Idea 9: Crowdsource the knowledge to ride solo with a motorcycle from London to Cape Town

It has been something I wanted to do for a very long time - a solo trip from London to Cape Town on a motorcycle.


In April 2011, I bought an Africa Twin and is currently using it to commute around London - a bit of an insult to the motorcycle, given what it is capable of.

It is always easy to find excuses for not doing the things we dream of. Finding excuses not to ride the length of Africa on your own, maybe even easier.

The excuses can be broadly categorised into:

1. Money - "It's too expensive"/ "Do you know how much it will cost?!" 

2. Time - "How can you get 6 months off work?"

3. Danger - "Half of African countries have some kind of conflict" / "Are you crazy?!" 

4. Capability - "What do you know about riding?" / "What happens if it breaks?"

The first two I can plan for, the third I can shrug of with a philosophical "we are all going to die" but the 4th will need a bit more effort. Given that I know nothing about motorcycle mechanics and little about adventure riding, I will address this problem as follows:

Idea 9 - Crowdsourcing the knowledge needed:

Start a blog to capture everything I learn. This can then be used by other enthusiasts wanting to do the same, help document my story and serve as a guide to keep me focused.

The information contained in the blog will be completely crowdsourced from individuals that have more knowledge on the topic than I do. These individuals can be found on motorcycle forums like http://www.xrv.org.uk and http://www.advrider.com/. Forums like these are treasure troves of knowledge and advice.

The blog will mainly be a "how-to" guide, broken down into a series of episodes. Each episode covering a very specific topic e.g., learning to get the bike onto the centre stand, changing a tyre, all the way through to sorting out visas and getting insurance.

I hope to find voluntary "mentors" on-line, willing to teach me specific skills. The format of each episode will be these "mentors", teaching me this skill and maybe ending with a story they have related to riding.

There is a lot of information scattered about on the topic of motorcycle travel but I wish to tell my story like every story should be told - from the beginning.




Update 1 Feb 2012
I did a basic Motorcycle maintenance course with Oval Motorcycle Centre last night.
They were absolutely brilliant and just the advice I got over the two tea breaks, were probably worth more than the £35 I paid for the course. It just got me excited again about pulling my finger in regards to my motorcycling. 

Why such a dry spell?

Funny thing, making your ideas public. As I said in my first post, I had no idea where this blog will lead me or how long it will last. It just felt right at the time and it still feels right. I had positive feedback from friends and one guy is now writing three songs a day! What a compliment.


I have been beating myself up a bit for being "out of ideas" to put on this blog until a friend remarked that it might be all for a good reason. I am working on two ideas that I think might have legs and it is strange, but it feels that the part of your brain thinking about ideas and the part actioning ideas are mutually exclusive.


Given that my "give away idea" part of thinking is now wrestling with my "doing stuff" part , I'll also be including posts on the latter as time goes by.


The next post is something I have been dreaming about for a very long time. The dreaming stops now.

The knock on effect of an idea. Here is the story of a modest charity collection – told backwards.

Our team collected more than £800 for the Movember initiative, benefiting various charities related to men’s cancers.

The majority of people at work donated money and all of them seemed to be doing so with a smile. We had many comments about our various styles of moustaches – all good hearted and I do believe the whole campaign contributed, in a small way, to office spirit.

A colleague of mine ordered the official Movember collection box and we had a manual collection in addition to the donations we received online.

Pictures of our moustaches were published in the staff magazine and also put on all internal television screens – all to the amusement of less hairy-lipped staff.

I asked a member of our communications team if she could help us to raise some awareness to see if we could collect money for the charity.

More and more colleagues started to sport a moustache and as the collective hair on our lips grew, so did the general awareness of why we were doing it.

A small group of colleagues committed to join me and grow a moustache for the whole month of November after I sold it to them as a novelty and a charitable endeavour.

I decided that since I always wanted to have a moustache, this was the perfect excuse to grow one. And if we received some money, I would be able to justify the hair on my face to my girlfriend and other skeptics under the guise of it being for charity. The perfect cover!

I received a general email directed to some of the men in the office, jokingly suggesting that we participate in the Movember initiative as the sender liked moustaches and would not mind a couple of “Tom Selleck” look-alikes roaming the office for a month.

A colleague of mine read a small article in a magazine about jewelry in the shape of moustaches and that the company selling it planned to donate part of their profit to the Movember cause.

 -------------------------

 Thank you Debbie, because of your small spark, we collected £800 in charitable donations, contributed to a spirit of wellbeing in the office, suffered some well intended ridicule and forfeited the odd bit of “leg-over” due to our partners not being as impressed with our “taches” as we were, but it was for a good cause and a lot of fun. Well done.

