Bright Idea For a Web Site?

Talk about having room to grow. The creators of TenThousandBrightIdeas.com want
to showcase as many as 10,000 of “the world’s best ideas” on its homepage.

Judging from this week’s launch, the site will need well over 9,900 ideas,
putting aside whether they’re the world’s best, to get there.

Still, some companies have shown they can build success a pixel at a
time. Laura Betterly, CEO of In Touch Media Group, a Clearwater, Fla.-based
Internet marketing firm, said part of her inspiration for
TenThousandBrightIdeas was the rapid success of MillionDollarHomePage.com.

Alex Tew, the student behind the project, had an idea to try and make a
million dollars by selling 1,000,000 pixels for $1 each at the site. A
notice on the Web site’s home page, which is jam-packed with ads, says it is
sold out of its $1 million inventory.

“That idea, which made college student Alex Tew $1,000,000 in just five
months, would have been dead on arrival even 10 short years ago,” said
Betterly. She says her site is designed to help inventors, businesses and
entrepreneurs gain exposure for their great ideas that would otherwise not
be acted upon.

One design feature Betterly brings to
TenThousandBrightIdeas is the use of “tag clouds,” which embed keywords in a
Web page increasing the page’s prominence in search-engine retrieval lists.

Also, visitors to the site can vote on the ideas they like by clicking on
them; the more clicks the bigger the type face headlining the idea gets.
You can also contact the inventor directly or just leave comments.

While the aim is to showcase new ideas, would-be inventors have to clear
a few hoops to get on the site.

First there’s a $500 fee for an annual
posting. Once the fee’s been paid, inventors can change the idea and the
link to any related Web sites if they want to promote something different.
Betterly also said ideas are screened by her staff as to whether they have
potential.

There’s nothing very revolutionary about the ideas currently on the site,
which Betterly attributes to just getting started.

“Some of the ideas will be wonderful and some not so great,” Betterly
told internetnews.com. “We won’t accept anything we don’t think is
going to work.”

Betterly knows a thing or two about inventions and inventors. Her late
father, Al Ajar, developed the first instant replay system in the 1960s.

It was part of a closed circuit TV network used by horse tracks to film and
replay what had become known as photo finishes back when they only used
still photography to determine the winner of a close race.

Ajar didn’t
patent his invention, but Betterly said he had a good business charging the
race tracks to lease his system. She says TenThousandBrightIdeas will offer
advice on protecting intellectual property.