Income study of Kiryas Joel

This is a town in new york, orange county I think.  It is supposedly the poorest or one of the poorest municipalities in the US.  It is a hasidic jewish community though and it doesn't seem that poor.  Would be interesting to find out why that is, there could be some economic lesson that would apply to the nation at large.  Apparently the whole town collects welfare, and it may have something to do with the large number of children each family has.  Efficiency or exploiting the system?  Subject for further research.

Idea for a basic trend description website

So there are always these trends like "cloud computing", "Social Media", and "Mobile Internet" that us tech involved people hear about, get pumped about, and understand to some extent, but what about everybody else? I feel like there are lots of places that provide technologist/very early adopter news (focused blogs lets say), and lots of places that only cover things that have become big trends that the general public can understand (the New York Times for example), but what about a place that makes the biggest trends instantly comprehensible to the larger public that can make use of it? I'm talking more basic than Wired, and with a real focus on not only what the tech is, but what the heck its for and how it can help people. Specifically. Concretely. Like Twitter for example, its powerful, but so many people don't even understand what the heck it is for. Sure some of the nuance will be lost in this, but so what? We sacrifice a little richness for a lot of reach. Ok.

Cloud Computing has been the Hot Stuff, but now what? Application Ideas? Post em!

Ok so some readers who have a lot better handle on this may find a mistake or two, but here is a basic description I wrote up for my father, who was asking about what it really was. He needs to know, he works in publishing. The question is, what are some great applications for the cloud that cannot be done with our normal infrastructure?

"Cloud Computing I understand it reasonably well. Remember that before computers became PCs on the desktop, they were mainframes? Then, every user had a terminal, but all the processing was done on a larger computer - the terminal was just the control station where you interacted with the mainframe. Cloud computing is very much going back in this direction. Instead of processing being done on your home computer or your smart phone or whatever, it is done by a larger "computer" somewhere else. The difference now is that this larger computer is not one mainframe, but a giant (and I mean giant) network of computers working together. This is the cloud. Together they have the power to process lots of requests. You can think of what Google does as cloud computing sort of since they have vast warehouses of servers stacked up, each of which is really a pretty humble machine, but working together they form a supercomputer, and with it, they give people access to services. Google docs is a very cloud computing type application, because they take what is normally a desktop application (word processing lets say) and make it into a network application - you just access the internet and use the program running in the cloud. This is why Microsoft is afraid of Google, because if Google does enough of this, the valuable windows operating system becomes obsolete. The crazy thing is that in cloud computing, your computer can become part of the cloud too though. Conceivably, the cloud could be the whole internet if everyone participated."

Voice-to-text app for smartphones

So this idea came to me while I was driving and I was tempted to text someone.  Using voice recognition it turns speech into a text message over the phone.  It should be integrated in an app w the phone's address book, so sending a voice text is as easy as calling someone.  Maybe partner with a speech recognition company.

-- Sent from my Palm Pre

New facebook app

Make an app that lets you find very unconnected friends of friends.  I was in a friends facebook page when I clicked on a random one of their friends only to discover that I had another completely different friend who knew this same person.  Wild.  I want to do that more!!

Stock and Economy Ranking Website

Ok so this is simple, people visit this site (and of course there are some cool integrations with other websites, esp social network) and give a thumbs up or thumbs down to a stock. You only rate the stocks you know, and an aggregate opinion is drawn out of this. Whether you want to go with it or go against it, it's an interesting data set. Other analysis can be done and interesting conclusions drawn. You could also yes/no investment in nation's economies, anything really, but I think there would be most interest in things people invest in.