As a programmer, my dream service is an API that lets me code against all of the financial institutions/businesses that I deal with. Not a read-only thing like Mint uses, but something I can actually execute, receive events, etc... so that I could automate my finances with code.
A few examples of things I'd like to be able to do:
Every Saturday, automatically transfer X% of last week's revenues to a savings account (which I use to pay my quarterly taxes).
When my personal checking account balance drops below $X, transfer $Y from my savings account at another institution.
On the 10th day of every month, pay off my MasterCard balance from my personal checking account. If doing so would leave less than $X in the account, then don't do it, and alert me (probably by email) every day until I fix it.
Every time my personal account receives a transfer from my business account, transfer X% of that to a retirement account.
Etc....
Of course, the barriers to doing something like this are enormous. Enough that it might simply be impossible, but you're the one who asked for "dream[s]." :)
This is true, but as a cyclist, often the sound of my own tires on the road, plus the wind in my ears and sometimes even my own breathing, masks the road noise of an oncoming electric car.
The problem with ratemyprofessor (and virtually any 3rd-party "review" platform) is the potential for participation bias. Students only participate when they 1. Know about the platform and 2. Have strong enough opinions that they feel a need to share. This means that the ratings are biased in favor of the exceptionally good and exceptionally bad. (throw in a little human psychology, and the bias moves towards bad reviews appearing proportionally more often than they should).
The advantage of having the data come from Yale is that they can mandate that every faculty member must take class time to conduct the student evaluation. This ensures that [nearly] every student's experience in every class will be considered in the final results, which gives much more legitimacy to the results.
The things you've listed are all "skills." Learning new skills is great, and you should do it for the rest of your life.
Don't limit your 'trying things' to just new skills, however. Consider new experiences you'd like to have. Others have mentioned travel, skydiving, etc... Those experiences are what make the memories that last a lifetime, long after you're past the novelty of being able to plunk out tunes on the piano. Here are a few suggestions:
* Go eat at a Michelin 3-star restaurant, even if it the price seems crazy.
* Next time the Mormons or Jehova's Witnesses knock on the door, invite them in and listen to what they have to say.
* Go to a concert, especially one that's outside your "norm" (Been to a few rock concerts? Go to the symphony. Or vice-versa).
* Volunteer at a soup kitchen, homeless shelter, or some other place where you'll work hard for nothing more than feeling good about contributing to society.
That said, when you do tackle the skill stuff, I highly recommend Josh Kaufmann's book "The first 20 hours" (http://www.amazon.com/The-First-20-Hours-Anything/dp/1591845...). In which he teaches how to become "not a beginner" at something fairly quickly.
I built and sell a collection of plugins for the Delphi IDE at http://www.twodesk.com. (Yes, people still use Delphi), for a consistent single-digit multiple of $1K each month.
FYI, I just tried to send you a message via the "Contact Us" link on your site, and clicking "Send" results in a classic Ruby on Rails "We're sorry, something went wrong" error page. You could be losing sales if those messages aren't going through.
I can't speak for the church or any particular mission, but from my experience as a Mormon missionary over a decade ago, backpacks 1) Make missionaries look like students, when they are not. 2) Are awkward on public transportation (and using them on transport is considered quite rude in some cultures). 3) Are more prone to being pickpocketed or losing things than a bag at your side/front that you can see more readily.
This is pretty cool. How far do you intend to take it? Here's a "use case"/feature request:
In addition to being a developer/entrepreneur, I moonlight as a high school marching band instructor/arranger. In other words, I'm a semi-professional composer. I work with a team of people who write different aspects of the music: One guy writes the winds, I write the percussion, and others contribute as well.
Currently, whenever one of us has an idea about something to do with whatever we're arranging, we have to either get everyone together in a room with a piano to talk through it, or someone has to sit down with a professional music notation program (we use Finale) and "sketch" it all out.
It would be really cool if there was something online like RiffUp that would let me put together that "sketch" quickly and easily, and send a link to my colleagues. Like a "pastebin" for sheet music.
To get there, it would need to do a few more things, in roughly priority order:
* Allow you to save your creation and send a link to someone else.
* Support "-let" rhythms (triplets, for example)
* Use multiple staves
* Set the tempo
* Allow other time signatures (time changes would be good too)
* Choose a different voice for each staff
The great benefit here would be simple composition without having to worry about all of the stuff associate with making a real score. So much of music notation is about making stuff that prints nicely, which is actually a separate process from just creating the music. And, of course, being able to easily share it with colleagues without requiring them to have the same software I do (or to download a file and open it in that software).
And to answer the followup question that you'll ask: Yes, I'd be willing to pay for this.
As someone who sells software online, the most horrifying thing about this scenario is that the user is very unlikely to ever tell me why they moved on, and so I'm terrifyingly unlikely to ever know that this trivial feature is missing.
This literally keeps me awake at night.
Statistic: it takes roughly 200 non-converting free trial downloads of my software to get one data point of feedback telling me why they decided not to buy.