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I originally wanted to design a web service that connected local service sector businesses with consumers, allowing consumers to rate the businesses that they have interacted with. The idea was to have a space for businesses to advertise and name their price, motivated by a need to find affordable local tutors by parents and college students, but extendable to small businesses advertising their services. A major factor in the design was how to allow the site to earn money. It could take a percentage of business transactions, like eBay, but local businesses could simply meet with their clients and not post their transactions online. It could make money by requiring merchants to pay a premium to post a larger amount of data or to be listed first on search returns. This functionality could stagnate the growth of the site if not done well. It could make money through advertising clicks, which may be effective after becoming more popular.

A great aspect about such a web service is that the design can be made simple, it can fill a niche market that isn’t quite filled yet, and it can start local and expand as revenue is made, thus paying for itself early on. This service has a chance to enable the service-sector entrepreneur – and in today’s job climate, it really has a chance to take off.

I don’t want that idea owned by UNM.

Thus, my second idea is to design a sophisticated bot to play through parts of the World of Warcraft MMORPG. This bot will not be sold to users. Instead, it will be used by several private machines to harvest gold on multiple WoW accounts. Websites will be set up that allow WoW users to buy gold for the game at competitive prices. A lot of effort in the project will be spent on preventing WoW administrators from discovering the bots and banning accounts / email addresses, and some effort will be spent on figuring out what countries we can host servers / our LLC in that can avoid legal issues with Blizzard. Early phases of the project will be carried out using unofficial Blizzard servers to begin testing out Blizzard with more formidable bots. Time will also need to be spent on making the UI that controls the bot easy to configure in real time, and also in writing or finding tools to assemble and analyze the massive data flows we will be experiencing as we run our project.

The motivation behind my second idea is to simply spend idle CPUs at cents per hour performing rote tasks that game addicts are willing to spend dollars for.