My favorite method for generating ideas is this:<p>1) Find a task I have. If I want to make money later from this idea, this task should probably be something I already pay money for, but if I just want to make my life easier, than forget the money part. My credit card statement is a great place to look for the money making ones. Once I have the task...<p>2) List out all the steps this task has. Be as detailed as you can.<p>3) Figure out how to remove as many steps as possible.<p>Seems simple, but I don't see people doing this very much. Instead they focus on making something because it sounds cool or is going to be the next Facebook for people who use Groupon.<p>OXO is one of my favorite examples of doing this. They make household goods.<p>1) Task: they studied the tasks people have in the kitchen. They watched how people cooked and baked using measuring cups.<p>2) Steps: one of the weird steps people have in cooking with measuring cups is when they lift the cup to see the water level against the cups ruler. They would do this 4 or 5 times trying to get an accurate amount of water in their cup.<p>3) Remove: they figured out they could add the measuring cups ruler to the top of the measuring cup so that people could see the measurement while they used the kitchen faucet to add water. They no longer needed to lift the cup up to read the level.<p>So simple, but they shaved off those 4-5 extra steps, and they sold millions of their new measuring cups in 18 months.<p>They innovated on a measuring cup. Pretty inspiring when you think of how long measuring cups have been around and how simple they are. There are so many newer more complicated things around us today that could use the simplification above.
Find some WordPress bugs/issues/features and start hacking away [1] or find another open-source project to contribute some PHP work to.<p>[1] <a href="http://codex.wordpress.org/Developer_Documentation#Contributing_to_WordPress" rel="nofollow">http://codex.wordpress.org/Developer_Documentation#Contribut...</a>
What makes a project/webapp idea well-suited to PHP? It might be better to ask about your interests, your experience, etc.. Presumably you've branched off from coding basic CRUD apps into something more specialized; do you have expertise (and contacts, domain knowledge, etc.) you might want to leverage in a new project? Or do you want to start a side project to build more expertise in X?<p>What do you want out of this?<p>Suggestions for finding (and validating) ideas for new webapps/projects are all over; you might check into those.
My way of learning a programming language is always to write a chess program in it (this is probably why I haven't learned any languages which don't encourage state). A multiplayer chess site would be a fun and challenging project.
though i agree with the comments that there's not really an idea restricted to php (jtheory) and your interests would be good to know (jtheory, dutchbrit), i throw in a wild idea as you didn't provide those…<p>an application in which you keep track of your fridge's content (throw a cam driven barcode scanner in there) and suggests meals to cook based on the lowest investment (stuff not in your fridge) taking into account the store closest to you (can throw a little location based feature) your favourite meals sorted desc based on a custom rating (client specific rating db?)…<p>should keep you busy for a while? B-)
Write a service for people who got the same issue like you: A web(app|page), where people can submit their computer problems like "I need an application, that scans my calendar from <insert calendar provider here> and alerts me in my browser ten minutes before the event comes up". Programmers than could just pick a task from it and post the solution. The whole thing can be expanded to the maximum like payed work, featured idea's, collaboration / team finding based on activity stats .. you name it :)
I hope this helps you a bit..
./sz0ka
I find that it's better to work on a project related to something you're passionate about. Otherwise a couple weeks will go by and you'll have a hard time continuing to work on it.<p>If you want to do something audio related, you can use an API that I built out <a href="http://audiour.com/api" rel="nofollow">http://audiour.com/api</a>
There are a couple things I want to rework before officially releasing it into the wild, but you can start using it now if you're interested.
A web app that plays music (could just be youtube videos), and makes smart ratings and playlists for you based on how long you listen to your songs. The idea is that if you listen to a song for 20 seconds, you don't like it as much as if you listen to it for 2:30. From this data on how much you like songs, you could even get into better predicting of which songs you should try (like Pandora does).
I've got a near fully built front-end that needs a back-end. The project is in the travel industry. It's a lot simpler than AI, video crawling, etc that you mention, but it's straightforward and ready to make money. Ping me on Twitter if you're interested.
You can probably do a simple Twitter-like application, it's simple CRUD and shouldn't be difficult (It's used both in Rails for Zombies and the Rails Book as example iirc)<p>A simple blog engine isn't complicated either.
I had a similar post, has some links to app ideas <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6067537" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6067537</a>
Try this method (for mobile apps): <a href="http://mobileappchat.com/mylyrics-giacomo-balli/" rel="nofollow">http://mobileappchat.com/mylyrics-giacomo-balli/</a>
An RSS reader that flows all the feeds together, but weights them based on frequency. So your once-a-month blog is above your webcomic is above your HN feed.
read the book "The Millionaire Fastlane" by MJ Demarco. after you have read it, your ideas will flow (I think) and you will have a clearer vision on what you really must pursue.