Charles Zhang

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Start-up/Software/Entrepreneurship Ideas

Created: 2023-08-01
Updated: 2023-08-09

Some of those are collected from personal notes; Others might be unique per this article. Anyone is free to take those ideas; Attributions are welcome.

Companies

Some ideas are big and requires people to manage and maintain.

• (2024) Methodox: Unconventional business solutions. (E.g. Parcel)
• (2024) Imagine Nation: Unique businesses. (E.g. iAvatar)

Entertainment

• (2021) (YouTube series) Fake Gameplay videos and visions: kinda like those 2D game and sometimes 3D game ads we see - but instead of ads, it’s just good visions. An unfinished example is World of Legends. Fun to do when we are not on schedule for Project Nine.
• (2023) (Experience) The iPad Experience: Dark room LiDAR, Aquarium, mystical jungle, haunted house treasure hunt.
• (2023) (Virtual Tour Service) (Empty Industry Room) Virtual AR/VR Tour: Just need a large walkable space - but Is this kind of pixel streaming better than VR?
• (2023) (Virtual Tour Service) Basically you pay money and let others travel for you. There are two forms: 1-1 travel where you can dictate and save yourself the travel to fly; Virtual Tour, but 给钱，让人去旅游。That’s the fun.
• (2024) (YouTube Series) Movies Didn’t Go According to Plan (and cut short) - (odea from) What is 那个电信诈骗的电影，在购物街拐卖的时候碰到个武功高手？Stories will be cut short因为坏人打不过他。拍摄特点：前面都基本是按照原片拍摄，但是在某一个环节（差不多过了30min之后）突然有变化。(Series, #20240208) 缅甸电信诈骗碰到武功高手。(Series, #20240208) 中国机长：前面30min的准备时间，然后总算飞了，结果突然有飞机横穿砍断，摄影机特效慢动作摄影一个非常镇定的年轻人在飞机断了一般的时候一边随着飞机的旋转摇摆，一边拿起氧气罩呼吸。

Event

• (Contest/Competition/Hackathon) BAR AI-only competition with Ray

Endeavour

• (2015, 2018, 2024) (Education) Revolutionize higher level eduation by providing gaming education of advanced university level courses. e.g. Mooc, open university, uoft, MIT, and great courses plus. NFC style. Starting with MOSFET:SETI. Part of Project Nine initiatives.
• (2024, Education) All inclusive, fully digital, full time high school curriculum with only 10 students and free for 3 years. I will design, program and guide through the entire process. Hire 10 engineers and develpeprs for contents and 4 additional helpers. Students only pay when at first full-time employment salary above 10W (inflation adjusted) 80% to our school for the first 3 years. (2024) This can be even enhanced and targeting primary education by using VR/AR devices in a classroom setting; We can start with consulting for specific classes.
• (2024) (#2024402) 汽车能跑800km比特斯拉长太多了。我们可以做个“开源免费零附加”的汽车，完全靠donation。

Games

• MOSFET:SETI: For poor kinds like me who can’t afford the space and money for electronics studies and when university education is kind of shitty and absolutely inadequate.
• RoboGo: Test the limit of modern real-time combat.
• Dream of Red Chamber (a re-interpretation) (not an original recreation of plots): 红楼梦Gal game攻略妹妹 (idea from) Mentioned a few times by Ashley, and I think it’s a cool idea. As a simple starter, it could be a 2D visual novel-like, or even a traditional non-novel hentai 恋爱 game.
• (Company/Organization/Series Idea) SillyGames: Unoptimized Unreal Engine 5 Ray Tracing Games, published on Itch.IO (dedicated account or category): Per My3DVD, Experiments (series 1 with a few levels), Domino, ICTZombies, 东外校园卡丁车. “I don’t have time for intricate contents and polished games, but I build fun stuff and open world nonetheless.” Always free.
• (Game) 鱼缸管理、鱼缸simulation (Idea from, Source) Shawn from OTPP TFR 2022-2024. (comment) It concerns e.g. cutting grass, adjusting temperature, balance of NPL etc. chemical elements. (COmment) Ask Shawn to be gameplay director if we ever develop this.
• (Application, #Fun, Machine Learning) Pretend Worker (Imitation Device; Agent J): A program pretending to be a person, while actually getting some work done. May use generative AI for decision making. This is a more advanced version of Ray’s Precision Strike. Should be able to interact with Excel/VS Code and pretend to be writing code/crunching numbers. Should be written in C++ and have fine-controlled OS level input emulation capabilities. Should be visual driven (not API driven). Effectively, we can train an AI such that: given desktop recording (as visual outputs) and all keyboard and mouse inputs, predict next input action. Mau develop as a framework/pre-trained model, so the user can just turn it on fo 1hr and learn her own routines and the model will pick uo and generate customized behavior.
• (Game Concept, Idea, Perception, Vision, 恍惚状态, #20240209) 大人小人小小人，3D小“公园”——Japanese town people living there (top-down God’s view) Watching game: 天降之物 environment. Watching those small figures living and farming their life. 大人are players, 小人 are the characters, 小小人 are the little babies and kittens.
• (2013, 2024) ICT Zombines
• (2024) Recreate Ahhhhhhhhh, local and online multiplayer.
• (2024) Conway’s Game of Life - an RTS (Call it “Life Online” or something cool, with a long subtitle: “An Online Multiplayer RTS of Original Flavour Conway’s Game of Life with a Real-time Twist and Cool battle Music): See Game of Life study notes.
• (2024, AR, Fiction, RPG) Everything has a spirit, from small to large items. Rediscover life, rediscover spirit. The game requires using AR/Photo device to capture photos from real world, and using object identification to find the subject object at center of the photo - and like 小精灵图鉴, collect the spirit behind it. It’s a purely informative game - lots and lots of spirits to discover, with meaningful mapping of underlying objects. The game may require network connection, both for GPS verification and maybe for object identification. Legendary real world building e.g. Japanese shrines may have special spirits in them. The scanning of the same object should reveal the same spirit (and won’t have any effect if already collected) - but depending on time of day, different spirits might reside there. After technology part is done, it’s a purely content/information driven game. It’s 3D RPG monster collection game, tradable. Key technology is requiring capture in-site. The monsters may then be used in PvP battles to level up. This is just like Pokemon Go, or Pokemon world MMORPG but with our own twist and is based on world history. Battles can happen online - no need to be geo-located. (idea from) Monster Legend ios game advertisement.
• (2021, 2023, 2024) Gravity (Metaverse, social media, augmented virtual reality): See earlier concepts - like Kijiji but in 3D. On the other hand, a latest “mode” would be like “Atlas earth” (game): Monopoly style game, very simple - just declare location, and when people come they will pay a fee. Immediately real owners at sites will want to participate and declare their own locations; On the other hand, owners of a retailer location can put ads there. What’s more, like Gravity, gradually this could be a massive social network. The biggest challenge today is GPS accuracy is low, prone to hacking, and mobile 3D rendering capabilities sucks and cannot deliver the intended vision unless we make it vendor locked (e.g. on iphone) but then it kinda defeats the purpose and defeats the accessibility.
• (2022, 2024) Gamed-based language learning: walking-experience-like and detailed 3D environments.

