Friday, December 26, 2008
Lesson learned: act on your ideas
A running gag between Will and I since we were 17 - literally half our lives - has been "Restroom Review". This was a tongue-in-cheek concept we developed in the way that a pair of prepubescent public school dudes only can, in which we'd develop and maintain an archive of the best lavatories worldwide.
This marked the first in a series of knockaround ideas we had that someone else eventually made millions off of. Foremost among these was what became Netflix. (Seriously, we came up with the idea of doing computer network-based video rentals through a widely-distributed interconnected system and snail mail in 1993 while working together at Blockbuster.)
Anyway, the top performers for Restroom Review, we concluded, would be based on a series of distinct criteria. These included how many plys the provided toilet paper had, if the facility featured liquid and/or bar soap, the number of available stalls (and how many were ADA-compliant), and if the joint supported air-blown hand drying or used paper towels. Typical guy stuff.
But as time went on the more we joked about it and the older and more experienced we got, the relative humor began to give way to hints of genuine opportunity. We began to see as the Web really matured others capitalizing on our idea. Surely we weren't the only cats deranged enough to have thought of something so necessary, albeit comical. It was inevitable.
So last night I'm watching TV and I see a review for MizPee.com, a site that allows users to register public toilets throughout the planet; a SkyHook database for crappers, if you will. The site is even coupled with an iPhone app that uses GPS to automatically pinpoint the loo in question. A rival service, SitOrSquat, has mobile apps ported for iPhone and BlackBerry. Brilliant.
I swear, I'm going to have the U.S. Patent Office on speed dial from now and ring them up everytime I get a new notion.
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