iPhone app showing your car's MPG

A little iPhone application + cable that connects to your car and shows the current MPG.

After getting my G35 in 04 I would often use the MPG display and very quickly learned how to drive better. Most cars do not come with built in MPG displays though so if they had this app they could save gas and thus save money which would pay for the app many times over.

"Pay an expert to review my code" website

A website that would get together people who can review code and people who need code reviewed.

New to a language, library or toolkit having someone review your code can be extremely useful. Paying someone to go through your code and writeup notes on bugs, use of deprecated api, bad api, security bugs, code style can very valuable. When releasing a library having an API expert read through your api or a security expert look over for any issues can help.

It could be karma based, it could be actual $, not sure. Getting people used to the idea that they are writing code to be read by a human and that a human will review everything is a good thing.

Library size profiling tool

A desktop application that when given a library or application binary will show a big square that is subdivided into areas in proportion to the size of the child objects. Users could drill down and select on an object for more information. This would be very handy for determining what part of your application is causing the executable/library size to be so large. One of those tools no one would make, but if it existed everyone would use.

audio/conversation splitting

Given a recording in a room of multiple people talking output multiple files each one containing the separate audio stream. Also generate a realtime 3d map of the different audio sources and where they move over time. Would this require 1, 2 or 3 microphones?

Using web ads as a massive computer

Web ads allow for javascript and even flash these days. Given that you buy million's of impressions (based on a .001% return or something ridiculously small you get a ton of impressions for cheap) you are not only buying real estate on the users screen, but buying their cpu power. Assuming that the smaller the ad size the less it costs I should be able to buy a ton of ads for very cheap if the ad doesn't even show on the screen! Combine this with some problem that is easily distributed and you could get a cheap massive computer.

Update: pluraprocessing.com, cpushare.com and discussion of plura and a biz model around this on hacker news.

Community Live Transformers Toy Movie

Expanding on the previous idea of a Live Toy Transformers Movie except rather then having one person (me presumably) do the entire thing turn it into a community project where everyone gets to put together a minute or two of the film in their own style with their own toys. From the extremely ruff and crude to the polished (with votes for what goes in?) it would probably come together rapidly, rally and amuse the community.

iPhone apps

Bird identifier
- Take a photo or record a sound, tell me what bird it is

Puzzle solver
- Take a photo of the box and the piece, highlight where the piece probably goes.