Hardware

• (2023) Recorder with basic editing and on-demand usage functionalities: One will be surprised how barren this market (in terms of supply?) is, and existing mobile apps just doesn’t justify the needs. A proper recorder should be able to: 1) Run on demand, 2) Allow insertion, 3) Allow deletion. And ideally those are achieved with physical buttons. I don’t see the need for wifi support, but being able to write directly to SD cards is a must.
• (2022, 2023) Precise Head Position Tracking for AR: May use base stations.
• (2023) HDMI recorder transmitter: some intermediary between a typical HDMI cable input and output, which can capture streams in betwee, bypass all hardware/software limitations when doing video capturing and consumes no hosting machine resources. I am surprised modern monitors don’t provide this functionality already. (Comment) There are external or either on-board “recorder card” or capture card devices.
• (2024) Fast and cheap e-ink display: No need to have color, just be fast first. On the other hand, software support is also super imporpotant - like ReMarkable 2, for paper display, touch-centric, or pure-keyboard navigation rather than mouse-based navigation is the key.
• (2024) E-zink Smart phone: Real, not toy functional. I needs to be smart because i want to use telegram on it. Protects eyes. Essential for suoer long term technical screen users like me. There are some chinese companies (DaSung and Boox) making those but their products are “functional” and don’t last more than a year.

Non-Centralized Applications

• Ethereum Lottery: Decentralized blockchain-based lottery. Real-world lotteries are not trustworthy. Programmed in Solidity, participants are guaranteed a transparent process. No one is there to take our winning money as tax. Idea courtesy of Shawn Li. Allow multiple pools of varying sizes so people can adjust their winning rates and even start new pools. A more interesting effect is tax-free.
• Ethereum Central Ledger (Fund): When implemented, it can serve as a fund for apps like SeekingMate.

Industries

• (2022, 2024) Technical Analyst: There is frequent need for highly technical computing yet very high-level analytics at finance/investment industry. Excel and Python are usually the first choice. I intend to create a completely new role with Parcel. One implementation of this is when I have my own investment firm, I can hire people developing Parcel, and hire people specializing in using it, and we sell/market Parcel ourselves.

Online Services

• (Game, Service, Platform, 2021/2022/2024) iAvatar: Fashion, and virtual character and having luxury presentation. Partly inspired by Mopcat/catface or whatever UofT makeup idea by signal and processing professor. (Comment, #2024) iAvatar can actually be a desktop application - less intrusive and online retailers just need to provide a protocol-based url. The desktop app would be a one-stop shopping experience like The Sims 3. In fact, call it a shopping game.
• (2023) Anonymous Free Social Online Surveys (with demographical identification information upon registration) for social studies, personal FAQ, and market research. The website should be something like Stackoverflows and be easily accessible and free-to-use, and offers among other things most importantly: registration and personal social identity information editing, survey publication and editing, interest editing, and participated surveys page. A person can see survey results after participation. Any new survey should ideally do a search to avoid repeating the same kind of questions. Each survey is versioned and new edits must record new polls and cannot directly inherit older polls. No comments shall be provided, but survey publisher can describe survey goals and purpose.
• (2024) ChatGPT is useless when it comes to academic research (arts & science). When asked “Have you read the article ‘The survival and recovery of bacteria in vacuum cleaner dust’” its answer is “I can’t access specific articles or databases, but I can discuss topics related to bacteria survival and recovery in various environments if you’re interested!” Apparently this is an under-utilized area: When training specific in helping people identifying research papers, LLMs can be highly useful in searching for relevant published articles during research process. That is, human researches ask LLM instead of having to go through and read each article in order to find what are ALL the articles that contain relevant information to their current study. To a lesser extent, this is less of a LLM problem - one first needs to have a way to unify all published articles like Google Scholar does.