Idea 8: Rate your local sex appeal

When I started to ask people about the following idea, there were various opinions about the statistical validity*, how many people you will need to make it work, blah blah blah. But, one thing that there is consensus about is that most people play this game in their heads anyway.

Idea number 8 - Rate your local sex appeal:

The premise of the game is to rate the sex appeal of strangers in an area, using a mobile application.

Under your profile you would enter your gender, age and whether you are straight or gay.

The interface of the mobile application will be simple.

• Two voting buttons; "Would you?" or "wouldn't you?"
• A countdown timer; Users can choose to play for 3, 5 or 10 minutes.
• The amount of alcohol (in units) consumed at the time when the game is played.

There will need to be some controls to ensure the parameters entered are statistically reliable*, of which the key ones to get right will be; (examples at the hand of a heterosexual woman)

• Dismissing scores when the location is too quiet (think deserted island). A score of 1 out of 4 means you only saw 4 men of which you found 1 sexually appealing - too few to base a statistic on.
• Dismissing scores when the location is too busy (think clubbing night). A ridiculously high total scoring means you are seeing too many men at the same time so you might be double counting or not counting all men.

Once you have played it a couple of time you would be able to;

• Compare your own scores, over time, against location - see where are the most attractive people, according to you. 
• See correlations between your scores, alcohol consumption and the time of day.

Once enough people are playing the game, you would be able to;

• Compare your scores to other people's in a given area to decide if you are "picky" or "desperate".
• See infographical "hotspots" in your city or town.
• See how alcohol consumption and time of day influences average scores (testing the Beer goggle theory!)

You can then post your scores and results, like everything else, to Twitter or Facebook.

I am well aware that douchebags and jocks will abuse such an app to a certain degree, but it should not be developed with them as the primary market.

Your thoughts?

* Someone mentioned that you might be muddling the statistical significance by measuring two things at the same time - the player's taste and actual sex appeal of the subjects. 

Idea 7: Guerilla paparazzi photo essay

Photo Credit: IziSmile

Overall, the public generally agrees that the phone hacking scandal that broke recently was overstepping the ever-fading line in the sand about what is deemed acceptable as far as privacy is concerned and so on and so forth.

Some argue that celebrities are in some ways public property due to the nature of what they do. I disagree. Someone needs to make the public feel just how ridiculous all of this cellulite-spotting really is.

Enter idea number seven….

You will need:

• Two photographers.
• Members of the public
• Guts, as you might be punched in the face.

The 1^st photographer will approach random people in various places as if they were celebrities and just start clicking away in an unannounced frenzy. Close ups, “up-skirt” photos, pictures of their children – anything goes.

There will be different reactions to this. This is where the 2^nd photographer comes into play. The 2^nd photographer will be capturing the unfolding of the scene caused be the 1^st photographer and his guerilla paparazzi assault on members of the public.

After the whole debacle, the subject of the photo ambush will be handed a card with a link to a website where he or she can then view the pictures taken. He/she will be asked to write a short bit about how this whole experience made them feel and if they think the way we treat celebrities for the sake of our own cheap entertainment is justified.

The photos of both photographers and the answers submitted by the subjects can form the basis of an exhibition to investigate our asphyxiation with celebrity.

Your thoughts?

Idea 6: Changing your Facebook birthday to launch your blog

On my birthday this year, I had 72 birthday wishes. That is about 15% of the 492 friends I have on Facebook. 
I did a quick search and it is close to the 17% mentioned in Can Facebook Birthday Wishes Control Your Mind?


This made me think...


The idea is as follows:

• Change your birthday on Facebook to a Wednesday (apparently the busiest day on Facebook)
• Post as your status that this is not your birthday but an experiment in launching your blog / product / service / website / whatever, along with a link.
• Ensure you can track how many people visit your site using Google Analytics or similar software.
• A couple of ratios that will be interesting:
• Number of Birthday wishes: Number of friends (Do they not read your status before they post?!)
• Number of visits to blog: Number of friends
• Number of friend requests in follwoing 7 days

It might seem like a cheecky way to launch something but they are your friends, they will forgive you.

Please let me know the stats above once you tried this as well as any other interesting measures you came across.

Idea 5: Crowdsourcing celebrities' ego check.

This post might be a bit more specific to South Africa but can work anywhere where celebrity culture has not yet set in on a ridicolous scale. Apologies England, America and Italy - we cannot save you all.


In South Africa, we are fortunate not to have an annoying celebrity culture - yet.
It is not strange to see our musicians, athletes and actors mingle naturally with people at a social gathering or in public. They sometimes seem sheepishly uncomfortable with any special attention as opposed to just purring to the stroke of their ego. Let me be clear, this is a GOOD thing.


