4iP Failure #479
Posted on | January 30, 2009 |
What should you do when one of your ideas gets rejected by 4iP?
You could ‘tut‘ loudly, you could release the inner teenager and moan about the submission panel’s “lack of understanding/vision/taste“, or… you could try and do something positive about it…
I’m going to make public an idea that was rejected by 4iP and see what happens. Neither I, nor the company that I work for (Tuna Technologies) is in a position to pursue it any further. We could mothball it and hope that there’s some way to exploit it in the future, but realistically, this is unlikely to be the case. If nothing else, it might just help people focus on potential pitfalls in their own submissions.
So rather than have the puppy I can no longer care for put down; I’m going to put his picture in the shop window, hope that someone likes him enough to take him on, and look forward to one day seeing him again, bounding through the park with his tail wagging.
Here goes:
Home Clone
Home Clone (terrible name, I know) was designed to take advantage of the fact that many of our homes are of identical construction. For starters; if you live in a semi, then your adjoining neighbour owns a property that mirrors yours. House builders reuse their plans many times, and it could be that your house has hundreds, if not thousands, of ‘clones’ (as in, houses that share the same genus; that are built from the same plans).
Home Clone would connect people with identically shaped houses and let them compare, contrast and contribute. This opens up numerous opportunities to share, inspire and economise.
Imagine how useful it would be to see ‘your house’ in multiple different guises. Suddenly, without the need for an interior designer, an architect, or a builder, you can see how you could modify your home. You might even be able to acquire technical drawings and ball-park costs from your fellow home owners.
Imagine a place where you could find a 3D model of a house that is identical to yours, that you can take and amend. Free software like Google Sketchbook could allow the ‘contributor’ element of the network to submit and share template models of each house type.
Imagine a platform where you can join up with owners of identical houses and share the cost of commissioning visualisations of loft conversions, or extensions. Imagine a platform where clone owners donate old plans, or planning applications so that others can benefit from them.
Imagine a place where everything becomes a bit more ‘like-for-like’; tradesmen couldn’t get away with sucking air through their teeth and plucking a price out of the air - you’ll have a community of people that can tell you how much (or how little) they’ve had to pay for similar work to be done on their houses.
As you descend the scale of house prices, the amount of exclusivity reduces. In other words, the cheaper the house, the more likely it is to be cloned - threfore the amount of information that could potentially be shared increases in line with the amount of people that are likely to need it most.
We’ve all seen beautifully decorated homes in magazines and on TV programmes, and then realised that the effect would look very different in our own home. Home Clone would be the first step towards delivering a more relevant set of design tips.
So that’s it. Now, I like to think that this idea is like a really good tennis racket; I could, in theory, win Wimbledon with it, but its best chance is with someone more capable than myself.
4iP’s brief rejection notes pointed to the saturation in the DiY/interior design market, and the difficulty of trying to build up an audience for this; which is fair enough. I was pleased that one of the reasons for rejection wasn’t “because you’re just a games company“.
As is the format of 4iP, this was just the opening suggestion of an idea, rather than a fully formed, ready-to-build proposition. I’d be interested to read comments on how it might evolve, and especially about where a scheme like this could thrive.
Oh, and just in case you were starting to feel sorry for our rejection - don’t! Tuna is a company that is full of ideas, and we’ve already moved on - in fact we’re already discussing another project with the very nice, informed, charming, intelligent, purse-holding, innovative and beautiful people at 4iP.
PS Do you own a 4-bed dormer bungalow like the one shown in the illustrations above? Just drop me a line if you want the 3d model that I created in 3DSMax9, and you can start home cloning for yourself ; )Comments
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