I’m going through the past few years of ideas that are in my moleskine notebooks. Some of the ideas are really lacking, but might give you an idea? All of these ideas are yours for the taking. Don’t forget my archive of 100+ web startup ideas.

Wouldn’t it be cool to walk through a museum of geek/tech stuff from startups? Like the original signed contracts for financings, mergers, hirings, etc? A copy of the check that Peter Thiel wrote to Facebook? Copies of emails that were passed between Zuck and Sean Parker? Pets.com memorabilia, original Twitter sketches, etc.

A museum like this would likely be in the Valley, but would surely attract geeks/tourists. Or maybe someone could start a restaurant with all this memorabilia hanging up and on display — like a Hard Rock Cafe.

It’d also be neat to simply have an online museum that aggregates all of this neat historic stuff.

I’m going through the past few years of ideas that are in my moleskine notebooks. Some of the ideas are really lacking, but might give you an idea? All of these ideas are yours for the taking.  Don’t forget my archive of 100+ web startup ideas.

The basic idea is that people post their picture like they do on HotOrNot, but then people are rated on their hotness in interest categories.

• For all the lovers of Linkin Park, who is the hottest fan? Guys vote on girls, girls vote on guys.
• “You are the hottest Linkin Park fan”. People will only input stuff they like — I wouldn’t want to be the hottest euchre player if I didn’t play euchre.
• In it for me: “I’m the hottest ______”
• I keep adding interests to be sure I’m the hottest in all those categories.
• Future: Show me others with these interests. Let me meet new friends or relationships.

I’m going through the past few years of ideas that are in my moleskine notebooks. Some of the ideas are really lacking, but might give you an idea? All of these ideas are yours for the taking.  Don’t forget my archive of 100+ web startup ideas.

This could also be ‘Today in History’ or ‘Today in our History’. The idea is that everyone has more important dates in their lives than just their anniversary and birthday. I have always been fascinated by Birthday Alarm, which I feel is one of the most viral ideas ever. This idea was from 2007 when I came up with it. Here were some notes:

• Allow friends/people to add important days
• “on this day in…”
• On your homepage, you’ll see all the important dates inputted by your friends and ability to send them ecards. [Think how Facebook shows you birthday reminders each day, but now you'd know other special days in people's lives -- when their child was born, or when they started a diet, or conquered cancer, etc]
• Ability/ease to add a special/important event to today
• … “in this day in 2007, Ohio State lost to Purdue 54-7″
• … “Steve went and saw Of Montreal with Krista”
• … birthdays, anniversaries, etc
• Ability to add friends to a particular day/event
• search stuff
• tag stuff; categorize?
• Phase 2: send ecards and virtual gifts
• names for the site/app: “What did you do?”, Today in History
• Commenting on event/days
• Phase 2: add photos to event/days/moments
• click on a friend to see everything you two did together and when
• Monetize: ads; real gifts; virtual gifts
• Viralness: user adds dates and associates friends to those dates
• Why do this idea? viral; easy; fun
• Why users use it? learn more about themselves and friends; diary of sorts

I’m going through the past few years of ideas that are in my moleskine notebooks. Some of the ideas are really lacking, but might give you an idea? All of these ideas are yours for the taking. Don’t forget my archive of 100+ web startup ideas.

You could likely start to get indexed by Google and get high rankings for your stories if they have age to them in Google’s index. That is my thought anyhow. Even if the stories never happen, you could be prepared. Here are some examples:

• A-Rod breaks Hank Aaron’s Record
• Microsoft files bankruptcy
• Britney Spears is dating Eminem

I’m going through the past few years of ideas that are in my moleskine notebooks. Some of the ideas are really lacking, but might give you an idea? All of these ideas are yours for the taking. Don’t forget my archive of 100+ web startup ideas.

This was an idea from 2007, likely as a Facebook app, but maybe these days it could be a mobile app? The idea is that you could give any award to a friend — an award you make up that is obscure and unique to someone. Some examples:

• “Most likely to…”
• “Greatest…”
• “Smartest PHP Programmer I know..”
• “Sexiest friend I know…”
• “Smooth player”
• “#1 Britney Spears Fan”
• “#1 Sabres Fan”
• Awards & Achievements
• Allow friends to post them and users can remove them (like comments and wall posts)

UPDATE: Note, as mentioned below, most of these usernames have been taken away from me. I can not help you get them, so please don’t contact me about them. If they are in a ‘suspended’ state, you can likely get them from Twitter. Otherwise, if they are being used, then they likely were already taken by someone.

