Cool! I'm wondering who will decide whether a project solves a given problem. Maybe automatically survey a sample of investors?

I like it!

A couple of people emailed me who I think might be interested - I want to send the introduction when I'm more awake, and I will be gone all day tomorrow, so ping me if you haven't gotten it from my by Monday night.

For the sake of argument, lets say I'm a somewhat greedy bastard who would like some compensation for bringing my spark to your kindling, and I am afraid of this system because while I can only give away my idea once on the internet for it to be infinitely copied and modifiable, you can package it hundreds of times to hundreds of different people to make a mint. Common good can wait for me to produce it myself and be the flamebringer to the masses, because If I give it to you, you get the glory, financial security, and reputation that means you can live to develop another day. How do you sell this to me?

EDIT: So we don't ninja each other anymore, I'll just leave it at "this is going to be a hard sell if you want idea people to play along." But for all I know, that may be part of the plan to get more people intrested in pitching in and being responsible idea parents.

You'd be "a smidge paranoid" to publicly "disclose ideas" to a party you couldn't afford -- or couldn't find -- as a dev team, anyway? The goal of this ReverseKickstarter, in my eyes, is to get those ideas out of people before they die! The alternative to this marketplace is a) be a dev, b) pay a dev.

Those are both pretty high barriers to entry. They discourage a lot of people from contributing meaningfully or significantly to this revolution.

How can we lower the barriers to contribution? I think AltonSun has an answer.

Maybe I don't understand your ideas of "who owns what" , "marketplace for hire" or "pear shaped".

YouZingIt and Fiverr have similar offerings, along with other invention contractors on the Google nets, LambertInvent.com offering a flat rate of $199 to look at your idea and tell you if they can do something with it. Get Satisfaction also has a similar idea for products and tech support, but I like the idea of posting bounties to problems, and actually getting things done by throwing money at it until it goes away.

Looking at this from the posting of concepts direction though, I'd be a smidge paranoid disclosing ideas to a third party where I pay them a buck to make one and they can sell the finished product for ten because they have the skills and resources to bring it into reality and I don't. I dunno if that's an unrealistic expectation or me being lazy and code illiterate, (too many words all over the place) but if who owns what is a barrier of entry, the idea of a marketplace for hire might go pear shaped if someone strikes it rich.

A Backwards Kickstarter

A crowdfunding & crowdsourcing platform where you go to post your problems that you'd like to be solved, products that you'd like manufactured, programs or services that you'd like to be made, and how much you'd be willing to pay for it.

This takes LSM validation principles and reverses it - don't waste time finding out what the market wants - have them tell you, then

* focus on fulfilling it.*

The closest thing to it that I'm aware of would be Quora , except every upvote on a question (idea) represents $10. Everything is editable a la wikipedia. This would enable you to view trending ideas in realtime. You can give unlimited upvotes to ideas because it is deducted from your 'bank' of credits that would be linked to your PayPal or Credit Card.

Alternatively, you can follow ideas for free, and optionally receive notifications on updates or immediately actionable items that match your domain of expertise.

On the fulfillment/programming/manufacturing side, anticipated trajectories of certain categories could create clarity as to what students could best invest their time and efforts in.

If you are interested, message me and I can share more details, mockups, etc.

I'd love feedback, remembering that 'criticism is the cornerstone to progress', and 'if version 1 isn't embarrassing, you've released too late.'

Other ideas that probably wouldn't make a lot of money

• Welcome to the internet page

• Accountability Engine - many have an easier time helping other people than they do themselves, why not trade tasks at 5 min, 30 min, and 1 hr intervals? Alternatively, everyone in your group has to post a series of 3 screenshots or images of the progress that they've made towards two publicly declared goals. I want to make inaction inexcusable.

• Your liaison in XYZ - want something shipped to or from a friend? Need someone to represent you in another country?

• Intelligent alert system - Hey, you've just spent 10 minutes on Facebook - how about you work on what you should be working on instead?

• AnswerMe - Questions? Ask them via text or email, and it will automatically be posted to Quora, ChaCha answers, and just for laughs - Yahoo Answers. At the end of the day or week, the answers are forwarded to your email or texted direct. If you're a premium user, it costs cents to post to Amazon's Mechanical Turk (and they have an API!) and only a couple dollars to post on Odesk to get hours worth of research. (I regularly hire people at $3.33/hr in India, since standard of living is so much lower.)

Odd ideas:

• Relationship advice hotline - text or call a phone number, direct connect with someone that can help

• LevelUpLife - Lend a GoPro camera necklace to someone, have them wear it to a social occasion or work environment situation, then advise them specifically on how to be funnier, happier, or better in some way that they choose. This can also be done with a personal recorder or iPhone in their pocket for more seamless suggestions.

Self-selecting from an audience that took the time to read this is likely worth connecting with, if at least online. If you happen to be located in the bay area, I spend most of my time in Berkeley, San Francisco, and Palo Alto, and am happy to meet up for tea or join you during an event with anyone who is even slightly curious.

Disclaimer: You may end up with photos of your face,, learning how to card manipulate, contact juggle, or flip a butterfly knife.

Short version: Make an Eckman-style micro-expression reader in a wearable computer.

Fleshed out version: You have a wearable computer (perhaps something like Google glass) which sends video from its camera (or perhaps two cameras if one camera is not enough) over to a high-powered CPU which processes the images, locates the faces, and then identifies micro expressions by matching and comparing the current image (or 3D model) to previous frames to infer which bits of the face have moved in which directions. If a strong enough micro-expression happens, the user is informed by a tone or other notification. Alternatively, one could go the more pedagogical route by showing then a still frame of the person doing the micro-expression some milliseconds prior with the relevant bits of the face highlighted.

Feasibility: We already can make computers are good at finding faces in images and creating 3D models from multiple camera perspectives. I'm pretty sure small cameras are good enough by now. We need the beefy CPU and/or GPU as a separate device for now because it's going to be a while before wearables are good enough to do this kind of heavy-duty processing on their own, but wifi is good enough to transmit very high resolution video. The foggiest bit in my model would be whether current image processing techniques are up to the challenge. Would anyone with expertise in machine vision care to comment on this?

Possible positive consequences: Group collaboration easily succumbs to politics and scheming unless a certain (large) level of trust and empathy has been established. (For example, I've seen plenty of hacker news comments confirm that having a strong friendship with one's startup cofounder is important.) A technology such as this would allow for much more rapid (and justified) trust-building between potential collaborators. This might also allow for the creation of larger groups of smart people who all trust each other. (Which would be invaluable for any project which produces information which shouldn't be leaked because it would allow such projects to be larger.) Relatedly, this might also allow one to train really excellent therapist-empaths.

Possible negative consequence: Police states where the police are now better at reading people's minds.