Possibility #1
I have a big problem with T9. The technology is one of the worst I have ever used. Whenever I try to text “I” or “a” by pressing 4 or 2 respectively, I get a “g” or a “c” I mean come on. The only two one letter words and you can’t even figure those out. Even worse is the ability to learn new words. Since I taught my phone the word pee, it now thinks that every time I attempt to say see that it should replace it, which can lead to some awkward conversations such as, “Yeah, I pee.” Such as the gaming industry had to begin with the monotony of Pong before it could give us the bliss that is Grand Theft Auto IV, Motorola has laid the foundation for an English company to come in and take a good decent platform and modify it for a more mainstream English speaking audience. There is a need for an improved T9 because traditional cell phones are not going away any time soon and the current system is not working at all.
Possibility #2
The Japanese have mobile e-books, why can’t Americans. I really enjoyed this Computer World article about cell phones saving books. With the uprising of Web 2.0 and social media in the past few years, I am very suprised that no one has taken advantage of this technology to produce a similar service of letting users publish to phones. Here’s a simple blueprint for a successful venture:
- Find out whatever the Japanese word for lets say “Sharing” is and register the .com (it worked for Ubuntu)
- Using the Twitter API make a web service that allows e-books to be published and sent to phones in snippets over days at a time
- Allow users to generate their own content and publish it via your new site.
- Make money by inserting ads at the end of their content.
- Everyone wins
In today’s I hate to say it, but face-paced society a cell phone is a must. The need for a better cell phone will never go away (Google knows this and that’s why they are prepping Android) and hopefully this will cause another entrepreneur to go out and fix these things so I can have a bit more piece of mind.
When you get rich, just give me a call.