This is a fun little story from my past that I thought I would finally share.

When I went to the SXSW conference in March of 2007 is when I truly “got” Twitter. I saw the future. When I came home, I manually (with someone I hired) registered 1,131 usernames for city names, state names, state acronyms, sports team names, and tons of generic keywords. (Fun fact: Over the following couple of years, the usernames would collectively garner 150,000 followers)

I launched the first Twitter bots (that aren’t running anymore) and didn’t know what I was going to do with all of these generic usernames (i.e. buy, sell, dvd, book, movie, live, when, where, reply, 411, fyi, maps, on, off, mp3, pay, hotel, mail), but figured I’d come up with something.

I knew from the day I registered the usernames that I may lose them at any point — Twitter never guaranteed me these usernames — I never paid for them. Evan and I had a brief email dialogue after Twitter pulled the ‘celtics’ username from me. Evan’s issue with me was he didn’t like any one individual/business owning “a significant part of the Twitter namespace”; fair enough.

I learned not to build a business on top of another business — as Fred Wilson has said, “be your own bitch“. I had an automated system that would pull in RSS and spit headlines out to the accounts. The Twitter accounts I setup on my system were specifically sports teams (examples Sabres and Bills). They explicitly said they were ‘fan accounts’ and not affiliated with the teams. There was no monetization, although I planned to insert eBay items related to the teams sporadically and earn affiliate commissions. I was going to use the city and state names that I registered, but felt as though it’d be more of a waste of my time and money. I was going to feed city news to them, answering the “What are you doing?” question for a city — what’s currently going on in that city. I was going to use Twitter’s API to automatically update the avatar of each city with the current weather conditions. Twitter has since written an entry about ‘name squatting‘ and the use of 3rd-party RSS feeds.

With all that said, here is the list of “my” usernames. Note: Most have already been taken away from me. If any are in a ‘suspended’ state, they are basically available for the taking and you should be able to claim them for yourself. I wouldn’t start bombarding Twitter with requests for these; just request one of them if it relates to you or your business and you will use it for what Twitter is intended for: answering the “What are you doing?” question. Hopefully you’ll have a better use for them than I did. (more…)

I’m officially putting MyFavorites behind me. The problem I was trying to solve, isn’t one of those problems you think you have… and I think those types of solutions/startups are a bit tougher. I already outlined my own problems with running a startup in a prior post about MyFavorites (“Repeat after me, I will not do another startup as a non-technical founder unless…“).

I’m writing this post with the intentions of telling you about the idea, sharing the debates that occurred with how the app should operate and be used, share mockups with you, share documents/spreadsheets of tasks/bugs/features/timelines, and simply give a glimpse into this failure. It was a failure because I called quits on it — I ultimately couldn’t keep funding it myself and the team was losing interest in working on this app that I kept going back-and-forth on how the user experience should play out — when we hadn’t even had any users using it yet.

THE IDEA

My initial pitch for MyFavorites was “Show + Tell Your Favorites”. That pitch eventually became: “The Like button for everything.” Nick came up with that one and it was solid gold — would have made a great TechCrunch post title… we discussed possibly using it as our tagline, knowing it might be controversial and Facebook might sue — but any press is good press We weren’t going to do that though. [Quick shout-out to Buffalo-native Chris Sacca, whose portfolio list has a one-liner that sums up every single company. If you can't do that for your startup, then you're likely too broad and not simple enough. Remember, if you can't explain your solution to your Mom so she can understand it, then most people won't understand it and they especially can't explain it to their friends]

The problem we tried to solve — wouldn’t it be great to know the favorite books of your friends (and celebs), so you know what book you should be buying to read this weekend? Facebook has interests, but have you ever updated those since you signed up for Facebook? Wouldn’t it be great to know your friend’s favorite … anythings? You’d be looking at a feed of just favorites — blog posts, beers, sneakers, drinks at Starbucks, things to do in Baltimore, apps for iPhone, tree cutting services locally, meals at a restaurant, etc.

Wouldn’t it be cool to see all of Ashton’s favorites? Or Britney Spears, or any celebrity?

We were tackling the “interest graph”. You can find lots of my notes and findings at the MyFavorites blog.

