Not all ideas are worth of your time – assess them all, wisely.

What’s the risk of setting your imagination free in the wild?  Is that new product idea worth of your time?  Say you have an idea for a product or product feature. Should you go for it?

That’s a question I’m constantly faced with, and truth be told, I haven’t completely mastered it yet – although my decision process has evolved over the years. Because I always write down every single new idea I have, and I can’t pursue them all, I’m always asking myself: “how to decide what idea should be at the top of my list?”

the risk of pursuing a product idea

The risk of pursuing a product idea.

These days, I believe that to be successful in deciding what ideas are worth pursuing, one’s state of mind has to be around how to mitigate all the risk associated with the pursuing of such creative bolts. Yes, sometimes not pursuing one idea, is the best idea; Not all of your ideas are worth of your time; And many times, the best ideas turn out to be the result of many doomed ideas.

Here’s a summary of lessons I learned over the years in the form of questions I regularly ask myself. So, when facing a new idea, if you want to try my process, ask yourself this type of questions, which I see being grouped in 3 major risk-assessment categories.

1. The perceived value of the idea:

  • Is this something you believe in?
  • Is this something that people might like?
  • Is this something that people might want to have?
  • Is this something that people might pay for?
  • Is this something that can be used to attract/get customers?
  • Is this something that creates a significant piece of intellectual property?
  • Is this something unique that no one else has done before?
  • Is this something you talked to others about, and the feedback was mostly positive?
  • Is this something you could see yourself using/buying?
  • Is this something that if it wasn’t yours, you’d love to read all about it in a magazine?
  • Is this something for which you already have all the required buy-in?
  • Is this something that someone else is paying you to create?
  • Is this something that will help you accomplish a long term goal?

2. The ability to execute the idea:

  • Is this something you have full and complete understanding of?
  • Is this something you can (financially) afford creating?
  • Is this something you can count on everyone else who need to be involved?
  • Is this something unlikely to break other parts of an existing system?
  • Is this something you can quickly prototype to confirm that it can work as desired?
  • Is this something you have all the tools/dependencies needed to build it?
  • Is this something similar to another idea you successfully delivered before?
  • Is this something you can learn more about if you feel you don’t know enough yet?

3. The amount of time the idea will require:

  • Is this something you can fit in your work schedule?
  • Is this something you can fit around your personal schedule?
  • Is this something that won’t affect your dedication to other professional responsibilities?
  • Is this something that won’t affect your dedication to other personal responsibilities?
  • Is this something you can delegate to another team member, if needed?
  • Is this something whose total project length you can guesstimate early on?
  • Is this something you can see yourself maintaining in the long run?
  • Is this something that won’t seriously damage the progress of other concurrent ideas?
  • Is this something that if put aside for some time, will still be relevant when you get back to it?
  • Is this something whose first version/prototype can be done in a reasonable amount of time?

Of course, the list above is a living organism. It’s always evolving – even during the course of this writing.

Depending on the situation, not all questions are applicable, and different questions might have different weights. In my analyses, I usually put a lot of weight on the time factor because I think time is the most precious non-renewable resource we have, it’s the one reason I never wear a watch as I don’t want to be continuously reminded that time is constantly passing us by. To help manage the time factor risk, when jumping on a new idea, sometimes I give myself an “exploratory” timeframe or an actual deadline to wrap it up (for this post, for example, I gave myself tonight and tonight only). If at the end of that given period, the idea hasn’t developed well enough for my taste, I simply put it back in the idea bucket. You never toss an idea completely away because you never know when your next idea will come by and (just maybe) present itself as a great companion to those rejected ideas that have been long forgotten inside that creativity container of yours.

