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I tend to develop technologies, throw them up on a web site, and see what happens. Usually this leads to someone saying, "hey, cool" and wanting to license it. This is easy because I don't have to worry about building a business, but it's not very profitable.

The heart of RhymeBrain.com is its pronunciation engine, which incorporates some fairly sophisticated artificial intelligence algorithms.

Any ideas on where to take this? I don't have any google ads up because they haven't been worth it in other projects. I've licensed the technology to an iPhone developer already.

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Rhyming dictionaries are useful. Sell access to it.

  • Add a captcha so people don't bot into your site.

  • Do more licensing such as you did for the iPhone app.

  • Create an offline version.

  • Create a plugin for Word that can call your web site. Paying customers would really like this convenience, it lets them focus on the poem, not on switching programs to use a dictionary. Bonus points for making your plugin work offline so people can go to the park, write their poetry and not have to be online.

  • Make an API that would allow integration into other sites. I know of at least one site that might use this, I'll send you an email with info about it.

  • If you sell access to it, sell by the number of queries per month so you do not have to worry about people sharing accounts (or at least not have to worry too much about it).

There's lots of things you could do...

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take keywords from news stories and run them against a list of idioms to generate amusing headlines, then sell the software to a news organisation

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