I’ll tell you my grandiose billion-dollar idea for MyFavorites — imagine 50k people that took pictures of themselves with their love for Starbucks (or any brand). Sure, Starbucks currently can show a Facebook widget that shows profile pics of their Facebook fans… but imagine just replacing their homepage with 50,000 people showing their absolute love for Starbucks? That’d be amazing — Starbucks doesn’t even need to say anything about their products, because here’s people that vouch for us. Imagine Gary Vaynerchuk when selling his next book to just show tons of pictures of people with his last book, showing creatively how much they love garyvee?

With all of these pictures, a new ad network could be created — per the one I wrote about back in 2007 (“Ads with Personal Endorsements“) — this is the future, there’s no doubt about that. The problem is how do you get people to take pics of themselves with brands/products that they absolutely love and personally vouch for?

In the feed, our plan was to always have a #dickbar at the top of the screen. That would be asking the user for their favorites. At first, these would all be some default categories that we ask everyone, but as the user gets friends and follows people, anytime those users are asking people for favorites in a category, that user’s profile pic and name would show in the #dickbar with category they want favorites for. Meanwhile, there’d be sponsored favorite questions — such as, if you favorited Doritos, then Doritos could ask you “What’s your favorite Doritos flavor?”, or if you favorited Starbucks, it could be asked “What’s your favorite drink at Starbucks?”, etc. It just keeps going and going. [Here's a spreadsheet of some more sub-question examples]

As a user favorites something, there would be sub-questions to those categories. If you favorited ‘NFL’, then we could ask the question, “What’s your favorite NFL team?”. The plan was to allow multiple favorites for any category, for every user… so that everytime you were drinking a beer you loved, we wanted you to whip out your phone and favorite it. Then you’d have a ranking of your favorite beers — with # of times you favorited each one. You’d also be able to see the favorite beer tally of all your friends combined, or individually… so then you would know the most popular beer amongst your friends. With us knowing where you live and where you’re favoriting this stuff, we could also figure out the most popular ANYTHING in every city — that’s powerful. We could basically show a map of the world and show Gibson vs Fender and which guitar brand is the leader in every city, every state, and every country.

LOGO

I used 99designs. I know that basically every designer out there loathes this service and anyone that uses it, but I beg to differ. If you’re awesome, you aren’t going to be replaced by 99designs. I think it’s a great opportunity for college kids and international designers that don’t have access to design work. It’s a great platform for learning as a designer — understanding a client’s needs/requirements/vision and trying to design for that. The designer gets feedback from not only the client, but other designers — and can see feedback on other designer’s work by the client [and others]. As a designer you need to go into knowing you’re basically paying for education — you pay by doing work for free and likely not going to get paid for that work. You go to school and pay for that education. Education and experience costs money and time. 99designs is disruptive and I understand the controversy. Various designers in the world will continue using it and so will various people — but it’s not going to become the defacto for the entire design world.

With the MyFavorites logo, I wanted something that could eventually be placed on blog posts like the Twitter ‘tweet’ button and the Facebook ‘like’ button.

FAVORITING PROCESS

We went back and forth on this so many times I can’t count them all. Granted, I was the one changing my mind a lot. We initially started with a sentence strategy — you would say “My Favorite beer is Duvel” — so basically “My Favorite (category) is (item)”. The problem you run into is pluralization — is vs are. I can’t even speak to all the issues with this, but our language is a mess  [Here's a screenshot of an old sentence structure process for our app]

The other problem with the sentence structure is that it seems a bit lengthy. We all went to SXSW 2011 and were almost ready to launch the app (this was after weeks of tons of late nights trying to cram this app to be ready) … and then we all saw Pete Cashmore’s interview of Dennis Crowley … where Dens talks about making the checkin process as easy as possible.. and I realized we needed to simplify our favoriting process. Nick had mentioned many weeks prior that we should start the process by showing like 10 default categories, with the ability for user to choose ‘other’ and input their own category. This would help guide our users and make the process slicker. So that was our final strategy on this focal UX point of the app.

We also originally allowed the user to input multiple categories for a favorite — this seemed to like it would make the user have to “think” too much. We found ourselves wondering what categories/tags to use.

Our other strategy was to focus on the ability for users to add tips to Foursquare. Initially we thought that when someone favorites something, they’d be able to checkin at Foursquare, post it to Twitter and Facebook. That doesn’t really make sense though — I use the Foursquare app — I opened that as soon as I walk into a venue — that’s when I think to use that app. The idea with MyFavorites is to use it when you are loving something — so likely, you’re already checked-into a Foursquare venue, and so this would be an ability to add more tips into Foursquare…. which hasn’t been done yet. No other apps are focused on getting more tips into Foursquare — and to me, tips are the most valuable aspect of Foursquare.