Very recently, I watched an interview with author and illustrator of children’s books, Mo Willems, and he said: “[…] a mistake that people make is they think ideas are things that you get, like shoes. And they’re not. They’re not shoes. They’re plants. Ideas are things that you grow, and every day you go back, and you take your sketch book, and you’re planting a little seed, and some of them just don’t grow at all. And every now and then, one of those seeds slowly, slowly grows up and becomes a beautiful tree that bares fruit that you can cut down and burn for profit. […]”

Imagination is not something tangible, and the risk of pursuing ideas cannot be easily quantified so I acknowledge that my informal process might have its flaws.  However, if while analyzing an idea, you end up answering “No” too many times to applicable questions like the ones I listed in this post, it’s likely that you have to proceed with some considerable amount of caution, if at all. Nonetheless, simply by going through such checklist in your head, you might be able to quickly figure out whether an idea is a yay or a nay. And if you happen to have many ideas concurrently circling around in your head, this little exercise might offer you a very naive – but efficient – framework to rank them all, while helping you figure out where your attention should go next.

Imagination’s greatest threat is the absence of an inspired and organized mind.

~ André Lessa

An idea to improve the success rate of reusable space rockets’ vertical landings.

For the past year or so, while seeing all the news coverage related to commercial companies going after the much sought-after recycling of space rockets, I asked myself, what could be done in a relatively short amount of time to improve the reliability of this fairly new vertical landing strategy? What could allow rocket companies to save tens of millions of dollars instead of facing failed landing attempts? So I started thinking about ideas that could improve success perception, and allow rocket companies to try to rescue rockets that misbehave during the last few seconds of their vertical landings. As a result of all this unsolicited thinking, I came up with an idea, which might not be 100% feasible, but hey, creativity and the will to innovate are everything!

The current state of things:

Bringing any rocket to a perfect precision vertical landing is a (huge) challenge. Rocket engineers have already created rockets that have an elaborated landing system that includes  capabilities like timed burns for deceleration, independent grid fins, and deployable landing legs, all to provide additional aerodynamic stability that is capable of supporting the forces of landing and the mass of nearly empty rocket stages.

As a naive outsider watching the landings, what I noticed is that during most unsuccessful landings, the overall operation seems to fail usually right after rockets reach the targeted landing area, as they reduce the engine thrust for the touch down.  A common problem I observed while watching the available failed landing videos was that as certain rockets started tilting during the last few seconds of landing, their center of mass get affected and reach a point where nothing else can be done to help balance them. In those cases, given a rocket’s lack of powerful thrusters (above their center of gravity) to quickly counter balance any excessive uncontrolled tilting, things will inevitably start to literally go sideways.  A good analogy uses a broomstick as a reference. Try to balance a broomstick using the palm of your hand, and move your hand to the ground level until your hand movements come to a full stop, all while keeping the broomstick upright.  The broomstick task would certainly become less difficult if one could use their other hand to briefly nudge the top of the broomstick, here and there, as needed, gently helping balance the broomstick, bringing it to a restful state.

The Idea:

I’m not going to talk about tweaking the rockets.  Companies in that industry already have 1000s of rocket scientists working on that front. What I’d like to propose is focusing on a landing assistance apparatus that could be quickly activated and deployed at the planned landing site. Essentially, a plan B. Here’s the thing: Any reusable rocket with their broomstick-like rocket design could, at least in theory, have a fallback plan relying on that same broomstick-nudging strategy to help stabilize the rocket’s landing angle and bring it to a steady vertical alignment.

How would this work?

At its core, the idea is to create an autonomous system and apparatus capable of :

  • Identify that the rocket is close enough to the landing target area but it’s getting out of control by losing its vertical alignment, and could require some landing assistance;
  • Have a mechanical “hand” capable of freely and quickly moving around the landing area, and position itself where it can lightly touch the rocket, providing just enough supporting surface above the rocket’s center of mass to allow the rocket to pivot and realign itself for the landing;
  • Once the vertical alignment is reached, the machine would either get out of the rocket’s way, or if needed, continue to assist the rocket until the landing is complete;

To quickly position itself at the right place, a guiding track would be constructed in the perimeter of the rocket’s landing area (Fig.1), where a fast automated transportation system (Fig.2) carrying a large hydraulic/pneumatic gripper (Fig.3) would quickly position itself to lightly touch the rocket just above its center of mass (Fig.4). 

