How does selling ringtones of a frog singing to club music sound as an idea to you? Let me introduce you to Crazy Frog:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crazy_Frog

Retarded ideas make money too.

I sure as hell didn't think limiting people to 140 characters was going to make sense.

I believe that was originally a technical limitation, and only later did it become evident that there is a business value in offering partially-literate individuals a medium that caters to, while providing plausible deniability for, their slow reading and writing speeds.

Twitter has little or no technical reason to be so limited, of course, but doesn't want to alienate the tldr crowd.

Technical limitation: SMS are 160 characters. 20 chars for username and 140 chars for message.

So does running a successful bagel shop. The "ideas are worthless" people place your neighborhood bagel shop, Crazy Frog ringtones, and Qualcomm in the same group: businesses you can totally run as long as you know how to 'hustle.' Somehow I think Andrew Viterbi would frown on that.

"If your ideas are retarded, of course they're a dime a dozen."

There is actually a town in china where the entire village makes their money painting caricatures of monkeys. Not saying it's a good career move, but at least that's the context for where the idea came from.

Interesting enough, the majority of the world's oil paintings come from this one tiny village with 5,000 painters who spend all day slavishly copying the same templates over and over:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiamen

You can find all their stuff on ebay and alibaba.

I wouldn't call Xiamen a "town" or a "village." My cousin lives there with his wife and two children. It has a population of over 2.5 million people, and was voted (by whom, IDK) one of the "most livable cities in China." He worked for EDS for years and wanted to be transfered to China because of how much he loved it. When they wouldn't transfer him, he FOUND a way to move there. He ended up building a factory there to manufacture leather goods. Get the best leather he can from N&S America, and manufactures it there. He now has hundreds of employees, many with some form of disability, and is incredibly happy.

So I wouldn't call Xiamen itself a village, but you may be referring to a small village nearby.

He's talking about Xiamen Wushipu oil painting village. It's a part of Xiamen, there is a subsection about it farther down the wikipedia page.

Or in the streets of Montmartre, sold as genuine Parisian paintings...

> If your ideas are retarded, of course they're a dime a dozen.

Conversely, people who believe ideas are a dime a dozen tend to focus on shallow ideas. The lack of deep interaction with technology (and whatever a pivot is supposed to be) forces you into businesses with a more social rather than technical role: web design, blogging, social networks, etc. I don't see much of HN's advice working well for a company developing asynchronous CPU chipsets. In theory they should be the same; the advent of fabless semiconductor shops and hardware synthesis languages lets someone design chips in their garage in Iowa, but the depth of technical knowledge required makes it a much different game than starting up "a distributed Facebook" or "a Foursquare but for X."

Just want to point that the most underrated reason why people choose the social app path is not the cost but politics (i.e. asking for permission). You have to ask the permission of fewer people (actually 0) to launch a social web app than to build a new hardware product.

Oddly enough my friend paints famous people as cats. Her Chairman Miaow is incredible and I am sure people would love the prints.

Exactly! Idea generation shouldn't be mental diarrhea, which this reads like, ranging from ho-hum, it's already obviously been done ("Brainstorm Consulting - Teach companies how to brainstorm", "Replicate reality TV shows for foreign countries.") to frivolous ("Herbal Flavored Gum").

I think that idea could actually make some money.