Big Idea - Number a Day

The idea is a website with just a single page that would have the current price of gold, and the current exchange rates for the Argentine peso. Naturally you'd want a graph so you could see what has been happening lately. It would need to update itself automatically from some source somewhere. It would have a couple of ads. Hopefully the ads would bring in enough revenue to pay for the annual domain name registration and maybe buy you a lunch out once a year.

The reason I wanted something like this is because the sites that have this kind of information are too noisy. They are covered with all kinds of crap that I neither want nor need. What's worse is that they make it hard to find the information I do want. This is the main reason I prefer Google over the other search engines - their home page is very clean and simple, uncluttered. Pristine. Glorious in it's minimalism. You get the idea.

So then I thought about this idea a little more and I realized that it could be a franchise, kind of like 'XYZ for Dummies' series of books. Things like 'Stock Price of the Day', or currency exchange rate of the day, or population of Zimbabwe, or high temperature in Chicago. Anything that could be represented by a number that changes every day.

We would need a two prong approach. One would be a list of web sites / web pages were you could get the particular number you wanted. Second would be an email/twitter/text service that would deliver the number you wanted. Every web page would have an ad or three, and every sent message would include an ad. If you really wanted to be fancy, and this became popular, you could even offer a subscription service that would dispense with the ads.

To make it a success, the web pages would need to be clean and simple. We aren't trying to be a service for experts, there are plenty of tools for analyzing stuff in depth. What we want is the lowest common denominator kind of information.