I'm not a huge fan of brainstorming, that has never seemed to work for me. Almost all of my ideas come from encountering problems. Sometimes it me who encount

I'm not a huge fan of brainstorming, that has never seemed to work for me. Almost all of my ideas come from encountering problems. Sometimes it me who encounters the problem, sometimes some one I've talked to, and sometimes I read about it. For example, I was looking at doing some programming contracting, but noticed all of the outsourcing sites like ODesk have a race to the bottom where all that matters is price. Maybe there is an opportunity for a high end odesk that rewards firms have good communication skills and do more than work for a spec. For another example, I read about the horrible CPM's that Facebook gets. Maybe there is an opportunity to build an Adsense-like product for social networks that allows targeting based on user profile rather than page content. The other thing I do is every time I see a brand new technology that has the potential to create a category, I think of all the things that I could build off of it. For instance, e-ink has this electronic paper that is easier on the eyes than paper. Who has high print costs that might benefit from this? School systems? Universities? If you can think of how a technology applies to a unique area, you can be the first to a lucrative market. One of the hardest things about being a young company founder is that you do not spend time around people with a lot of money. You would be amazed at how many bigger companies just throw away money on crappy software or throw away time on things that could easily be automated. One source of ideas would be to spend time around people who have money.