A couple of months ago my cousin, who is still in school, asked me if I knew Java. I replied in the affirmative. He knew a school friend who had an idea that could potentially make a lot of money, and it involved Java. Both my cousin and I didn't know what the idea was, since the dude was not willing to share his idea, until we signed 'Confidentiality Agreements'. The only information I got was that it involved cellphones, so I gathered it involved J2ME, which I knew absolutely nothing about. I said, sure I'll meet the dude and hear his idea.
I finally met the dude. After I signed two copies of his poorly written 'Confidentiality Agreement', he demonstrated the idea. The idea was to get a cellphone to receive an infra-red signal, store the signal in the cellphone, and send the signal to any receiver. The best example of this was using your cellphone as a remote control. According to his idea, you program the cellphone with your remote control, assign a key to a particular TV channel, and you can press the assigned key on your cellphone to change the channel. The argument was that remote controls are often misplaced. Rather than looking for the misplaced remote control, use the infra-red interface available on your cellphone to change the channel. And if you misplace your phone, you can call your cellphone. The cellphone remote control can also be applied to other areas, such as switching on/off a light or an alarm system.
For the J2ME side, a mobile application that runs on the phone needs to be developed, and presumably has a nice-looking user interface and some business logic to assign different keys to a particular infra-red signal. The application can be installed on the phone.
The dude was pretty adamant that the idea hasn't been implemented. Since he didn't know any Java, he wanted me first to do a prototype to prove it can be done. As remuneration, I would receive $500 if I completed the prototype. If it sold well, I get a share of the profits.
While he thought of an amazing idea, I wasn't really convinced it was going to be successful. Infra-red capabilities of current cellphones are poor; in fact the range is around 3 feet. That would make a crappy remote control. But who knows, the range could be greater. Battery life could take a hammering, plus cellphones can be treated roughly if used as remote controls as people tend to throw remote controls around recklessly.
I'm also not keen on product convergence (combining different products functions into one product); an example of this is camera phones, which I hate. Some people love product convergence, but others just loathe it. Personally I'm just not keen on dicking around and configuring every key to change channels, volume, mute the TV or read Teletext, especially if I buy a new phone. Infra-red ports aren't available on many phone models, and to my knowledge, the Java platform is only available on certain phone models (not sure how widespread it is). So basically the product will only work on certain cellphones. And personally I don't know J2ME, so I'm not sure how big a learning curve it would be. Considering the above, a few days later I told him I would not go further with it.
Later on I googled for this idea and found literally hundreds of links talking about this idea. It seems Sony Ericsson already had some sort of patent on this idea and is already developing a new phone model to deliver this functionality. I wonder if the dude actually did his research. Oh well, it seemed like a good idea to begin with, but then they just kind of seem to lose their original 'wow' impact when you begin to think about it more.
And if you were wondering about the 'Confidentiality Agreement' that I signed, well it's pretty much useless. There were no legal witnesses, it wasn't properly done, etc. I suspect he ripped an example from the Internet. It was basically a gentlemens agreement. Not saying that I'm not.
No comments:
Post a Comment