While working with several startups I've realized it would be useful to have a community of alpha testers who are eager to secretly test your new app and give you feedback before anyone else lays eyes on it... even before you stealthily launch your private beta.  This would also be useful in cases where you think you've fixed that annoying bug and you push to the Apple app store, only to realize a a week later when the app is approved that the bug is not fixed.

But what would motivate people to join this community?  How about only allow people to join if they also are building an app that they needed someone to test?  It would be an alpha tester "dating" site... "I'll test yours if you test mine"  This would also ensure that all members are savvy enough to be able to navigate tools like TestFlight.

I don't want another Rate My Startup site.  I want a community of hard core alpha testers.  Please email me the URL when you are ready for me to secretly alpha test it.

I was fortunate to be able to join a bunch of great people (too many to name) this week on the GeeksOnaPlane trip. We visited Brazil, Chile and Argentina. Our mission was to meet with entrepreneurs, investors and government officials to learn a little bit about their tech startup culture and to share a little of ours.

I feel that I understand what's going on in Brazil much better than I do Chile, so I am going to just cover Brazil in this post (I was tired after going non-stop for 4 days in Brazil and unfortunately I did not join the group in Argentina so that I could return to the US for a friend's wedding. Hopefully someone else will write a similar post on Chile and Argentina.)

Here is what I observed:

Brazil
- the country recently overcame a period of hyper inflation and their currency is now stable
- taxes are high and complex, but also stable
- nobody thinks the govt will lower taxes any time soon to spur more business growth
- they have a rapidly growing middle class (consumers!) = opportunity
- Sao Paulo is the tech & business hub
- Rio de Janeiro wants to be the tech & business hub
- Rio is a beautiful city but businesses moved to Sao Paulo over the past 30 years due to drug related crime
- Rio is aggressively cleaning up it's image by pushing the drug gangs out, closing and remediating their environmental catastrophe of a landfill (see film "Waste Land"), and building infrastructure to host the upcoming World Cup and 2016 Olympics

Brazil's Startup Scene
- most startups I met are creating consumer internet businesses that copy successful US business models
- most are first time entrepreneurs, because until recently there wasn't an appetite for engineers to take risk relative to getting a high paying govt job; this is changing because of the opportunity presented by the growing number of middle class consumers
- Brazilian VCs suck; they make investments to grow established businesses rather than investing in the riskier early stage companies that are innovating
- entrepreneurs are inexperienced and lack guidance when it comes to raising money. VCs rape entrepreneurs by taking huge equity stakes for a small investment (I heard one case of a guy giving up 80% of his company for a couple hundred thousand dollars!)
- entrepreneurs don't collaborate with each other; again due to lack of experience they don't understand the value of the feedback they would get from an open culture where ideas and data are shared, rather than being stealthy
- there are very few successful entrepreneurs advising and founding new startups; I think this is because there aren't many exits and the entrepreneurs that get acquired are staying with their companies long  afterward
- big established companies don't think they can be disrupted by startups. They believe that startups should and will just go after new opportunities rather than reinvent old industries using technology. I guess a big disruption has never happened there before. They're in for a shocker.

Brazilian consumers have money to spend and their culture is similar to the US. There will be a land grab this decade to bring the types of products and services that we have in the US to Brazil. Local entrepreneurs are racing for it, but could really use our help. They need our experience and our money. I mentioned to the organization that hosted part of our trip, Brazil Innovators, that they need to get an entrepreneur exchange program going. I hope they do. They should recruit Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to come to Brazil for 6 months after they sell their company and before they start their next one, and send some Brazilians to work in Silicon Valley. The knowledge transfer that would occur from such a program would be tremendous and I bet some folks would stay. Startups cofounded by an experienced Silicon Valley entrepreneur plus a local Brazilian entrepreneur would crush it down there right now.

Great thread on Quora about how to programmatically parse a sentence
and determine if it is appropriate to respond with "That's what she
said"... http://b.qr.ae/jU5woX

Someone should build a speech-to-text iPhone app that you can talk
into, which answers with "That's what she said" when it hears one of
these sentences. Build it. You'd make millions! Or not.

People often discover new music from their friends. I tell people
about new bands all the time, so I want to publish my iTunes library
to the web and let my friends buy songs from me, rather than from
Apple. And I don't want any of the money... I want it all to go to
the artist.

I imagine there is a creative legal way to do this. There is
definitely a technical way...

