Server-Server #waiter

• Pain points
• To customer: You go to a restaurant and order something the first time. Then afterwards, for ordering the next item (which will typically be extra naans or some new thing). But calling the waiter: "hey bhaiyya"/"waiter" or some other thing is a problem. Even bigger problem is when you don't remember who your table's waiter is - and you want some spoon/onion or something.
• To customer: You don't know how each item looks in the menu. Typically you ask the waiter about specific items: "Bagara baigan mein gravy hota hai kya?" kind of questions. The pain here is that the number of questions you can ask the waiter is limited (you can imagine why) and you cannot see how every item looks like.
• Also, if there are some suggestions about what is special/quickly available/generally preferred item in a particular restaurant, it will be helpful to the customer and the restaurant owner will be happy to provide this data for the users.
• Idea
• What if all the menu cards/restaurant tables have QR code or some marker? When customers arrive at the restaurant table, they can point their smartphone cameras to the marker, which fires the menu up. The menu will be a standard card type menu, where items are clickable. 
• On clicking a particular menu item, you can see the image of how it looks like (solves the gravy problem), quantity information (veg biryani in different restaurants serves different number of people), etc.
• When you want to order another item from the middle of your meal, you order it from the app itself (you give the quantity and item), you know the running price (track to see if it is in your budget), you get suggestions about what is popular in this restaurant, etc. Basically, computer server becomes the hotel server here...
• What more? The order you give fires up a timer, if you do not get service within a time, you can rate the restaurant directly from there (think improved service).
• Once we get all the rating/orders/popular-items-in-a-restaurant, etc. we can provide analytics about it to the restaurant owner about what items are going well, what needs to be improved, how is the service at each table, etc.
• Since we know all the analytics, we can provide discounts to repeated customers (configurable by the restaurant owner).
• Technology challenges/description
• The augmentation part is easy.
• Analyzing the data and giving useful feedback to restaurant owners is a big data/text mining challenge.
• Marketing this app to users and restaurants.
• Competitors
• Yelp/OpenTable (not direct competition though), FourSquare (in the discounts category).
• Market 
• All restaurants which expect customers who have smartphones with cameras.
• Business model 
• The app can be free both to restaurant owners and customers but the data of which item is being ordered by whom, and how many times (data analytics/market research, basically) can be sold to other companies or even restaurant owners themselves.

NetFlix for Youtube Videos #SponsoredContent

• Pain points: 
• For creators: 
• Video content publishers in youtube (think amateur short film makers) have no business model for the awesome entertainment content they deliver (sometimes short films are actually better than the mainstream ones but still we pay only for the flop movie content in theaters but not for youtube videos). #ad-based-revenue-for-content.
• Want analytics and expert feedback on their content. Analytics are currently provided by Youtube but expert feedback is in the comments - can this be improved?
• They need publicity for videos. The whole point of putting a video on Youtube is for showing off/publicity. #Can we improve it?
• For video content hosts: Youtube, despite being the thing which many users can't live without, doesn't have a good business model. #business model for youtube.
• For users: Don't want to pay for youtube which has been free all the while.
• Idea (needs improvement - please help):
• Design a ad structure for video sharing sites like youtube and facebook - I am not saying the ads will be non-intrusive at all (which is bad for advertisers). They will be as intrusive as TV ads (to which users are used to anyway), or may be as much as display ads.
• Like all passive ads (like TV ads or display ads in internet), the ads will be embedded in content. The embedding can be done in several ways (needs improvement/your feedback)
• Ads can be augmented in the video. Ex: Zuna vision, Stanford.
• Starting of the video like already existing youtube ads.
• In between the video - based on video content. If it is cricket match/MTV video, ads (different ads each time) can be present in between overs/songs.
• So, in summary, it will be a website/app which provides some tools for content creators/video makers to edit videos - augment their videos with some virtual objects, put images as background to some parts of videos (called video compositing - the one you see as background to hosts in tv9's weather report), etc. But, while editing the videos, the creator will show some space where we can put some ads. During his editing time, we can show him other videos as suggestions which will improve content discovery (needs improvement).
• Technology challenges/description
• Embedding ads in video
• Content discovery - think of videos (with our ads) appearing as suggestions in the right side top panel of Facebook.
• Competitors
• None I know of do both easy content discovery (which is marketing for video makers - we publicize your video by making it discoverable) and embedded ads in video.
• Market (possible customers)
• Youtube and facebook videos have a new business models. And, since content (along with the ads, of course) is shown in the ad space, the CTRs are bound to be higher than the traditional sponsored search ads.
• Business model
• Advertiser pays every time his video ad is shown to a user. We can distribute that revenue between our platform and the original video content owner (can be figured easily - challenge level is low here).
• Or even niche clients like national geographic/ndtv/espn can monetize their old videos using ads in plain spaces (charcha vedikas ante table space of the news reader/discussion forum is generally plain and available for ads/ ground for sports is free for ads, etc) is huge money.