Last Thursday I attended Stanford Design EXPE, where a dozen teams of students present the result of their 9 months of innovative work in relation with a corporate sponsor.

The twist is that all projects must build a hardware prototype (I guess because it’s linked to the Mechanical Engineering department). For me, it was a welcome change to hearing pitch after pitch of web and software startups. When you actually build hardware, your horizons expand.

There were good projects.

A dual-screen tablet to communicate with your grandma (there is a definite need here, I just think having two screens doubles the cost of the tablet beyond what people can afford, without adding enough value).

A very impressive demo of a telepresence table that goes beyond video to provide real document interactivity using gestures.

But my favorite one was TRUSTcard. It looks like a credit card (but a little bit thicker) with a tiny keyboard and LCD screen. It’s meant to make casual borrowing mainstream. Can I borrow your $100 textbook for the weekend? Although you don’t really know me, you hand me the textbook, because I hand you this card where I just punched the borrowing information. The card will serve as a reminder that the item is out there, and in the worst case, it can be used through insurance to get your money back.

Their vision is that will save the world because objects will now be reused much more, so we’ll have less junk being manufactured.

I like it.

Of course, it reminds me of crowdfunding and topics close to my startup (for instance, creating an instantaneous contract on the fly is quite similar to the vision behind FairSoftware, except one is for IP, the other for physical goods).

While there are iPhone apps that pretty much do the same thing today (minus the insurance bit, which I think is critical), the students were adamant that the physical trade, the fact of exchanging the card for the object, was hugely important.

How would I fund such a company? I would pitch it to an insurance company that wants to break into the student market. By selling those cards, they would instantly acquire a huge number of customers, that they could upsell eventually when they need car insurance of whatever else college students need nowdays. Kind of like freemium for insurance.

It’s a great idea. Unfortunately, it was designed by students for a class. So it remains to be seen whether someone will actually push this further.

UPDATED: I just had coffee with a member of the TRUSTcard team to discuss the concept further, and try to understand what features are core, and which ones are not necessary. By removing all the fluff, you can typically launch a product in weeks rather than in months, and find out quickly what works and what doesn’t. Stay tuned…

When you just found a great idea for an app, the first step (after the initial excitement subsides) is to gather feedback from as many people as you can.

That’s what we just made really simple now on FairSoftware with our new feedback widget. Once you setup your idea and enter a description, the community can give you instant feedback on three key elements:

Here are some examples:

• Is there a market for bugcollect, a web site that collects logging and crash reporting information (early feedback from community seems to indicate so)?
• Can a Facebook game of power and political intrigue make money?
• Is an iPhone app that lets you create an emoticon from the built-in camera useful?

We figured that these three criteria are the most important to help improve your idea:

• You need to express your idea clearly, so people you’ll be pitching to (co-founders, business partners, potential customers), understand what you are trying to build
• Your product must be useful, otherwise no one will care. Are you solving a real need? Make sure you are not confusing a technology with a need.
• Even if you do great with the first two questions, you don’t have a business unless it can generate money. Some ideas are great and very useful, but you simply can’t build a business around them. They may be better suited for an open source approach, as a side project. Better to know before you invest too much energy.

Just visit any of the public projects to provide feedback. You’ll be doing a service to the startup community. New navigation buttons let you go from one idea to the next with one click.

And when you want to give more detailed feedback to the founders, there is a discussion thread attached to each project idea. Who knows, you may even join the project and become a co-founder if you think it’s a great idea.

Few people know that during the dot-com bubble, I tried to start a company about annotating the web, so that your friends could influence what you see. It makes sense to think that the web by itself is too large and needs to be personalized.

So I got very interested when I saw Austin Brandt post a Fair Project around the concept of “Web Conversations.” It’s a space that I had been avidly watching for almost 10 years! So I challenged him right away to probe if he was any different than the few plug-ins I had seen come out in the last few years.

To my surprise, he had an idea that was new and innovative. When he explained it to me in details, it made a lot of sense. It’s one of those ideas that sounds quite simple and obvious once you hear it, but somehow, no one has done it yet.

Austin is a student in entrepreneurship in Illinois with a strong history of entrepreneurship. He brings vision and business sense to the project. He is looking for a software developer to further expand on the concept.

A lot can be done to improve the way we interact online and I believe that some amazing products will emerge in the coming years. I hope this project is one of them.