Andy's Blog

I had a product idea this morning... Not sure if you could make money off it, but I was amused.

Start an e-mail alias company (like Bigfoot.com) except rather than just forwarding mail in the typical digital way, it forwards the mail through snail-mail. You pay a subscription fee and then whenever you send a mail to an address like "YourGrandma@grandma.com" the mail is printed, folded, stuffed in an envelope, and mailed along to your grandma. Obviously, that's labor intensive, and you'd have SPAM issues (these are probably preventable with a whitelist since it's only going to have a few allowable senders), but the fact of the matter is that I'd write to family members more often if I could do it through e-mail and some of my elderly family members are just not going to use a computer. I barely know what a stamp is anymore with online banking and what not.

I guess the main problem with this idea is that it's going to expire as eventually everyone will be online.

Why is it that when you fail to dial the '1' when dialing a long distance number it's smart enough to detect that but not smart enough to automatically dial it for you? Maybe they want you to be in control of whether you make a long distance call.... Then again, the phone company should know whether you've called that number in the past and hence know that you know "what you're getting into" and then they could auto-dial it for you.

Even dumber is the message "you do not need to dial a '1' when dialing this number. please hang up and try again." Really?!?!? Then why on Earth didn't you just complete the call and ignore the fact that I dialed the '1'?

I don't like change. I give it away as fast as I can actually; tip jars, beggars, charity cups, my kids. I've even thrown away pennies because it was a nuisance to hold onto. I was thinking about this and figured "hey if it were convenient, giving away change would be a perfect way to regularly give to charitable organizations."

Because I've worked in internet related projects for almost 10 years, I think in domains. The idea started off as sparechange.com. However that was taken. So after some brainstorming, I settled on:

• coindonor.org
• numismaticphilanthropist.org (a close second)

As I thought about the idea more I remember an Ancient Jewish law you can find in the Bible which bound landowners not to harvest the edges of their field nor the gleanings (stuff missed on the first pass), but should leave that for the poor and alien. (Lev. 23:22). Change, it seemed to me could be the modern-day equivalent to this. So, I decided to start up CoinDonor focused on trying to find creative ways to help and encourage people give their change.