Looking For A Crowd-funding Project of Your Own, But Can't Think of One?

Your job sucks. You want to start a business but can't think of anything worthwhile. You want a surefire way to start a company, get rich and have an exit event where one of the big boys buys you. You see crowdfunding successes and wrack your brains for an idea, a spark, an inspiration of innovation for what the world will want in large quantities.  Well you have come to the right place. Here are some ideas for crowdfunding projects that will go big.  You snooze, you lose, so act fast. First to market wins.

Idea #1 Fixing The Chewing Gum Market With New Product Introductions

The chewing gum market has been flat for years. It is in decline. It really took off post-World War II and during the 1950's and 1960's, it was quite hip to chew gum. From the 1970's to the 1990's, chewing gum was seen as anti-social.

The last big hurrah for chewing gum was the sugarless kind that contained xylitol and proven to prevent cavities.  The way that chewing gum innovates now, is producing some more exotic chemical flavor, like Raspberry Melon Dream.

So I think that the time is right for a disruptive paradigm shift in the chewing gum market that will make you the Mogul of Mastication. And you can crowd fund it.

Let's revitalize the business in a couple of ways.  First of all, all gum now is made from synthetic rubber. In the early days, it was made naturally from chicle. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicle ) In the Bahamas, and other Caribbean islands, there are dilly trees that produce a delicious sapodilla fruit that tastes like apple pie. These trees produce chicle as well, and NOBODY taps them. The Bahamas in particular is looking for economic diversification and growing chicle would be one way to do plus.  Plus, chicle is all natural, and not like the gum base today made from coal tar. While once stealing picking dilly fruit that was hanging over a fence on the sidewalk, the branch of the dilly tree broke and the chicle got all over my hand.  I licked it off and chewed it, and it was pleasant even without flavoring. AND IT IS ORGANIC! How about an organic gum. That is innovation number one. It would sell like hotcakes to the organic food crowd.

The second disruption in the chewing gum industry is flavor. I don't want chemical fruit flavors. Suppose you infused the gum with stuff that was good for you, like Acai berries, gingseng and herb and botanicals that were healthy. Suppose you made a gum that energized you like Red Bull. Red Bull came out of nowhere and mades its founder gazillionaires. So you would have an energy gum. You would have a St. John's Wort gum that is anti-depression and anxiety. Great for chewing during an exam. And speaking of exams, you would have a gum with ginko biloba to increase your brain power.

There are all sorts of things that you could do with chewing gum, and carve an empire to make you a Mandarin of Manducation.

Idea #2, The Virtual Window

I was driving in the downtown core a big city, and saw four luxury condo towers going up. The condos were thickly crammed into each of the twenty or so stories of the building, and since the towers were close to each other, some of the condos had a beautiful view of a brick wall, and another building.  Who would want to pay half-a-million dollars for a condo whose window look out on a brick wall, and yet many folks do.

So I had an idea to fix this. The Eureka moment is a virtual window. You make an LED display the size of window. As a matter of fact, you could enlarge one of those electronic photo frames, and enhance the display. The Light Emitting Diodes in the display would be the ultra-bright type, and the white ones would have sunlight spectrum built in.  Then images are loaded into memory, and the processor keeps the time to give you a diurnally-appropriate image. What this means is that you would see a sunrise, and a sunset, and the window would get darker in the evening and you would see a beautifully lighted cityscape at nights.

You could change your view to look out over Diamond Head in Waikiki. Or you could have a crystal blue lagoon view of French Polynesia. You could pick the view out of your window, according to your mood. Or the window would be part of the Internet of Everything, so you could link to a webcam in Paris for you window view.  Or you could link to art gallery images for something completely different. You never need to look at a brick wall again.

The goodies that you would offer the crowd funders for this one, would be a free static view of their choice.

Idea #3 The Private Internet Retreat Platform for Self-Forming Social Groups

Attention all tekkie geeks, this idea can be done by cobbling together existing technology.  What it is, is a private Internet Retreat platform for self-forming social groups.  Let me explain.

I got off LinkedIn because when 3 million accounts were hacked, my password was among them. My password was chosen with care so that it be very hard to break even with a rainbow table. I got off Facebook when I saw where it was going with my privacy violations (even though I managed to sneak with a pseudonym. However any decent data mining could have garnered my correct identity in 5 minutes by daughter calling me "Dad" in a post).   I don't like a lot of my information to be public.

My classmates are all huge successes in academia, industry and commerce, and I don't particularly want them looking me up. I don't want ex-girlfriends stalking me. I don't want my likes to be tracked and recorded.

What I do want, is a safe place to interact with my chosen contacts, where there is no chance of anything being public knowledge. I don't want to be a lab rat for a data miner like myself.

So, suppose I log into a platform that is like an intranet. I could VPN or SSH/SSL to the network, and it is a private little domain with no public access. I can have a Facebook-like app, because Facebook is the lazy man's way of keeping in touch, and it is damn handy for that. Forgot a birthday card? Send a Facebook-like message etc.

So the idea could grow. You have an area of the internet solely for a self-forming group. They can trade messages, ideas, shopping wants, product reviews, personal opinions, photos etc that would ensure their privacy.

Now the platform provider would have to provide some content safeguards, but that could be done with technology. If you had complete privacy, then you would attract child pornographers, money launderers, terrorists and criminals. I found that out the hard way. I have an ultra-secure app for High Networth Individuals to store their data in a secure bunker in the Bahamas, and we have to sell it by invitation only, because I like to travel to the US and don't want to be put on their "list".  I was caddying at the Michael Jordan Invitational in the Bahamas, and Bill Clinton was playing with Samuel L. Jackson and James Caan. One of President Clinton's caddies was the FBI director stationed in the embassy, and when I handed him my business card, he put in a section of his wallet and told me that he would keep it, because one day he might have to serve me with a subpoena. So, you have to be careful that you don't create a criminal garden like Silk Road did.  But the take-up for this idea would be fantastic, especially now that more and more people are becoming aware of intrusions in their privacy.

So there you have it. Three crowdfunding ideas that you can run with.  I have lots more of them.  You can get them by signing up for my very occasional, non-annoying email about tech ideas, futuristic things, artificial intelligence, machine learning and app ideas.