Everyone in that position needs someone to keep them anchored, given our collective distain for big headedness.  A certain singer in SA, after becoming famous, asked his close friends to check his ego whenever they felt it was getting out of hand. They had the right to tell him very frankly when he was losing his footing on humble ground and, if he was to get annoyed by any rebuke, he was to be reminded that he commissioned it in the first place. He explicitly outsourced the checking of his ego to his close friends.


But what can celebrities do if they are only surrounded by other celebrities and "limelight cling-ons", with no-one to do this checking for them? Enter idea number 5.

1. A blog is created where people can submit stories of encounters with celebrities, both positive and negative.
2. These stories will have to be moderated by a panel of "ego checkers" or else it will just become a cacophony of insults, defenses and baseless opinions.
3. These stories are then published on the blog for the public to rate the celebrities' "ego health", based on the stories published about him or her.

The intention is not to turn it into a slaughterhouse for celebrities. Stories about cheating husbands, drugs, speeding fines,  and the like will not make it onto this blog - that's what tabloids are for. However, if you asked the hooker, dealer or traffic officer "do you know who I am?", we will grill you like Nando's in the public domain.

Let me give you specific examples of the kind of stories that would make the cut. I am not giving the name of the first person as I only heard this via someone else and it might have happened too long ago.

An example of a 1/10 "ego health" 

A well known rugby player,  was chatting to a girl next to the swimming pool at a party in Cape Town. She probably thought that the friendly banter was going quite well and asked him for his phone number. He agreed and asked her for her phone. When she handed it to him, he tossed it into the swimming pool and laughed at her for thinking that she could have the audacity to ask him for his number in the first place.

An example of a 9/10 "ego health"

I used to have my breakfast at the same place and time as Nina Swart at one point. It was in the middle of the morning on weekdays so the coffee shop was not that busy. After the 2nd or 3rd morning, she initiated the customary greeting of a smile and gesture you would expect from someone sharing a fairly quiet space for the 2nd or 3rd consecutive morning. Later that week, there was an opportunity where she introduced herself with a plain "Nina, how do you do". Anyway, does she look like someone with an ego problem?

You will need a couple of things to make a site like this work;

1. Excellent "keepers of the gate". Your moderators will control what is to be published and what is not. With great power comes great responsibility.
2. A sytem for the featured people to defend themselves if they feel that a story was taken out of context or was untrue.
3. A way to check that the stories are true. A story teller should either not be anonymous or it should be substantiated by more than one person.
4. A culture that hasn't yet fallen terminally ill to celebrity importantitis.

I would like to hear your thoughts on the workings of such a site and ideas for a name.

Idea 4: Online food shopping - an alternative experience.

Using Ocado as an example, but most online supermarkets work in a similar way.

• You have the option to choose a recipe you like.
•  All the ingredients needed are listed.
• You then have to select each ingredient individually to add it to the shopping basket or, alternatively, you can select "Add everything".

The idea flips this logic on it's head.

Let us take this Spinach Lasagne from Ocado as example.

Ingredients

• 250g Spinach Lasagne sheets
• 500g Tomato Passata
• 2 Garlic Cloves
• 4 tbsp Olive Oil
• 500ml Milk
• 2 tbsp Plain Flour
• 2 tbsp Butter
• 1 pinch Salt
• 1 pinch Pepper
• 1 pinch Nutmeg
• 3 leaves Fresh Basil
• 1 ball Mozzarella, diced
• 1 cup Parmesan Cheese, freshly grated

All 13 these ingredients will cost me £16.36. But I have garlic, olive oil, milk, butter, salt and pepper in my pantry.

After removing these 6 ingredients, I am left with a total cost of £9.87 (60% of the original value) for the 7 ingredients I need to buy.

Currently, I am ADDING ingredients to a shopping trolley. I see the total cost rising with each addition and it "feels" like I am spending money.

Alternatively, you can re-design this whole "buying-from-a-recipe" experience as follows;

• You select a recipe and immediately it shows you the total cost in case you wanted to buy all of the ingredients. 
• The shoper now DE-SELECTS those items that he/she does not require. You see the total cost decrease with each de-selection and it "feels" like you are saving money. 

The argument against this is that it will put the buyer off as all recipes will initially seem very expensive. That is easily remedied by adding two additional costs along with the total potential cost of buying all the ingredients; 

i) Average cost per serving and ii) The average amount people who bought the ingredients for this recipe spent on it.  Looking at these two indicators, customers can then get a very clear understanding of how much they can expect to pay. 

