Sorry for the three-month hiatus!  School has been as busy as ever, with tutoring in Harlem, working on a research project here at Columbia, developing the test preparation site, and trying to do well in all of my classes!  Finals begin in two weeks and I feel confident about all of my classes (except physics).  I’m looking forward to tomorrow, when registration for next semester’s classes begins.  I’ll be loading up next semester on mathematics and computer science classes (calc IV, discrete math, advanced programming, and data structures) if they will let me.

I never mentioned it on the blog, but I have applied as a transfer applicant to MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology);  I’ll find out in May whether I have been accepted.  Either way, at MIT or here at Columbia, the prospect of completing my breadth requirements and getting into the major is exciting.  I’ve been constantly thinking of ways to apply the skills I am gaining in computer science to entrepreneurship and creating value (and thus profit).  Below is one idea I had recently:

On-demand foreign language recordings

Problem:

• Pat wants to learn Ukrainian independently over the Internet or through a CD/DVD course.  Unfortunately, Pat lives in Podunk, Missouri, where Ukrainian speakers are rare.  Even if Pat knows one, she does not want to bother him, or is too shy to ask for help with pronunciation.
• Pat’s Internet/CD course has sound recordings of general-interest words, but if Pat wants to know how a native speaker would pronounce any arbitrary word from the dictionary, she is out of luck.

Solution: On-demand foreign language recordings

• Pat comes to my website, where she enters the words she wants to hear pronounced (“??, ?, ??????, ?? ????? ?????? ?”).
• Pat pays $0.25 for each word (a total of $1.75, in this case).
• *hidden magical business process*
• Voilah! Pat gets an email with a link to my website, where she can download an audio recording of a real, live native speaker of Ukrainian saying, “??, ?, ??????, ?? ????? ?????? ?.”
• Pat can now sing part of a Ukrainian folk song!  Yay!

What do you think about this idea?  Please leave comments to this post and/or complete the survey below!

Chris

[Update: Removed the form for aesthetic and performance reasons. It's here if you are interested.]