Crazy ideas in the works
Here’s a list of crazy projects that I have tumbling around in my head:
Web 2.0 point-of-sale software
The secret of WalMart’s success is its point of sale and inventory software. Nothing ever sits on the shelves for long, so they don’t get stuck with overpriced inventory.
The point of sale software you and I can get our hands on is notoriously bad. The world needs a web 2.0 solution, badly.
Imagine being able to go from zero to fully automated brick and mortar, with online store, linked inventory, credit card and paypal support, total monitoring and reporting online, all instantly.
Use Google gears to maintain persistence locally in case of Internet outages, and use a signed JPOS applet to drive drawers, printers and pole displays. Make it simple for integrators to write add-ons, as easy as writing Facebook apps. Build a network of resellers so that businesses can get help with hardware issues.
General purpose computer based on Arduino
Playing with the bootrom code for Arduino has inspired me a bit. I want to give it a keyboard, a display, and a disk and be able to load and unload programs. Eventually every software developer has to design an operating system, right?
Open Wireless Mesh Extranet
Let’s use Arduino, Cantennas and Linux to create an open mesh network in NYC. Why? Mostly because we can, but partially because a network like this would allow for people to have a wide area network without NAT. We can do all sorts of things once we can fully address each other. I want to be able to hit NYCR and Blip HQ from my apartment without hitting the Internet.
Erlang
So it’s time to learn another language, this time Erlang. It’s supposed to be fantastic for creating distributed scalable applications. No locks, only messages. And the code is hot swappable! I’m not sure what I’m going to do with it yet, but I’m thinking some sort of number crunching on S3 would be appropriate.