The big problem we just never knew how to answer until the app started getting used, was we didn’t know what to give the user after they favorited something. Foursquare gives points, random badges… should MyFavorites being doing game mechanics like this? Leaderboard seemed pertinent to us — but specifically showing the user what other favorites exist in the category they just favorited in — and where their current favorite item ranks in relation to other items they have favorited in that same category (i.e. ‘Pabst Blue Ribbon is your 3rd favorite beer!’). [Here's an old leaderboard mockup and another one specific to a user] [Here's a spreadsheet of tons of possible messages we could have delivered to the user after they favorited something]

MOBILE APP vs WEB APP

Initially we were building both an iPhone & Android app (after establishing our dev platform as Titanium Appcelerator), as well as a website where you could favorite things as well. It was all too much. Even with Titanium’s ability to “write once, and push out an iPhone and Android app” — that’s false; it takes a lot of work to manipulate features for iPhone and Android — there’s no scroll wheel function in Android; there’s no menu button on iPhone as there is on Android.

Having a web app being created at the same time was ridiculous too — especially since we still hadn’t nailed down the favoriting process or tried it with any users. I was blowing cash — at a ridiculous pace. I had 7 guys working on this thing at once, as we were hustling for SXSW launch deadline. We decided to focus on the iPhone app, which sucked for me and Dan the backend programmer, because we both couldn’t even use the app — we both have Droid X phones.

Focus on one platform. Get it out there — let people use it — nail down the UX with user input.

SOCIAL INTERACTIONS

I looked at Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare — then wrote a post called the “Metrics of me, me, me!” — basically the conscious and subconscious interactions/metrics we make with these services. I also blogged about the “usage psychology” of those services to better understand how we could hook MyFavorites users. Our social interactions were the following:

• favorite [default action; like a tweet or checkin]
• ‘me too’ [trying to get users to add more favorites easier]
• ‘reply’ [ability for users to reply to someone's favorite with their own favorite -- i.e. your favorite car is a Nissan Altima, well mine is a Mattel. We found a lot of humor came from this action]
• ask for favorites [ability for user to ask friends for their favorites in a category -- i.e. if I were going to Ireland for vacation, what are things to do there?] [users would simply 'reply' with their favorite]
  

API

Eventually we wanted to open an API that allowed you to have favorites auto-imported — such as Twitter favorites, who uses that feature on Twitter anyway? Our site would give you a reason to use favoriting on Twitter. For YouTube, we’d auto-import stuff you favorite in there. Lots of apps out there have a like or favorite ability, and it seems like an opportunity exists for aggregating all of that.

MOCKUPS OF FUNCTIONALITY

These obviously took tons of hours of our lives nailing these. We looked at lots of apps for help/ideas.

Question Process:

This was up for serious debate all the time. Basically, I wanted this. I wanted to be able to ask my friends what their favorite things to do in Ireland were. Or Hawaii, where I’m going for my honeymoon. Or I am looking for someone to take down this tree in my backyard — Yelp sucks in Buffalo, so how can I find a friend that can recommend a tree cutting service? So the ‘where’ was a big issue — I didn’t want just a ‘tree cutting service’, I wanted a ‘tree cutting service in Buffalo, NY, USA’. So we had this ‘Where?’ optional field, which then would either take a Foursquare venue, or you could select a city or country from a DB we had. It was a complete mess — it was confusing to users [especially when we had this on the Favoriting process] — and the rest of my team didn’t think we needed this functionality at all anyhow.

Profile Settings and Adding Friends:

Signup:

Favorite page on web — we ultimately decided to do the Instagram thing, which was have a non-interactive website initially and simply have a webpage for every favorite that occurs by users, so that these could be shared. I think this minimal design was great and we planned to build out feed/category/profile pages on the web this way too:

Search / Discovery – nearby and everywhere. By the people you follow, or everyone. Too many options and thus too cluttered IMO:

Documents / Spreadsheets

• Sharing to Facebook and Twitter and Foursquare — get new users! Here’s a spreadsheet of all the possible copy (tweets, etc) that could have been used.
• URL examples of our website as a spreadsheet (more ideas of our future plans).
• Here is a spreadsheet of our final team push towards a launch. These were the remaining features to finish and some hours estimates on completing them.
• Here is a monster feature / task list, which clearly was just out of control. I didn’t know how to tame my beastly instincts for “we could do this, and this, and this, and..”
• Here is a list of common categories that most people would likely add favorites for.
• Here is a monster list of bugs and features (different from above) — you’ll see more ideas of our plans here.