The small amount of customers being put off by this "flip around" should be far less than those appreciating a more honest way to estimate the cost of recipes. It is also much easier to de-select what you do not want as opposed to select what you do want - adding to the overall experience.

To test if you agree is simple. 

• Register on Ocado.
• Select a recipe with 8 or more ingredients.
• Click on "Add everything" to see the total cost - note this down.
• Now de-select all items you do have in your kitchen (e.g., salt, pepper and milk) whilst keeping an eye on the total cost of your basket.

Do you find it quicker to de-select those items you already have?

Does it "feel" like you are saving money when seeing the price drop each time?

This can be implemented by the online shops themselves or by a "compare-the-market" type online shop where you shop from recipes pulling from various supermarkets.

Looking forward to hear your thoughts.

Idea 3: My Cloud Mag

Not sure if something similar exists.

Despite all the online alternatives offered to us, a lot of us still read magazines.

The idea for a app to collect, store and bookmark your favourite articles are as follows:

• You scan the barcode of the magazine.
• You enter the page number and select the topic you would like to file it under from a pre-populated dropdown box e.g., photography.
• The selected pages gets added to an online storage/sorting cloud for all your favourite magazine articles.
• Categorization, sharing, posting to other social sites and all the rest be done via either a website or a mobile app.

You will need the buy-in from major publishing houses to make it viable but I am sure they can market it as a "transitional product" to move their magazine customers online given the surety that magazines as we know it are edging towards extinction.

Idea 2: Alternative coffee shop model

I can probably look up the value of the market for take away coffee and write some statty-sounding blurb about how much profit is made on a single cup. The fact is selling coffee makes loads of cash - if you can get customers to buy it given the Starbucks and Cafe Nero on each corner.

Facts, themes and sentiments:

• To make a cup of coffee is quick and cheap.
• To wait for a cup of coffee in a queue is annoying.
• To be a member of a club feels cool.
• To support small business is cool.

The idea is as follows:

Create a coffee shop chain where each shop has two counters, catering for two tiers of clientele;

Counter 1

• Customers buy coffee like in any other coffee shop (queue for it, choose it, pay for it, wait for it, leave with it or, sit and drink it)

Counter 2

• The second counter will be for "club" customers only.
• These customers pay a monthly membership fee and can have as much coffee as they like.
• A single, "coffee-of-the-month", selected from artisan roasters, is served in the normal formats of -pressos and -chinos.

How can you afford to give coffee away for free?
To make the coffee is cheap and the membership fee will work on the same principal as a "eat-as-much-as-you can" pricing model in that the average person will drink much less coffee than he initially thought he would, leaving you with a profit.

The following should happen.

• Your members will form an online community of coffee aficionados. They will discuss and star-rate the coffee of the month.
• Your website should become synonymous with great quality coffee, produced by independent producers.
• You then sell the featured coffees online with customer ratings automatically driving the best coffees to the top of the pile.
• The whole concept should grow itself as long as you are actually serving good coffee.
• In effect, you are using your club as a market research collective and as advertisers - both elements that can be expensive and not always accurate in the traditional format.

"Nice-to-haves"

• A fair share of regular. club customers will drink coffee at the same place every day. Not wanting to wait, they can have a mobile app to pre-order coffee so that it is ready just before they arrive. The details of such an app will need to be worked out but I cannot see how this should be too difficult.
• All things coffee related can be booked or bought online e.g., barista courses.

Just a thought on how to get the most socially acceptable drug to operate in a more socially responsible manner.

(Permission to use image was kindly provided by supanovadesign)

Idea 1: Start a blog, publish a torrent of ideas and let someone else finish it.

The idea is fairly simple and works as follows:

1. I publish a bunch of ideas on this blog - some of which will be business or product ideas.
2. Other people whom are better finishers than me, well, finishes it.
3. Once tried - successful or not, let me know how you got on.
4. If you built it into a viable business, good for you - an altruistic share or donation will be appreciated but not expected.
5. I get to sit all day and think of wacky ideas whilst other people get to sort out the details.

Why do it?

It started with a friend of mine, Michael Mentessi, sending me a link to Scanner Central with the words "Dude, this is sooo you".

In short,  a scanner is someone playing hopscotch between ideas, topics, subjects and the odd theory here and there.  This blog is as much about "logging" this floodgate of seemingly random ideas for comical value as it is about trying to find the common theme that there might be. This blog itself is an idea and I will not be surprised if I write it for a couple of weeks and then stop. It does not matter.

I will not be putting all ideas on here as I am working on some of them - luckily with people that are much better finishers than I am!