it into a simple regenrating daily checklist on your smartphone so that it's always with you when you complete those simple tasks, thus notifying and reminding (and hopefully motivating) your friends to do the same.

I'm all about sharing and collaboration, and I'll be the first to admit my lack of competence in the developing side. Thus, I would like to work with the people who can execute who are passionate to help the world. Anyone can "steal" these ideas, if they're really inspired, or hopefully, make a better one.

But one thing I've learned, an idea is worthless without proper execution and that requires a competent team and passion. I'll gladly share any wireframes, UI screenshots, etc. with anyone who is interested, and hopefully passionate about helping people help themselves.

-Steve