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Here are a few of the reasons why we thought ‘Shopping by Colour’ is a good idea:

-  Firstly it seemed like a great service to use to get inspiration for gifts for someone that has a favourite colour. Say, a friend is obsessed with green, or has a bright pink bathroom, then it would be the place to shop to find the perfect coloured gift. (e.g. Shopping for Paris Hilton? Get something pink!)

- We then got thinking about matching colours. Someone may have a red dress and is looking for matching shoes, or is after some red cushions to match the roses in the wallpaper. They can search our site though a red filter.

- This also throws up complimentary colours. For example if you have a blue carpet and are looking for sofas, then you can search for those coloured sofas that will compliment the blue and fit in the room.

- Seasonal colours. You’re looking for festive colours decorations for Christmas parties? We could provide a special Christmas pallette of inspiration to choose from.

- Shopping based on mood. If you are feeling a bit low and need a pick up then maybe looking for a yellow thing to buy could be great. Could be a nice colour therapy angle!

- We also felt that injecting a bit of colour back into the online shopping experience would be good, because online shopping can often be a little uninspiring.

- We also reckon there are  strong possibilities for certain more colour-based brands and products (such as DELL laptops, Dulux or the VW Beetle) to get involved running special promotions. The Dell Candy might want to do a homepage colour takeover when they release a new gold laptop, sposored links ensue!

- I don’t care about the colour! Bit of fun – potential to click a button in the corner that turns the website black and white.

We’re sure there are lots more interesting ideas of how our service could be used… Let us know if anything springs to mind!

The branding guys have been having a bit of fun naming our service. This normally difficult task has been made all the more of a pain in the arse (or more fun, depending on how you look at it!) because the product is still being talked out in terms of how it will work. So, all they’re going on is that it will help people “shop by colour”… which is a bit vague.

One funny thing though – there’s been a lot of debate amongst the lads about whether to use the UK or American spelling of “Colour / color”… we put the question to our growing band of Twitter followers – with one pretty awesome response in particular from @Winn1!

Some rejected names:

• Suits Hue
• Swotcher
• Pizzazz

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John talking to TradeDoubler on the phone!

Then, a quick wander over to the Tech team (tried not to trip over all the Cat 5 cables!). They’ve already started some interesting conversations with TradeDoubler; who I hear are being very helpful – cheers guys! That seems to suggest we’re on a kind of passive-income revenue stream tip… hmmm. More will be revealed when the business plan is being written in the early hours of this morning!

There was also some really fascinating chat about identifying colour pallets from images and object detection stuff too. I hung around until this got so technical I was just smiling like a moron!

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Finally, I stopped by our Ebay auction and saw that we’ve had 18 bids already and are up to $154.00! Cheers to the two bidders who are currently duking it out. Any more for any more?

I have never seen a whiteboard eraser take such a savage scrubbing! Imagine 10 people all trying to talk at the same time about which idea is best… when they’re the people who had the ideas in the first place and love their little babies passionately… we just did that.

Actually, despite how loud things got it was pretty focussed. Anyone was allowed to suggest a judging criteria (e.g. Will it be fun to do? or Can it start making money straight away?), then each idea was given a tick if it answered “yes” to that criteria. Repeat until you’re out of criteria, and then you have a winner… simple….

Ideas ideas ideas

…or so we thought; three ideas tied on ticks! Next move, everyone ranked each idea 1, 2, or 3… Points were ascribed for each ranking and we added the whole lot up to find our winner. Sort of democracy, and not everyone was 100% happy – but time is short so ONWARDS!

So, what’s the idea?

Well, it’s simple really. It’s “shopping by colour”. Think the colour filters on Google image search, or Etsy’s colour thingy… only for any product on the planet! So, if you want a car from AutoTrader and want it to match your boxer shorts; this site will do that for you.

(At least, that’s the initial idea… now we’re into concept development – so who knows what the idea will actually end up being. Experience tells me it will change somewhat!)

(At this point we’d like to say thanks to EnterpriseUK, who provide a good pinch of inspiration for this whole thing, with the fabulous Global Entrepreneurship week. They’ve also already blogged about what we’re up to – cheers guys! x)

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After that, we all split off into pairs, with pads and pens and had a big, fat brainstorming session. At the time of writing, we have 20 ideas on a whiteboard and we’re finding ways to cross some out:

• Can we actually make a decent Beta in the remaining 22 hours?
• Will it make money?
• Has it been done before?

Exciting stuff… I’ll be back in an hour with another update…