Kid's idea: Eco Day game

It's a video game in which you try to spend the day being as eco-friendly as possible.

For example, your dad sees a hornet's nest in the garage. Do you:
a) incourage him to kill the nest
b) beg him to leave the nest alone
c) enter your own idea

As you go through the game, you get presented with similar situations where you need to make eco-friendly decisions or contribute your input to other kids. You earn badges when you accomplish certain tasks in the most eco-friendly way.

You get 5 stars for each level. If you get 2 or less stars on a level you have to restart the level, if you get 3 or more you can move on, if you get 5 you get a bonus level.

Parents can also log what they've done to help the environment, e.g. read books instead of playing video games or turning off the computer for a day.

Granted, all of the above was dictated to me by a 9 year old. But the basic idea is interesting: create a virtual world in which kids and adults alike can practice addressing environmental issues and ultimately grow into more eco-responsible generation.

First Step Real Estate Helper

There are many resources available online for finding houses based on price, number of bathrooms, bungalow, apartments, & row-houses with fireplaces, pools and AC, but there is no easy way of sourcing out a neighborhood. Next time I look to move I will be interested in a lot of other details that are completely overlooked by most real-estate-board websites (particularly anything available in Canada).

I would like to be able to find houses for sale that are near a library, a school - and not just any school. Perhaps a well-rated school, a French school, a public school or a religious private school. I would like to be within a certain distance of public transit, and a reasonable commute time to work, church and clubs. On a low traffic street that is a short walk from a park, and near a bike trail.

Knowing what areas have houses within my budget, and with the amenities I am looking for is an important first step before I start considering individual houses. Generalized pricing data may be sufficient for an application like this, and available from census data. It would be a fair investment to try and build in all of the functionality of a real-estate boards property listings, but it may not be necessary if you don't try to compete directly. Besides, you may find some data feeds are available to be included into your app at a later date.

Need a place to start?
The Realtor's website in Canada (http://www.realtor.ca/) has some major oversights. You cannot get to a map view if you start in an advanced search. Their recently released Android app is rated 2.3/5, with three times as many "1" votes as it has "5"s. People in Canada need somewhere else to start their search

Bloggers help bloggers

How do I get attention to my blog? This is indeed a hot question for bloggers. You start by writing content that people are interested in. How do you know what people are interested in? If you are a new blogger, you may not. If you are an established blogger, your readers might ask you questions directly. But even established bloggers have difficulty figuring out what to blog about next.

Startup Idea:
Bloggers Help Bloggers or Ask a Blogger. Here is how it works:

1. Bloggers register their blogs on the site you develop.
2. Questions get asked either on your site or to the individual bloggers the usual way.
3. When someone is in the possession of a question they don't want to bother answering, they forward it to your site.
4. Interested parties grab the question and answer it on their blogs, then refer to their posts on your site.
5. The person who asked the question gets the answer, and the blogger gets the attention.

Expand:

Use machine learning to match questions to bloggers and answers to people. 

Swap Resources platform

If https://www.parkatmyhouse.com/ and Garden my garden ideas work, then

Startup Idea:
Make a platform to allow people with more of similar ideas to bring them to life. Your startup is a 0-1, which allows others to do the 1-n work.

Garden my garden

This is a similar idea to https://www.parkatmyhouse.com/, so in a way it is not a 0-1 startup. The idea still has potential though.

I am a terrible gardner and I live near apartment buildings. I know some people who love to garden as a hobby. People in apartment buildings or rental properties do not have the opportunity to garden.

Startup idea:
Let people make use of the soil you have available. You get a pretty looking house, someone else gets to design and grow a flower garden. You get vegetables as a payment, the grower gets more vegetables from using your backyard garden.

Pick my tree

Tired of having to rake up all those rotten pears from your tree?
In the neighbourhood and need a snack?
Love to can stuff, but can't afford to buy the fruit?

Startup Idea
Create an app where people put their trees up for picking.
Search for a particular fruit or area (especially nice with a mobile app) to find available tree - voila, instant free grocery store!
Tree owner gets no rotten pears. Tree picker gets free fruit. Volunteers and people in need get resources.

How do you know that this is a good idea? Edmonton is doing it - but at first glance it seems that their process is a bit clunky.

I need a pattern..NOW

Lots of people sew. If you want to sew, you need a pattern. You can buy a pattern at a store for $5+ and then have to modify it to fit you, which takes a fair bit of work. You can draft your own pattern, which takes even more work.

OR

Startup Idea 1
Start with making an app that allows a sewer to record her clients' measurements.
Expand by building a website where a sewer can log in, choose a client, and generate a basic pattern drafted to the client's measurements. Sounds difficult? Not really. If you can generate a draft to scale and send it to a web page, all you need is this book.

Start with basic patterns like skirt or pajama pants. Give slopers for free, charge for more complicated patterns.

Startup Idea 2
If the first idea still sounds too hard, skip the app and start by creating a custom hat pattern. All you need to know is how to draft a rectangle and print it to scale.

This is a low competition market!!! For some reason, there are very few apps for an amateur sewer. Pattern drafting software is either expensive or crummy. I happen to be a developer who also likes to sew. Please build in this field for me!

Find me a home

Everyone has stuff. Stuff is hard to organize. The popular advice, and a good one, is to get rid of stuff.

But what do you do if you just can't part with a helmet-shaped salad bowl that you inherited from aunt Agatha, and that is too big to fit into your bachelor kitchennette? Would you turn it upside-down and use it as a lamp shade? What if your house was flooded a week before your baby was born and you lost your crib? Would you put the baby into a laundry basket? (Smallprint: babies are not stuff. Just using babies to illustrate the point.)

Startup Idea:
Create a forum-like website where people post a challenge and other people come up with solutions. Could be reward-driven to order to be attractive.

Take it further:
Show the most common places for regular items, like keys or childrens' artwork.
Show the most interesting, or unusual places for such items.

If you get traffic, the owners of house organizing blogs will put up links to their blogs. So instead of using google, people will search your site (or google your site).

The goal is to  allow people to get answers to their specific problems without spending hours researching and customizing. And to allow those that are good problem solvers and enjoy creative thinking to help someone else with their problem.