Thursday, November 8, 2007

A social network for criminals

Just watched an episode of Numb3rs, where an FBI agent solves crimes with the help of his brother who is a math genius. And very often, the math prof uses math to determine the relations and connections between people.
So that got me thinking: The rise of social networking software gives police a very powerful tool to store and organize information about criminals. Criminals very seldom act alone - they have, as have all of us, a social network: Be it "business" relations with other criminals, be it family ties, be it rivalries. Having a good idea of the social network of a criminal could be very helpful to catch a fugitive. So the police would simply have to create a social network like Facebook for all the criminals they know about (since, unfortunately, the criminals can't be expected to enter the information themselves). But I guess that most of the information that would go into such a criminal network is already available in police files. The innovation (if it really is one and doesn't already exist) would be to organize and, most importantly, visualize this information in a new way.

Wednesday, November 7, 2007

Automatic Podcast of long articles

Situation: I am very interested in the fact that more and more written content is available online but that in my opinion a lot of people dont like to read long texts while sitting in front of their screen and already posted an idea about that earlier.

Idea: My new idea is very simple: how cool would be a software that would automatically read to you long articles? I then could simply click on "read me this text". I know that this software doesnt yet exist and must be very complicated that it doesnt sound like the announcement of an arriving train on track 3 at the trainstation.