Here's an idea, that'll be five bucks
The latest lightbulb is from IdeaExchange, a Web site that lets anyone with a bright idea offer it up for sale.
Worried about hotel room mirrors actually being two-way? For $5, anyone can find out whether you're alone when you gaze into a mirror.
An idea to keep cats out of the garden forever costs $5. A way to create an instant keyboard penholder deskset costs $1, or about the cost of a coffee cup. An idea for a folding pen that can fit in a wallet is $1.50.
An ex-Internal Revenue Service lists 13 ways to beat an audit. Never file taxes in April, that'll be $9. For another $9, a customer gets another news nugget: Don't use rounded numbers.
The idea came to IdeaExchange founder and chief executive officer Robert Brazell with the quickness of a pluck of a broken guitar string.
"This college student discovered a way to restore and preserve guitar strings," Brazell explained. "In previous economies, what would someone do with that idea? There was just no efficient marketplace."
Idea Exchange users pay $2 a month to list their ideas. In exchange, the site will help the genius post the idea. It'll also help write the little teasers meant to give tantalizing glimpses of ways to eliminate a blind spot while driving without giving up the entire three dollars worth.
For its help, IdeaExchange keeps 20 percent of every sale.
The exchange sits in a Web space that is slowly getting to be quite the idea mill. The group of companies haven't settled on a niche name yet. Some call it idea commerce; others dub it contextual commerce.
InfoRocket, a question-and-answer marketplace, is arguably the granddaddy of the information marketplaces.
Others include Ehow, which offers up ways to perform every, real-world tasks, like throwing a knuckleball or making Cajun hot sauce.
The site was pegged by Nielsen/Net Ratings as the fastest growing among those accessed at work. Ehow's Renee Langemach, senior manager of corporate communications, said the site has about three million unique visitors a month.
ExpertCentral offers up experts. Another newcomer to the space, Qsource, lets people offer up their own life experiences for a price.
There is a lot of money to be had. According to global market research firm Datamonitor, the direct information exchange market will generate about $6 billion by 2005.
It has other ideas as well. The market has the potential to facilitate more than $50 billion in online buys in five years. The whole marketplace could be worth about $30 billion one day.
Major portals are starting to take notice. Ehow works with Microsoft Network, Ask.com and has a distribution deal with Looksmart.