My startup idea is a web app that automatically generates startup ideas by randomly combining various inputs. I think this would be approximately as effective as throwing out ideas here and asking people to vote on them.
Original ideas are combinations of other ideas, but they're ideas combined by humans.
If I were to pull some buzzwords from a single niche (let's say social networking) from a hat, say.. Twitter, music, friends, pictures, e-mail, profiles, voting. I could pull a lot of random ideas from joining some of them together:
- a site that lets you specify the music artists you like, then it finds Twitter users who have mentioned all of those artists.. instant music buddies!
- social profiles oriented around people's e-mail addresses
- random MP3 sent to your e-mail each day as voted for by people on a Web site
- voting on Twitter in elections
- use song mentions on Twitter to establish the most popular songs for certain artists
I won't go on..! These are not really great ideas, but they're not nonsensical either.
You might argue that earlier I mentioned "unconnected" ideas, whereas "Twitter, music, friends, pictures, e-mail, profiles, voting" are from a niche of sorts. True, but when I said "unconnected" I guess I meant more that the ideas are not connected in any practical way, rather than sharing a common element. Random words would probably not cut it :)