figures.001

Such fast and automated guiding track could, in theory, be mounted underground to minimize the footprint of the apparatus and any applicable air-drag resistance. The time between detecting a problem and start delivering the assistance is in the order of seconds. Apparently, based on observations, 5-10 seconds at the most, so I believe that the custom vehicle operating on such track would require both a body with a low drag coefficient rate and high-torque engines working in parallel, something with a powerful acceleration to be able to quickly position the apparatus at the right location around the rocket. The large hydraulic/pneumatic gripper would also require a special setup to allow the rocket to touch it while generating the least amount of friction/heat as possible. A possible solution would be to equip the gripper with powerful magnets that would react to a magnetized rocket surface with opposite forces, but that would require changing the design of the rocket, so maybe a simpler solution is to equip the gripper hand with several wheel-like points that would gently spin as the rocket slide its way down the grip. It’s important to highlight that there’s no grabbing of rockets here. The goal is to simply provide a surface that can be used to lightly nudge the top of the rocket, just like it can be done with a broomstick.

Back to the design aspects, low footprint of the overall apparatus is a key requirement as this system cannot have a tall structure as those can prevent rockets from reaching their target landing areas.  Another design consideration is that since the gripper would neither need to support the full weight of the rocket,  nor have a need to grip its whole circumference, this apparatus wouldn’t necessarily need to be a very rugged system. It would only need to be nimble enough to quickly position itself and provide a supporting surface for the landing rocket to touch and start a pivoting operation, auto-correcting its landing angle, and eventually, vertically realigning itself.

In closing…

I’m a computer scientist and a thinker, not a rocket scientist, not a mechanical engineer. I do enjoy trying to solve hard challenges that I find intriguing though. I’m a big fan of innovation and I think that what I have described above is a very cool and innovative solution to increase the success rate in the process of landing reusable rockets.

If not completely practical, I hope this idea is at least inspiring to the scientists and engineers out there in such exciting industry.

~ André Lessa

Open Sourcing a sleek intelligence API

Back in 2011-2012 I put a lot of time and energy into creating a simple and sleek JSON API framework for quick intelligence prototyping; an API capable of managing JSON objects, and performing a lot of smart computing tasks. Fast forward to 2016, I decided to open source the codebase, sharing it with the world because I believe this framework, although a bit outdated by now, still has the potential to help others.

pie.small

SQLpie™ is an open source API framework that uses all sorts of SQL statements to creatively perform all kinds of computing tasks (thus, SQLpie). With SQLpie, developers can store JSON objects in a SQL database and run a lot of information retrieval and machine learning tasks on the data, covering areas such as: Text Classification, Text Summarization, Collaborative Filtering (item recommendation and similarity), Boolean/Vector Search, Document Matching, TagClouds, etc… The project is 100% written in Python and runs on top of a MySQL database.

The SQLpie project went after a lot of big challenges, and although I do not advocate that it includes the best implementations to handle all of those tasks, I believe the combined effort can help people quickly prototype new ideas, and hopefully, create new and awesome products.

Its API services can help developers with the following type of questions:

• How can one store JSON documents? (answer: documents services)
• How can one keep track of document relationships? (answer: observations services)
• What documents exist for query Q? (answer: indexing and search services)
• What documents are located near location L? (answer: geosearch service)
• What top keyphrases and keywords relate to query Q? (answer: tagcloud search service)
• What are the key sentences, entities, and terms associated with document D? (answer: summarization service)
• What documents are similar (or relate) to document D? (answer: document matching service)
• Will user U like document D? (answer: classification service)
• How likely is user U to like document D? (answer: classification service)
• What documents is user U likely to love based on user data? (answer: recommendation service)
• What other users have a document taste similar to user U? (answer: similarity service)

If you’re a developer, learn more at SQLpie.com. The project is hosted on Github.

Cheers,
~ Andre Lessa

Benchmarking Engine: A new revenue stream opportunity with business data you already have.

Let’s start with the kind of question you are likely to ask yourself the first time you come across something new.

“What do I need a Benchmarking Engine for?”

A possible short answer is this: To efficiently and automatically identify opportunities for business performance improvement, customer/vendor satisfaction, and revenue generation.

Now for a more comprehensive answer… Continue reading →