Idea Idol 2006

The countdown to Idea Idol 2006* has really begun in earnest.

This competition is really the showcase of the Oxford Entrepreneurship* Society, where simple ideas can be pitched to judges in an attempt to win up to £5,000. A sort of Dragon’s Den for back-of-the-envelope fantasies.

Last year’s winners included Boso.co.uk, the first (they say) online student marketplace, which has received a wealth of high-level national media coverage.

The Final is on the 27th February at the Said Business School. The finalists were due to be announced on the 4th of this month, but I suspect that something has gone wrong with the administration, because on the 12th people were asked to resubmit their ideas, suggesting that entries were lost (or not submitted?).

Let’s look forward to the canapes, anyway!

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* Note about the links: apologies to sensitive souls for including those links, but I include them for good reason. The websites, which — in case you’re too scared to see yourself — fall into some of the easy traps of Flash (not at all Web2.0):

Fancy transitions, colour effects and fonts are easily seen as a synonym for good design. It’s a common aphorism that 80% of the users of MS Office use only 20% of the features (or at least it should be if we follow an interpretation of Pareto’s rule), but I think we could easily formulate one for Flash, namely:

80% of the users of Flash should only use 20% of its features;

or going further:

You’ll be right 80% of the time if you only use Flash 20% of the time you’re tempted to.

Hard to find content. The site has a clear menu, but it’s hard to find what you’re looking for and to leap from one bit to the next. Of course, none of it is actual text (presumably people of limited sight or using older machines can’t have ideas). For example, while writing this I knew I had seen a page of previous winners, but couldn’t find it again for ages.

MUSIC! The web was never intended to be a multi-sensory experience.

Now this may all seem harsh — and I don’t want to get into a CrunchNotes/Fooky-esque debacle — but I’ve resisted making blink tag gags and I fully accept that I made all these mistakes back in the 90s, before the World had speeded on into Web2.0 clarity. The issue is that OE is supposed to represent a dynamic professional bunch of people, and that is not what bouncewithit.com and ideaidol.com suggest. Sorry.
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