Rogue killer app

One of the people I follow on the Twitter-dot-com was apparently having a bad day earlier this week. You could tell that when his tweets began referring darkly to “rogues”.

I got the impression that by “rogues” he meant “scoundrels”, and not, say, “scamps”, or even “undesirable deviations from a standard”. That’s because he declared, “If I invented a gadget that detected rogues I’d be a billionaire in a week.”

Well—you can’t argue with that, really.

He went on to announce, “So it’s time to get busy inventing a rogue detector”.

And the product manager in me kicked in pretty much automatically. Because in software product management, it’s all about understanding the problem that needs to be solved and who has the problem. Only after you’ve got those two elements completely in hand can you start thinking about defining the technology that might ameliorate the situation.

I pointed that out to him—the big challenge in developing a scumbag-identifying device or (more likely) application is in how one defines a scumbag. My standards in the matter are going to be somewhat different from yours, depending on how charming you find lying, cheating, self-puffery, back-stabbing, expense-fiddling and other behaviors and character traits. You probably wouldn’t download the app if it’s set to my criteria.

(Well—it’s the Twitters, so I was limited to 140 characters. What I actually said to him was “The big problem is accommodating individual definitions of ‘rogue’. #GoodLuck”)

This guy is definitely CEO material, the man with the Big Idea; and every start-up needs one of them. Maybe more, in case of traffic accidents or bad seafood. His response was right in line with the CEO approach:

“LOL…but my definition is the only one that matters! ;-)”

Well, I tried to be circumspect, as you are to CEOs. “To you; yes. But to the millions who’ll pay you $$$ per download…they gotta have their definition. Just sayin’.”

(I once told a CEO who was visualizing Big Things for a product I was developing, “It’s your job to build castles in the air. It’s mine [as product manager] to get out the shovel and start digging the foundation.” This tweeted exchange was along those lines.)

And he graciously came around: “Very true…I’m actually beginning to think seriously about the plan… :-)”

But then he came up with a prototype involving Wonder Woman’s Lasso of Truth.

Okay, look—it may surprise you to know that I have given considerable thought to this whole rat-catching issue over the years. Being able to detect scrotes is the first step to getting them out of your life. It is therefore my opinion that a Lasso of Truth is not only hardware-intensive (you’ve got manufacturing and distribution costs, moving parts and all the stuff that can go wrong. Plus—what do you do about batteries?), it’s not subtle and it puts you in closer proximity to the schmucks than I think you should be, as a paying customer.

I’m thinking mobile app, here; something that combines user-defined scumbag criteria, maybe NLP, voice recognition, even facial scanning technologies. The subscriber chooses what’s important to her from a comprehensive pick list, sets the priorities, probably using sliders, and then just taps the icon when she’s in the presence of a suspected schmuck.

(I say "subscriber" because this has to be Software-as-a-Service. Need to determine the subscription model—per-month or per-use. First thought is that per-use is going to be the money-spinner, but I'll have to run some number projections; maybe plug them into a spreadsheet.)

The app would “read” the jerk in question from a discreet distance (pretend you’re taking his picture; they’re narcissistic enough to be pleased by that) so that it would never occur to him that he’s being, ah, filtered, and process the inputs according to some algorithm yet TBD.

(It would have to be robust enough to handle the presence of multiple scumbags. So that if you were, say, in any legislative body anywhere in the world, or a Hollywood party, it wouldn't crash through the sheer weight of data. Well—maybe we put in the instructions that you shouldn't waste your per-use fees on politicians because everyone knows they're all lying, thieving rat bastards and why would you even fire up the app for what you already know?)

What you do about it is, of course, not part of the app, and we’d have to state that very clearly in the End User License Agreement (EULA). So it’s not what you might call a complete end-to-end solution. For that we’d probably have to partner with some, ah, services organization(s); so that would be part of a future version in the product roadmap.

But, like 10,000 lawyers at the bottom of the ocean, it’s a start.

I think I’ll just put together a little product requirements document and have it ready in the cloud for when I run into VCs at a local coffee shop somewhere near Sand Hill Road. I'm thinking there's a Google Glass tie-in, too.