- install a light weight agent that monitors my itunes folder and
pushes the following data to the server: list of songs, playlists and
meta data like number of Plays and Last Played.

- I'd be given a friendly URL like "http://mymusic.com/billboebel" and
people can "Friend" me, just like on Facebook.

- my page would let people sort by "recently added", "most played",
"recently played", etc.

- people can buy any of the songs I own and the website would securely
handle their payment and then would act as a middle man to let the
buyer download the song directly from my computer (or queue it for
download later if I'm currently offline). If the song's file is DRM
protected, a non-DRM version of the file would be created by the agent
on my computer using my credentials that are stored in itunes.

- the website would need to take a cut of the proceeds to handle
operating cost, but the rest of the money would go to the artist.

- the website could even let artists set their own price for songs.

- the sound quality would vary from seller to seller, but since the
sale takes place between friends, I'm sure the friends can work it out
if the buyer is unhappy with the quality.

Someone should package together a cheap iPhone microphone accessory
and iPhone app for amplifying the sound, and target it at pregnant
woman to listen to their unborn baby's heartbeat. I bet every
pregnant mom who owns an iPhone would fork out $50 for the $2 piece of
hardware.

In 2011, when the second generation iPads are released, my first gen
iPad is immediately going on eBay. I want the new shiny one with a
camera for video conferencing! I'm not alone.

It is a safe bet to assume that over the next couple years, millions
of used iPads will hit secondary markets. Today's devices will likely
be too slow to run iOS5, but they will still have enough compute power
for many great uses. How about repurposing these hardware devices
with new software that serves a single purpose in an elegant way...
such interactive restaurant menus? or upgrade those audio devices
that old people rent at museums? or a kick-ass kids toy? or a better
remote for a home control system?

Start thinking about how to disrupt a market with a special purposed
hardware device. All you will need to write is the software. You
will be able to buy "magical and revolutionary" hardware at an
"unbelievable price" soon.

Can someone make it so that if I press an elevator button for the wrong floor I can press it a second time and it cancels that floor?  You can probably invent an hack to the standard elevator electronics that does this.  Then sell it to every hotel and office building in the world.  Thanks.

For the past 17 months, I've been taking photos on my phone of my son (born last June) and emailing them to my family.  They love this and the list of recipients has started to get big, so a few months ago I created a group mailing list.   My son's great-grandfather, however, is 93 years old and not a very savvy email user.  Emailing him photos isn't very effective.  So 2 weeks ago I logged into his email account and downloaded the 200+ photos I've sent him and got them printed and mailed to him, and he was ecstatic to receive them in the mail as a surprise.
I want to be able to send great-grandpa printed photos in the mail in real time from my phone.  I don't want to have to take any additional steps beyond sending the photo to my family email list... I just want to add a third-party photo printing service as a recipient to the email list and have the photos automatically printed and mailed to him.

I was going to blog this as a startup idea, and hope that you create this business so that I could be your customer.  However, I recently found a service that does this... Picwing.  After testing it for a couple weeks and working out a few kinks with the email forwarders, it works and I love it.  It batches photos into two shipments per month to save cost.  I'd pay extra for weekly shipments, but they don't have that option and this is close enough for now.

Remember Million Dollar Homepage?  The website's owner sold 1,000,000 pixels for $1 each.  It worked because the idea was new and generated a ton of press.  You can't repeat this now because the concept is no longer newsworthy and nobody is willing to pay $1 per pixel again to a copycat site.

But what if this concept were applied to a superbowl commercial?  According to wikipedia, minimum quality standard 4:3 TV broadcasts are 640 x 480 pixels and can be as low as 24 frames per second, which works out to:

• 640 x 480 = 307,200 pixels per frame
• x 24 frames = 7,372,800 pixels per second
• x 30 sec = 221,184,000 pixels in a 30 second commercial

If you sold every pixel for $0.05, that equals over $11 million.  Last year the average cost for a 30 second superbowl commercial was $3 million... pretty good margin.

I have 10+ tshirts from failed startups. I love wearing them. Where can I get more? I can't find a website that sells them. Someone should create this.

When a startup dies, the founders/investors/employees are usually left with a ton of scwhag. At fieldParty.com we were left with thousands of beer can koozies, beach balls, stickers and tshirts. (ya we were stupid but it was fun)

There should be a marketplace for this stuff!