Others

• (慈善事业, #2024) Open Source Awards: Director Personal Pick & Community Pick. Only to non-organizational/foundational open source projects. Including categories as: Games, Software, Mobile App, Others, etc. (Idea from) BAR is so good it deserves an award.
• (实业) No-Retarded Real Estate Development: Develop a community housing area that is pretty and actually looks like some place people would want to live in. (Idea from) Modern Toronto suburbs are urban crawling that looks like shit and put too much division between people and have zero design and zero sense of community. Start with a central square, some stream of water, some markets, shareable farming lands. Make a 1 million dollar house actually worth 1 million - and not in terms of how large the building is.

Personal Business Endavours

Personal because it’s personal and only I can do it.

• (Magazine) The Project Nine Magazine (Entertainment Industry): Magazine with a vision.
• (Technology) Dreamscape (Technology Industry): Dreamscape with a vision.

Productivity

• (2022, 2023) A new file format that can be previewed in windows and most importantly - supports rich metadata and notes and tags. To implement it on windows is fairly easy, we can just create a specialized ZIP that contains an image file and a text file or some other stuff, and most importantly, write a proper Win32 Shell extension to allow previewing the image itself, and add to properties that allows reading and editing the metadata (or we could develop external tools for managing that). Alternatively, we figure out how realiable is DigiKam (at the moment we don’t like it because it’s monolithic and configuration is a bit confusing and I don’t know how reliable it is in associating data with files, especially when we edit photos in Windows Explorer; And the interface is a bit hard to use when editing tags and notes). Alternatively, we could enhance Somewhere to allow it tracking file changes properly, like DigiKam or Everything does.
• (2023) Markdown should really support: 1) Pop-up/Embedded multi-line payloads, 2) Images, and multimedia contents. This is for self-contained management.
• (2023) GitHub Pages needs better ways to managem multi-media, e.g. self-hosted images.

Service

• (Financial Data, 2024) Data source service

Software

• (2019, 2022) Spreadsheet: Object-oriented, functional programmable spreadsheet application. Partly implemented in Parcel - but we actually want a GUI interface that’s much just like Excel. The core problem we try to solve is to enable named variables and named table ranges and enforce strongly-typed and safe references. For GUI framework, we should clearly use Qt for efficiency and cross-platform portability.
• (2019/2018, 2024) Social Media (Gravity, downgraded): Community Building on GIS scale - Map chat. (idea from) Waze Map has those interesting icons - that reminds me of the fun of such a map based social media platform. People can join channels and decide when where for how long they post information. The platform is just a map. It’s like Twitter but with an (arbitrary, not necessarily GPS located) pin.

Solution

• (2022) (Business Automation) Needs a visual-driven node-based process automation framework. Kind of WWF. Partially implemented in Parcel and https://charles-zhang.itch.io/expressoExpresso, also as a core concept in dbt. Pending a dedicated article on this concept. Alternative workflow uses Python/Jupyter Notebook, or Pure.
• (2022) (Business Analytics) Needs a better programmable business analytics platform, ideally incorporating dbt like processing workflow and as one-stop ETL/ELT solution, as an alternative to Grafana. PowerBI generally is the best but there are lots of issue with its programmability, lack of open-source nature, and very troublesome GUI (too many clicks).

Social Media

• (2023) On the problem of mating: Github

Theme Park

• (2023) Life/Survival Simulator: See 20231006 dream.

VR/AR/Enhanced Reality Gameplay Venues

• (Per GTC2024) Codec Avatar Chat Booth

YouTube Video Production Series

• Emily & James: Dedicated animation shots.
• Studying Unreal Engine Source Code: Just official documentation and official source code, digging through walkthrough - something I wanted existed when learning for myself.
• World Build for Project Nine: Talk about specific aspects from technical, theoratical and how-to-with-tools perspectives. Sharing and consolidation of knowledge.
• Studying PyTorch Source Code: Always wanted to write deep learning, also review math.

Dated

20230802 Multi-layer Graph

Tags: Software, Platform, Note-taking, Productivity

Had this idea for a while. Basically it’s either a node-graph or something like Draw.IO, but the organization scheme is that you can keep “drill-down” and go deeper. Will be immensely powerful, no idea why it’s not already done. A clean interface is also the key. Parcel kind of was moving in that direction but I never got chance to complete it.