Don't worry about what anybody else is going to do. The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

Alan Kay

Cambrian House began as a crowdsourcing community using a wisdom of crowds based approach to discover new business and technology ideas. These pages are being kept online as a technology demo to showcase Chaordix™.

Looking to harness the power of your crowd? Find out about Chaordix™ - technology that enables enterprises to get the most out of crowdsourcing.

Ideas

View next idea in this round »

Digital Doorbell

Submitted by: thecougar
Created: May 14, 2007, 5:28 pm

Join Cambrian House

People

Ideas

Businesses

Connect with talented people. Collaborate on ideas. Realize your vision.

Not freeish. Not freesque. It's free!

The Idea

Back in the day, if someone wanted to get a hold of you, there were only a few options. Telephone (land line), snail mail, or the good ol' fashion doorbell. Nowadays I have at least 20 ways for people to contact me. Home phone, cell phone, work Email, hotmail, gmail, blog comments, CH messages, Twitter, MySpace message...the list goes on and on.

My idea is a service that can send you a text message or Email when you receive a communication from any of your online contact points. You would log into a site, tell it about the services you use, and set up the level of interruption you'd like (i.e. Email for blog comments, text message for CH mail). It sounds complicated to implement, but it might actually be fairly straightforward considering how many sites have RSS feeds for comments and messages.

I thought of this idea when I was...

realizing how much time I spend on the Internet just checking in on all the various sites that I use.

Comments Posted

gzep Posted: May 14, 2007, 6:16 pm

An aggregator for all types of e-communications, interesting.

Perhaps it could send a periodic summary email or sms as an alternative (or additional) output.

I have multiple email accounts, rss feeds and forums that I check too, so I can see the value in this project.

gaim is a program that can already aggregate your IM's into one stream, but it is free.

I like it, but how do you propose to have it make money?

micco Posted: May 15, 2007, 8:02 am

I don't think making money would be a problem. If you can demonstrate that you can accurately filter, aggregate and alert, people will be happy to pay for the convenience.

Aggregating things like phone calls would be more technically difficult because they're on a separate network, but aggregating mail, RSS, web content, IM, etc. would be pretty straightforward.

I think the big challenge here is usability, not technical. What kind of interface can you provide that makes the aggregation useful? What kind of controls can you put on changing status (i.e., it needs to be really easy to go from regular to "quiet mode" and back)? What kind of rules and filters can accurately prioritize alerts?

Maurreen Posted: May 15, 2007, 2:02 pm

It could also set different priority levels according to who sent the communication.

Allan Posted: May 15, 2007, 3:36 pm

Like the idea. But it could be a curse!

Hello!

Ideas