The Hypernumber Idea

Hypernumerals

"It has never been easier to start an Internet company. Create a Web site, begin a "viral" marketing campaign to grow word-of-mouth and acquire an audience, garner some ad revenues, generate venture capital funding and sell out to a Web giant such as Yahoo! or Google."  

This is how an article in Forbes starts, with the title: Good technology is nice, but a Good idea is better. http://www.forbes.com/entrepreneurs/2007/08/09/google-yahoo-youtube-ent-fin-cx_kw_0809whartonvc.html?boxes=relstories  I cannot agree more, but since my RSS reader is daily filled +100, I tend to have too many ideas, so I started to give them away for free, thereby contributing to the emerging Gift Economy ☺

For instance, Techcrunch announced today that one of the finalists of Seedcamp, a European Y Combinator-like seed fund and mentoring program is a Scottish Project Fairplay which states that they want to do something with hypernumbers such as hypertext does with words.  I tried to find out more, but strangely the new company has no website hyperlinked to their name ☺

Hypernumerals is an old idea, but nobody has ever touched it the right way.  Everyone says it is too much of a niche market, but I disagree.  

When I think of hypernumbers I do not think in algebraic systems where they are called hypercomplex or numbers with dimensionality (axes).  My view on hypernumbers should do to numbers (or numerals) what hypertext does to text.  This opens up a whole array of opportunity.  One could set up a new advertising concept around "number advertising" instead of text advertising.  The advertisement syndication or ad serving platform could be called "Addsense", for instance (instead of Adsense).  One could generate frequency tables of numbers in texts ("Adnumbers" versus Google's Adwords) so that it would be possible to make a top 20 of the most popular numbers in the world. Let's not forget that any text which consists of tips and is numbered is immediately taken up by Digg or other content synidcators, people just love numbered lists.

 Just like Adsense people could bid (why not a simple Vickrey auction?) to sponsor a certain number or cipher in texts all over the world in for instance a CPA model (cost per action instead of cost per click as Google now does which would lead to price discovery in this niche market).  This would require a new search engine (let's call it "Numeratica"), for numbers only, which could be an add-on to Firefox and an alternative to wikipedia.  The field of numerals should include both the idea of numbers and symbol for numbers (so that I could for instance sponsor a variable number such as the US debt).  My definition of numberals would also include zero, negative numbers, rational numbers, irrational numbers, and complex numbers.  

The idea is infinite.  Just like numbers and our imagination.