Some of the best ideas come by solving a problem for separate parties simultaneously. Start up businesses often struggle to afford the overhead associated with running a full time office, and restaurants are effectively, non-earning dead space for much of the day.

That’s the background to ‘Spacious’, a start-up founded by Preston Pesek and Chris Smothers in New York, which makes use of empty restaurants by offering them up to freelancers and others without an office as an alternative to crowded coffee shops. More than 2,000 restaurants in Manhattan and Brooklyn are closed before 6 p.m. every day, according to the company, and it’s some of this space which they’re putting to us. Users pat $29 a day of $95 a month to use the facilities.

If this can work in New York, it should work in other major cities too. Thinking more broadly, there’s  under-utilised capacity in many sectors and spheres. How might you fill it for profit?

One of the big trends of the last few years is peer to peer services…cutting out big companies and bringing individuals together for mutual benefit. We’ve see it in accommodation through the likes of Airbnb, in lending through the likes of Zopa and now Grabr is taking the concept into the delivery market.

The platform enables travellers to take a little extra baggage for a small fee. A buyer chooses their item and anyone heading for their town or city can bid for the job. The buyer then selects who they would like to make the delivery and arranges a meeting place. The service takes advantage of journeys already taking place.

What other services, currently the domain of big companies, could lend themselves to the peer-to-peer treatment.

grabr.io

You probably need to have been asleep for the past couple of weeks to have failed to have noticed the hysteria surrounding the new Pokemon app. The app is a game that enables phone users to go out and track down and capture virtual monsters which are to be found hiding in their locality. It hasn’t taken long for some people to spot a money making opportunity. For app users who are too busy (or lazy)  to go out and track down their own monsters, entrepreneurs are now offering to do it for them, for a fee. And it seems there are plenty of takers.

I suspect this opportunity to make money will be short lived, but it does demonstrate an interesting point – the range of things that people will pay to have done for them is probably wider than you think. If they’ll pay to have someone play a game for them, what else might they be prepared to pay for?

I just read about PlayDate, an interactive device and camera built into a ball that  lets you play with your dog or cat from anywhere in the world, via a mobile phone. The Playdate smart ball can be controlled remotely from an  iOS or Android device after downloading a  free app. Through the app it’s possible to move the ball and also see what’s going on.

I mention this for two reasons:

1. It seems like an interesting product, you might want one.

2. Because it might generate another idea. The principle is that you can put something in a product which can move that product and also  view what’s going on. It can all be done from a phone anywhere in the world.

So how else might you use this?

If you’ve changed jobs a lot, maybe you should stop doing it – or try to disguise the fact.

Researchers sent out fictitious CV’s with varying frequency of job changes, and found that those with fewer changes received a 40–50 percent higher interview rate than those with more. The researchers found that all else being equal, frequent job changes can indicate poorer work attitude to a prospective employer.

If you’re in the job market, what you do with this information is down to you, but in any event, it’s certainly useful to know. You should at least attempt to put a positive spin on any apparent job hopping in your application.