Idea two sounds like GMail/GCal's got it covered, you're just suggesting a different input mechanism. Not that it wouldn't be a good programming exercise, but... mynameishere has a point.
Your proposed dynamic input mechanism does, however, sound like the right granularity for IM/SMS. As in, an IM/SMS to your service with the contents "contact: Paul Graham [email protected]" updates your address book. "money: 9.48 Quiznos" updates a ledger. "note: news.yc needs UTF-8 meta tag" sends a note. Twitter's taking off; a context-aware Twitter seems like a cool idea.
Just don't give it a name that implies Chester Cheetah should be skateboarding all over your site. Radical.
It probably doesn't affect your chances of getting funded, but any potential investors will have a serious discussion about how your employer views intellectual property. In our case (YouOS), once we had received funding, we had to rewrite what we had developed from scratch, since our old company's employment agreement was a bear.
Your proposed dynamic input mechanism does, however, sound like the right granularity for IM/SMS. As in, an IM/SMS to your service with the contents "contact: Paul Graham [email protected]" updates your address book. "money: 9.48 Quiznos" updates a ledger. "note: news.yc needs UTF-8 meta tag" sends a note. Twitter's taking off; a context-aware Twitter seems like a cool idea.
Just don't give it a name that implies Chester Cheetah should be skateboarding all over your site. Radical.