Yesterday, I returned from obscurity to tell you that I’ve been busily grinding away at three major projects. Today, I’m going to tell you a little bit about the first project, with some background information for those who may not have been following along.

Over the summer (and immediately following my failed interview at Google) I announced a project to brainstorm 30 business ideas in 30 days. Although the project slipped a little bit (I ended up developing 28 ideas in 43 days), I came up with a broad range of possible software projects.

Over the next month or so, I arrived at a decision: the AI-Coder project rose to the top of my list, and I started working on an implementation. But within a few weeks, I ran into a number of difficulties (both technical and legal) and I decided to reconsider.

So, I returned to my list of semifinalist projects and began to weigh the options.

And now I’ve chosen a new project.

Here’s a quick rundown of the my thought process as I revisited those four ideas:

WebDelve

I still think this would be a very cool project, and I’m still enamoured with the idea of using a Windows GUI application (rather than a webapp) as a platform for a rich web-analytics experience. I also really like the idea of presenting the kinds of charts typically only seen in financial applications as an advanced mechanism for exploring the different characteristics of web-surfing behavior.

When I’m looking at my own web stats, I’d love to be able to view them as a seven-day moving average, or as a pair of crisscrossing momentum lines or as a region between a set of Bollinger Bands. It’d also be nice if i could drill down to see the browsing activities of individual users, rather than always having to work with aggregate stats. I’d like to be able to annotate the charts with my own notes, and I’d like to join my web-analytics queries with queries on my other database tables (products, purchases, users, articles, blog posts, etc).

So I think I could develop a really unique product in this space.

But, like I said before, I don’t relish the idea of competing with the world’s googliest search engine company. Google Analytics is one of the four most important pieces of software produced by Google (in order of importance: Search, AdSense, AdWords, and Analytics). These separate applications work in four-part harmony for Google’s overall revenue strategy, since Analytics is the tool that advertisers use to maximize their revenue. And when the advertisers maximize their revenue, so does Google.

Google isn’t likely to smile at competing products, and I’m not likely to smile if they’re frowning at me.

Plus, integration with AdWords isn’t something I could offer, and the WebDelve product would be significantly less compelling than theirs, for that reason alone.

Beltway Analytics

This project would also be fun, and very personally satisfying. I’d get to participate, indirectly, in American politics (which I enjoy). I’d also get to flex my skills in writing machine learning algorithms and natural language processing systems.

Unfortunately, the whole project would have to be driven by advertising revenue. Which would almost certainly mean Google AdSense. And, call me crazy, but I’m just not comfortable relying on a single source of revenue for an entire business model. (Though I wouldn’t mind supplementing my revenue with ad dollars.)

Besides, there have recently emerged lots of interesting players in this space. Between FindLaw, GovTrack, and Google U.S. Government Search (couldn’t they think of a catchier name?), many of the features I was planning are already being offered. (Though, without quite as much natural language processing as I would have liked. For example, wouldn’t it be interesting to know that a recent piece of legislation contained three different quotes from the Bible, or from a United Nations document?)

Anyhow, although I think it’d be a fun research project, the Beltway Analytics project lacks many of the key criteria for me to consider it a viable business plan right now.

Project Artifact Management

This one is so tempting.

Unlike the software industry–where there’s already a multitude of free software to manage the versioning, transfer, documentation, and release of project resources–most other industries are still grappling with the need for a robust methodology to handle their project artifacts.

In fact, just a few weeks ago, I was talking with my older brother–who has a masters degree in civil engineering and works in the transportation sector–about how his company (and the industry at large) manages its project assets. In most engineering firms, electronic documents are continually passed back and forth between the project personnel and the client. Technical specs, charts, diagrams, schematics, construction and fabrication plans, FMEA analyses, and on and on and on. Document versioning information (when it exists at all) is usually just pasted into the filename.

And, in most cases, these documents travel around in email attachments or burned onto DVDs and sent through the mail. The mail!!

He said that a few artifact-tracking systems have started to appear in the marketplace. But they’re very complex. And very expensive.

The engineering industry is just ripe for the kind of product I’m envisioning. Other industries are in even worse shape. I mentioned the intelligence and law enforcement communities in my original blog post as being particularly hungry for this kind of software. I’ve talked with a few people from the intelligence community about this software, and they’d be espcially interested in a solution that combines artifact tracking and versioning with strongly encrypted access controls to sensitive documents.

Unfortunately, in these industries, I would need a very knowledgeable sales person, with a Rolodex full of industry contacts. And the sales cycles would be long and difficult. This isn’t the kind of software I could sell myself, either by whipping up a brochure-style website or by trying to make sales appointments myself. I don’t know any such person (my brother is an engineer, not a salesman), and I definitely don’t have the cash to hire a sales team.

So, as much as I like this idea, I’m putting it on the shelf for now.

VaporTrade

I actually started developing this software many years ago, back in the late 1990’s when the stock market was experiencing its heyday of growth.

When I looked for new investment opportunities, I browsed through a few hundred charts every day, keeping my eye out for particular price-movement patterns. Maybe I wanted to find a security with high price volatility over the previous weeks whose decreasing price was about to cross the 90-day moving average.

Or whatever.

At first, I trained my eyeballs to look for these kinds of patterns. And I got pretty good at it. I could look at twenty or thirty charts per minute, only pausing to look at the ones that might meet my criteria. But it didn’t take long for me to realize that those patterns could be described logically and that I could use software to search for my criteria in a pool of thousands of securities.

Even more compelling was that I could go back in time, through the previous ten years of market history, to test the validity of my assumptions. It’s nice to have actual numbers to quantify the effectiveness of each type of pattern. And it’s even nicer to have a dispassionate algorithm doing the work, instead of my over-emotional brain.

Of course, since I was just writing the software for myself, I didn’t bother to develop any fancy GUI interface. At that time, the VaporTrade software was just a fast analysis engine, with a small set of command-line tools for querying the engine and an XML syntax for describing patterns.

Obviously, I don’t think I could market a command-line analysis tool for the stock market.

But I think the core idea is still worthwhile, and I think it could be very powerful if I build a slick GUI to accompany those tools.

Plus, this idea is very good from a business perspective, since it will facilitate the capturing of additional revenue streams. Not only will I sell the software, but I’ll also sell a daily data feed of market prices and volumes. And, since the software will be built entirely around a plug-in architecture (even core services like charting will be provided through plug-ins), I’ll have the opportunity to up-sell additional capabilities like paper-trading, money-management, hypothesis testing, and portfolio tracking.

So, there you have it, folks. This is the project I’ll be working on for the next six months. Even though I’ve been at it for a little while, I’m going to cheat slightly by declaring today as the official start date. Six months from today–on April 28, 2007–I’ll release the first public beta of the VaporTrade platform. I hope you’ll stick around and take the software for a spin around the block.

Along the way, I’ll keep you posted about my progress, writing with copious detail about my technical and business decisions. In fact, tomorrow I’ll write about a jaw-droppingly-stupid decision I’ve (proudly) made, to implement one of my core infrastructural components from scratch.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 28th, 2006 at 2:33 pm and is filed under software, biz. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.