It feel like every week that I read some post on Hacker News or some random blog post extolling the virtues of free love with our ideas. People say that ideas are cheap, it's execution that matters. They say that nobody is interested in stealing your crappy idea. And if your idea is worth anything, you will have to shove it down peoples throats.

I think that ideas are floating around in the collective unconscious, and it is rare that you are ever the first or last to think of something. Consumers are fickle, markets fluctuate, and ideas are always floating around, waiting for the proper execution. With that in mind, here are 5 ideas to add to the pool.

1) Communication tools for Product-to-Developer - What I mean by this is software to help product owners communicate with engineering teams. I am aware that groupware is bad, but each year more software is being made. Software engineers are in high demand, and for the foreseeable future, people are going to continue to need software built. Managing these software projects is going to be a bigger market, much bigger. Developers are looking to accomplish more work with less overhead and product owners are looking for ways to check scope, set timelines, and prioritize features. That is a lot of communication. There are already a ton of players in this space, so you'll have to be innovative.

2) Mobile-controlled Jukebox - Essentially I want to be in a bar and play a song on the jukebox from my phone. That's the core use case. But the implications of that idea are massive, so I'll just let you dwell on that. (I really love this idea and hesitated to throw it up here. A while back, we even bought http://musicbar.fm but we ended up re-purposing it, for now... :)

3) The New News Aggregator - I am confident the #1 thing to do on the internet is consume content. It's what we all do all day. Sharing the content is still being worked out however. People share on Twitter, Facebook and their blogs what they find from Reddit, Pinterest or StumbleUpon. But I think there is room in there for a new player to bridge the gap between the social network and content discovery. The business model would probably have to be based on eyeballs, however.

4) A Health Community - They say health is the first wealth, and nothing is more true. There are lots of sites out there right now which cater to health related questions. Most of the sites are divided up by disease or illness. People on a diet have a site, people who have chronic pain have a site, and people who have mental problems have a site. IANAD but I think health should be approached holistically, and having a community for all sorts of health issues, and being able to connect the dots on peoples 'unrelated' issues, would be HUGE.

Example: John goes to a site for his stomach aches, he goes to a site for his drinking problem, and he goes to a site for his STD and he goes to a site for depression (poor John). And for some reason, John just isn't seeing how these are related. In this contrived example it's easy for us to see what is going on, but most health issues are way more complicated, and most doctors just aren't approaching patients from the right angle. I am sure there are TONS of challenges to solve here, but it would be worth it.

5) The Newest Way To Share Content - Granted, this is very broad, I still think it is important to consider. Usenet, the web, blogs, social networks, twitter. These are the primary ways we have been sharing content over the last 15 years. Pinterest is coming up next, and we see the shift going from textual to visual. In previous incarnations, sharing went from factual to personal, and long-form to short-form. Sharing has become more visual. So where is it going next? 

Facebook wasn't the first, and it won't be the last. So steal some of my ideas and get out there. And don't worry about me these aren't even my good ones.

About the author

Dev/Code/Hack is a technology and business blog by me, Par Trivedi. I'm a software engineer and I've been writing code and managing teams for over a decade. This blog serves as a way to share thoughts and ideas about the tech/startup community, and also to educate newcomers to software development.

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