Leveraging Ideas
It’s often the case that your original idea (or even someone else’s idea!) can be leveraged to do far more than was originally envisaged.
Take Styky who contacted me last week. It’s essentially a service that synchronises contacts and photos with a server. Remote phonebook backup isn’t a new idea. However, Styky have leveraged this idea to allow changes in your friends contact information to automatically propagate to your phone book. Their service also allows you to see how ‘popular’ you are i.e. How many other people have you in their phone book. In fact, the whole thing is being packaged as a social community.
Another example is Cognima who also had a remote sync solution for mobile. The original idea itself wasn’t commercially successful so they leveraged the same technology to provide a ‘photo print from your mobile’ type solution. Today, the technology has been leveraged even further as ShoZu.
A final example is Palringo who I am doing some work for at the moment. At first it appears to be ’just’ a multi-IM solution. However, once you have people connected there are many more things you can do. The first idea to be implemented is to leverage IM to easily provide for blogging.
Hence, if you are looking for new mobile ideas, perhaps you should take some old ones and try to re-cycle them?