OINK

Meanwhile at SXSW is when I first learned that Kevin Rose was gathering some troops (including Daniel Burka, whose design work I have been following for years in awe) to create Milk Inc., which was going to be an incubator of app ideas. One of those app ideas that possibly was going to be their focus (OINK), was dabbling in similar territory of MyFavorites. We had about 6 months on them, but still — that’s some competition.

THE END

I still want to use an app like MyFavorites — and I hope OINK can nail it. Ultimately, I wasn’t the guy to push this idea through. Being a non-technical founder, I just can’t throw money at this thing in the hopes of nailing it. I believe we were definitely at a point where we could have raised some funding around SXSW timeframe — we had the team, the focus, and an app that was working … but ultimately when we came back from SXSW, we all started losing interest, the team was all wondering where this was eventually going, and I was wondering if I even wanted to run a startup, have investors, have the responsibility of employees and answering to a board of investors, etc.

Moving forward I’m looking to help the OINK guys or anyone working on this problem in any way I can. There’s a solid 6 months of problems, solutions, strategy, userflow, monetization, and everything else under the sun… that went down. And there’s still a massive opportunity out there to nail.

• Want to read more of my startup failures? Read here
• Want to read the 100+ web startup ideas I’ve written about? Read here

In closing, I’ll leave you with some Jay-Z that pretty much sums my future up…

I’m onto the next one, I’m onto the next one…

I needed railing for my home’s balcony. I wanted composite PVC, because it is relatively maintenance-free. I bought the Veranda PVC Composite Railing from Home Depot. The project took Brennan and I a total of 19 hours. The night before we got materials for 3 hours at Home Depot and then spent 16 hours the next day (we started at 8:30am and wrapped at 12:30am the following morning). I went with black vinyl railing. It does look nice and is decently sturdy.

[Brennan -- you absolutely rock. Thanks again for taking your one day off and making this happen.]

Supplies were roughly $1,000. The balcony is 20′ x 11′. There’s about the edge of the railing to the edge of the balcony. We put up 18′ of balcony facing the front, and then another 9′ on each side. So (5) 6′ rails, and another (2) 3′ rails [these we cut from a 6' pack].

Overall, it’s not bad…. but there are issues you need to be aware of before starting the project to avoid the same mistakes we made:

1. The boxes for the 6′ Stair Rail Kit and the 6′ Rail Kit, look way to similar. Be aware (because the precut baluster holes aren’t square for the stair kit).
2. The proclaimed 6′ rails, are not necessarily 6′. They will likely need to be cut.
3. The bottom rail and the top rail typically aren’t even the same size! They might be 5/8″ off or whatever, which is not good.
4. The BIG issue you need to deal with first for the rails is that the precut baluster holes are not aligned (typically) for the top and bottom rail — you will need to line up the holes, and then cut the rails from one end to ensure they are lined up … and then whatever length you really need, cut off the other end…. this will ensure your balusters line-up.
5. Read the instructions and ALWAYS start with putting the top rail in first, as it says. This wasn’t typical for my friend who has always started with the bottom rail first, but he has always used wood that he cuts.
6. The ballusters come in packs of 6, yet each 6′ rail requires 13 ballusters — wtf.
7. Use a circular saw for the cuts — you really want them completely straight.
8. Have a drill and hopefully have a real square bit — as the ones included are garbage (they do work, but when you make a mistake — and you will — you’re going to destroy that garbage bit and your screws).
9. We bought 4′ x 4′s, and 4′ x 4′ metal brackets. We used liquid nails between bracket and balcony floor, then screwed brackets in wtih 1 5/8″ screws (bought a box of them).
10. We started by putting up all the posts — unsure if this was a good idea or not. We spaced them all 6′, although the post sleeves are probably 1/8″ on each side, so probably an additional 1/4″ should have been added to the equation. Don’t forget the 3.5″ for the 4′ x 4′.
11. After the posts, you should start from a corner and work yourself around the entire balcony. Initially we started in the middle — not good.

