Today I read an article on TechCrunch which was positioned as a poll eliciting responses on a generalized area of development. The framework, as outlined by Erick Schonfeld, was this: “come up with a killer Web app in 45 minutes” for the Future of Web Apps conference in Miami. I guess the goal is to actually build the app within the timeframe specified. The categories for the poll were:

• A Webwide Reputation System
• Cloud Computing
• Social Finance
• Webmail – An Alternative to Gmail
• Search
• Life Streaming
• Video Messaging/Publishing

Below are the stats taken @ 2:10pm on 2/12/08 from the TechCrunch site.

The thing that really grabbed me about this TechCrunch poll was not what was in the original post, but the 50+ comments that followed, many with several other ideas on the “killer app.” In fact, yours truly tried to jump into the comment thread as well. I figured that I should keep my comments short, but still the topic and inferred topics kept me thinking and spawned some other ones in the process.

Many other ideas

(more…)

From today’s Dilbert cartoon (published on 2/12/08):

Will Dilbert be able to save the day? Our software engineers already have! Obviously, Dilbert hasn’t heard of GoGrid where you can deploy virtualized servers within minutes! I sure hope that Scott Adams builds this theme out. It might prove to be interesting.