A good rule of thumb is to look for things that save time and/or energy. The more saving, the more valuable your idea is to the users. The idea value, in the

A good rule of thumb is to look for things that save time and/or energy. The more saving, the more valuable your idea is to the users. The idea value, in the eye of the user, is the saving multiplied by its occurence. Big savings are eye catching and most probably covered by zillion startups. Small savings are more frequent but also often less obvious and eye catching. This is the heuristic I would use to find where to start searching for an idea. google search algorithm is in fact saving search time. This is where the value comes from. The advertisement is a smart way to leverage the value without restraining access. To detect these tasks with potential savings you have to scrutinize what you, or people around you, do on a daily basis. One example I am currently thinking of is typing on these cumbersome keyboards. There is something to do there, especially if pressure sensitive screens become available. Look at what it takes to type a message with a mobile phone. Painfull. Look at how big a keyboard has to be. Look at the blackberry success and the high value of an interface that would not require these littles keys wasting space you could use for viewing things (cf. iPhone). You won't wake up one morning shouting "eureka". This is something to experiment and explore as the people at Xerox did with smalltalk and their brilliant mouse and graphic interface. The keybord thing is is just to give an example of something people do every day without thinking of it and imagine that there might be a better way. This is where you can find gems and gold mines.