Next project, I need balcony flooring. I’m likely buying Envirotile, which works out to about $3.11/sq ft — it’s made out of recycled tires. I also like the idea of wood, but it requires maintenance each year (which I’m trying to avoid) — IKEA has PLATTA Decking that works out to about $3.88/sq ft. Then there is this composite wood flooring that is real nice, but works out to about $9/sq ft(!!!) – http://www.handydeck.com/resideck.html.

This idea I really wanted to pursue. I had it back on October 9, 2007 (that’s when I wrapped up a spec document on it). Below is info on it.. you can see it’s a bit dated, but still a good idea. Someone is pursuing something similar to this that I know of, so if you have any interest in this idea, or have better ideas for pieces of it, comment on this post!

It is a facebook app initially, but the future would definitely hold this as becoming a stand-alone website.

The startup is called ‘Fakebook’ and essentially is an app that allows people to have their own ‘fake’ profile, which friends can impersonate. So I could be the ‘fake dave g.’ and post something on a mutual friends’ wall by your fake profile — or on your own wall. There are also ‘super fake’ profiles, which are typically going to be celebrities – so I could act as fake britney spears and post something to your fake profile. The point is for everyone to be funny. Additionally, there’s a game to this whole thing — people get awarded ‘LOL’ points on their comments/photos and see where they rank on the leaderboard amongst their friends (and the entire Fakebookpopulation). People also earn ‘fakebook bucks’ (virtual currency) everytime someone LOL’s a comment of theirs, which they then turn in to post as the celebrity (super fake) profiles — it might cost 2 fakebook bucks to impersonate Paris Hilton and post to your own fake profile, or your friends’ fake profile — or to the super fake paris hilton’s profile which would get your comment huge exposure and possibly a huge ROI of fakebook bucks.

I got the idea from www.twitter.com/fakeandrewhyde

That’s a twitter account that some friends of Andrew Hyde ( www.twitter.com/andrewhyde) setup, to kind of impersonate and make fun of him .. in a fun way.

Also, my friends and I always joke around — and throw each other’s funny subtleties back at each other. I’m a huge music buff, and have a tendancy of sending out emails to my friends that read, “OMFG! YOU HAVE TO LISTEN TO THIS SONG… NOW!”

So they joke that I’m always saying OMFG.  I could see one of them logging into this system, pretending to be me, and making a statement as me regarding something stupid, like, “OMFG! YOU HAVE TO TRY THE APPLE PIE AT MCDONALDS!”

RE: Super fake friends — only the admin creates these [for now].  Fake friends – only users/friends can create these of friends. So I’m a friend of Mike Arrington, if he doesnt’ have a fake friend profile setup yet, then I can create one for him by simply uploading a photo of him; and then he’s setup. But if you aren’t a real friend of him, then you can’t setup a profile for him.

I have uploaded the spec doc and embed’d below:
Fakebook-Mockups1

Here’s the spreadsheet for estimating the work, which I gave to some programmers:

Fakebook Dev Estimates

• Access to unreleased songs and exclusive remixes
• More user avatars
• Stickers for your laptop
• Laptop skins (maybe with upsell to buy the real one)
• Real turntables
• Filter effects on songs as if you remixed it a little (bass effect, treble effect, etc)
• Laser light show
• Dry ice
• Glow sticks if in the crowd
• Lighter if in the crowd
• Chains for your neck
• Ability to drop your own nickname audio over a beat like DJ Clue (“DJ PoPo”) or other predefined clips (“bounce!”, “get up!”, “how’s everyone doing?”)
• Other accessories for your room (poles, cages)
• Different room themes (bar, club, country bar, dive bar)
• Different wallpaper for the room
• Hats for avatars (NewEra sponsored?)
• Eggs to throw at the DJ
• Blow kisses at the DJ
• Sponsored rooms by Bacardi (thx Scott Sage)
• UGC if integrated with SoundCloud (thx Scott Sage)
• Projector that displays music videos of the songs playing
• Any other ways of personalizing the experience

Other ideas:

• I wish if were to boot someone off the stage, you could do it in the style of the 2min mark of Guy Ritchie’s video for ‘Smack My Bitch Up’ by Prodigy: http://vimeo.com/8714164
• Charts: Similar artists; popular tracks by this artist
• Once an iPhone app exists, I see parties with my friends revolving around a few of us sharing the DJing responsibilities. A monitor or TV could display full-screen the song title and artist, along with the DJ name/avatar.

What are your ideas?