Arthur Freydin’s Blog

Online marketing, gadgets, business, and thoughts.

Web 2.0 is all around us. It’s changed the ways we interact with online entities and has facilitated the creation of many great tools we use today.

However, there are still countless of uses out there that have [probably] not been exploited yet.

I gave myself a little test the other day on the drive back home from work: think of any industry and try to come up with a web 2.0 enhancement. Here’s the list:

Imagestorm
Brainstorming – but with images.
Say you’re a marketing agency and have a new project that requires you to create marketing collateral for a new visual (video or static imagery) campaign. Your campaign is marketing hotdogs. Unfortunately, this is the first hotdog campaign you’ve ever done and are drawing a blank picture in your head.

That’s where Imagestorm comes in. You type in hotdog and you are instantly blasted with various logos, newsletter images, and video promos that other companies have had success with. Kinda like MarketingSherpa but more web2.0.

Amazon2.0
The Amazon product pages are notoriously known for being ridiculously overpopulated with info. While this is great for SEO, product education, and cross-sell, it may not be exactly what the user expects to see on a product page.

Google Website Optimizer would help here but with so many moving parts and predetermined user expectation, it may not appeal to the Amazon usability group. So why not hand over the control to the users entirely? Allow the users to customize every content block’s position and remove if necessary. Not only would that provide the users with that power but it would also give Amazon valuable insight into what the consumer really wants to see on a product page.

Machining & Models
Anyone ever hear of those 3d model printers that are being developed? Well, why not use the same web based software for the custom machining industry to build basic parts out of metals and plastics? The machining shop can charge by amount of corners, length of piping, etc. This would be a boon for industrial jobs as well as hobbyists.

Tire Design (can you tell I was driving while I thought of these?)
Have you ever met a true-to-heart car enthusiast? Someone that has done every single aftermarket modification that is commercially (and sometimes homemade) available for their car? These people are serious fanatics and will go to great lengths to make sure that their ride stands out from everyone else.

Enter the custom tire tread. Showfloor-only designs that can be anything from custom tribal imprints to club logos to manufacturer sponsored designs. The tread on these tires would not benefit the driver in a rainstorm but would be a huge hit on the showfloor. The custom tire tread can easily be created through an online application or submitted artwork.

Design Your Own Road Sign (once again, I was driving)
Plenty of stores already sell signs like “Parking only for Yankees Fans”. How about launching an online service that allows the user to completely customize a new road sign – custom sizes available of course. A web based application can accept text (in multiple fonts & sizes) and images and be able to overlay the creative right on the road sign shape of your choice.

Social Hot Sauce
Have you ever walked in to a niche food store in San Fransisco and noticed the seemingly endless wall of hot sauce bottles? People that purchase these bottles are more likely to pass them on to friends and document the experience than people that purchase a typical off-the-shelf brand. These people are fanatics about hot sauce.

In comes the hot sauce social network with a twist. Users would be able to design their own hot sauce by dictating ingredients and bottle design. They can then purchase the finalized product and showcase it to the masses for purchase & review. This would also be a great facebook widget.

Virtual House Hunter
Enter a internet savvy, home-seeking individual. This person knows what area they want to live in, how many bedrooms they would like their house to have, and how much they would like to pay for the house. This is the type of person that doesn’t need a real estate agent to literally hold their hands as they are viewing a house.

Virtual agents. An agent can be in Detroit, Michigan but will be showing three houses in 3 different corners of the USA at the same time of the day. This agent will also only be taking 2% commission. Oh, everything would be based on a very slick web application.

There are countless other ideas that I have come up with the rest of that day. There are just so many verticals that have not even touched on some of the cool new ways to interact with their users and it’s so damn exciting. I can only imagine what happens when the adoption rate booms.