Kamen … said every entrepreneurial innovator he’s ever seen shares a few characteristics.

“It’s not that they’re brilliant or well-educated,” Kamen said. “They work all the time. They don’t let failure demoralize or destroy them. They pick themselves up and keep going and eventually, every once in a while, one of your ideas actually breaks through and works, and it makes all that stuff seem worthwhile.”

In other words, Mr. Kamen agrees with Ammi :)

• WhyNot.net: I was Googling to see if anyone else was curious about using active noise-cancelling techniques for turning down the volume (in some sense) on babies. There are serious technical challenges (such as that current noise-cancelling devices target a point sink), but it’s a cool idea and even if you could get a 50% effective system, it would be immensely useful. And profitable. Anyway, Google turned this up. It’s a bit disappointing that this is another idea that someone’s already thought of, but on the other hand it’s cool to be able to read the comments and see useful extensions (eg, this would be a godsend for snorers’ spouses). The website’s like a catalogue of people’s if-onlys and what-ifs — a goldmine for potential entrepreneurs.

• BookMooch: This one has me seriously excited. I have a bunch of books that I have to lug every time I change flats. I really like most of them but haven’t really picked them up since I first read them. BookMooch is a community of people just like that who are happy to exchange books with each other. Last night, for instance, I got online and listed the 20 or so books I’m willing to give away, and requested a math book that someone in Illinois has. This morning, my inbox had an ‘accepted’ message from the Illinois dude and 4 requests for my books (one from New Zealand!). You might argue sending the book to NZ will pretty much offset whatever money I saved by getting the math book for free, but there’s a larger point here: this is far more efficient than stockpiling books that one never reads. And in return, I get access to a pool of books that might not be available in local bookstores, or even be out of print. Of course, countries like Pakistan have a very active second-hand book market where one can often exchange books with minimal friction/costs so this might prove less useful, but here in the UK, the second-hand book scene is much more limited. There’s an analogy to zakat (and more specifically, keeping money circulating in the economy) taking shape in my head that I think is appropriate; also, it appeases my burgeoning sense of eco- and anti-consumerist responsibility.

• The final Wow will be shared between coLinux and andLinux. coLinux compiled the Linux kernel to run on Windows, where it’s hosted as a guest operating system with virtualised access to your hardware. It’s a really cool idea and its performance is pretty impressive. I haven’t run anything really heavy (ie, OpenOffice), but the things I have run (Perl, Octave, Vim) run superbly well on my Centrino 1.6/1.25GB. The caveat in that last sentence isn’t even that much of a problem for me, since I already have MS Office and am not interested in OO. andLinux built on the coLinux base to provide an easily installable package (2 packages actually: KDE (!) and XFCE). Installation was light and problem-free, and now I can install any additional packages I want with Synaptic. Unlike VMWare, I don’t start the VM manually, and while idle the resource consumption is completely unnoticeable. I have a nice auto-hiding XFCE bar from which I can bring up a terminal or launch the file explorer and that’s that. Linux the way I always wanted it: on my terms, and as I need it.

BTW, my laptop is falling apart. Seriously: it’s cracked in two places, scratched all over, the palmrests are a little worn down, and now the USB and power ports are starting to get loose. It’s lasted 4 years without a single hitch though, which I think is serious testament to how solid Fujitsu machines are.

Still, I don’t see it as a viable business. And I certainly don’t see it as a $4 million business, which is roughly what their angel investors must think it’s worth to hand over $400,000. Keep in mind, they’re headed into a crowded playfield and their differentiating feature is not protected IP. So, basically, Epinions or eHow or AllExperts or whoever could take their existing databank and just layer on datamining to get a filtering mechanism at least as effective as Avanoo. That’s not to say there isn’t potential here, but given that their business model is based entirely around advertising, you’d have to be really optimistic to figure this is anything more than a startup in a niche that is fairly well-saturated already.

Of course, if I were Avanoo’s founders, I wouldn’t be so worried about AllExperts/Epinions/whoever as I would be about Facebook. Their applications platform is going to absolutely kill a whole lot of advertising-based websites by providing features within the comfortable confines of Facebook that users would previously have had to head to various individual websites for. Web 2.0’s social networking boom is firmly in the convergence and consolidation stage now, and that’s just the plain truth.

One final note: I really can’t see what they need $400,000 for. It’s a fairly basic community website with some data mining thrown in. They’re not inventing the data mining algorithms and if they’re smart they’re not even implementing them, so all they they need right now is rent and food money and a couple hundred bucks a month for a dedicated server somewhere. This is a classic Y-Combinator project.

What converted me, though, was the awesome Firefox extension, which makes del.icio.us bookmarks behave exactly like in-browser bookmarks. It’ll even recommend tags based on your existing bookmarks, which means bookmarking remains an exercise in clicking, rather than forcing you to think and typing in tags. (Eww, thinking…)

So, I’m relatively happy. Except for one little thing: archiving bookmarks. I was a Digg user for a while as well, and while the juvenility (it’s a word; I checked) of the community proved irritating, DuggMirror was one of the highlights. It’s common sense, really: when you have a social news website Digg that routinely sends massive waves of traffic at unsuspecting websites, it’s a good idea to archive the page somewhere (ie, take a snapshot and store it on a different server) so that if the website goes down, you have a mirror to point people to. This is one of the things that Slashdot really missed — sure, Coral/Google/WaybackMachine archives existed, but it was always a bit of a lottery whether they would have the page you wanted, particularly if it was a news page that had just become available.

Anyway, that’s what I want for del.icio.us (they’ve got delicious.com as well if you find the punctuation irritating). I’m a pretty committed bookmarker, and oftentimes (apparently also a word…I blame Amreekans) worry about my bookmarks disappearing. The New York Times, for example, requires a password for articles older than a couple of weeks. There are also transient pages, such as expiring auctions (useful for making comparisons at a later date).

There are bound to be copyright implications, but I doubt it would be a big deal if you only made the pages available to users who bookmarked them (ie, I wouldn’t be able to retrieve pages that you archived); in that case, it would be identical to saving a copy of an article on your hard disk (which I also do…and which has resulted in a 50MB folder of HTML pages I have never accessed again).

Given the sheer number of del.icio.us users, I’m sure there’s some pretty serious Adsense moolah to be made here. Until I get time to do it (or hear of someone else who’s done it already — I honestly don’t care either way, I just want this available), I guess I’ll just have to make do with Errorzilla.

I’ve been thinking about something almost identical (though targetted at a different audience) for several months now. Of course, it isn’t like this is rocket science: they’ve basically done a lot of grunt work to write some very elaborate Javascript that you can insert into your website’s template, which will then send an async packet (we’re AJAX haxors!) back to the server every time the the mouse moves, or there’s a click or a keystroke, or the page scrolls. The server then compiles this information into meaningful statistics. Combining this data with the URL of the page makes it simple to recreate the user’s session as a video.

Hmm. Actually, their website says it’s “a hosted service, so no installation on the server or client is needed”, which maybe a deliberate attempt to throw off competitors. I don’t think they’re in any real danger of having someone simply replicate the async packet sending and offer that as a competitor — the sheer amount of data this thing is going to generate is going to make it completely useless unless they generate quality stats that are human-comprehensible.

Returning to the point, I think this is another reminder I need to get my act together and start implementing the Grand Idea. There was a story yesterday about how Kevin Rose created Digg for just $200 by employing a freelance PHP guy. Maybe I need to stop being possessive and admit I don’t have enough time to devote to this…