I would use the spare time (10 hours a week you said) to develop a prototype of your application. MVP, etc. Keep your job, and start out small with your side project.

Work on it until someone will pay you to use it. Over time, improve it, get others to pay, etc. Repeat until you can you reasonably devote yourself to it full-time.

If your app/idea/situation doesn't lend itself to that sort of organic growth, then you've no choice but to roll the dice and go big, or stay where you are. But since rolling the dice sounds unlikely, I'd contort myself and my idea as much as possible to fit into the grow-slowly-as-a-side-project paradigm.

[Source: my experience. This is what I did to launch my first biz. Grew slowly. Company got acquired.]

I agree completely with Wayne Yeager.

More than that, I'd probably use some type of landing page technique to help gauge demand for your top 10 ideas. Create simple landing pages with a tool like unbounce to see who will click the signup, download, or buy buttons for each idea and drive targeted traffic with adwords.

This is probably the easiest way to narrow down to your best idea w/ some market validation.

This reinforces Reid Hoffman's maxim that if you're not embarrassed when you launch version 1, you spent too much time on it.

I suspect there are some whopping economies of scale to be had here, though. This was a one-off and prototypes do tend to be expensive.

BTW, I'll bet 2/3 the cost was that military-grade omnidirectional treadmill. Mass-produce that and you're back into the realm of possibility.

Indeed. Gerber went even further and says that it may be counterproductive to own a business that matches your technical expertise. That's because of the temptation to jump in and do the technical work... instead of focusing on the strategic aspects of owning the biz.

And, apparently, videography.

They took a still image and added moving objects to it, but I don't know if they can apply the technique to videos yet (although I'm sure that's coming).

Trust me, that's a trivial extension. It's more time-consuming to do these things on video, but on the other hand one can also extract a ton more information from the scene if the camera or objects within its purview are in motion.

There is a company which puts ads on objects in videos. Seems like a step in the right direction.

This could be a huge step for augmented reality if the process can be applied in real-time without any user input. It could improve on other research that's already out there like this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCEp7udJ2n4

I've seen videos of this already. I think Maya was the software?

It casts a shadow too :)

My attempt at Dueling Banjos: http://goo.gl/doodle/gsW2

The icon for point #9 is particularly clever.

Can you imagine how cool that would've been if it had contained actual information?!

I don't think the premise is bad, but we're pretty good about separating REAL consequences from contrived ones.

Example:

Several years ago, I put a $100 bill in five different envelopes (w/ no return address)... all addressed to a guy I really, really dislike. I gave the envelopes to my housekeeper and told her that every week, we'd measure my weight and compare it to the previous week. If I didn't lose weight during the week, she was to mail one of those envelopes. It worked for 2 weeks, but then I gained 1/2 lb during the 3rd week and I pleaded until she handed over my envelopes.

I think there might be a workable hack here, but it takes courage to make the consequences real and irrevocable.

You should have just given the money to the housekeeper. Than you would, presumably, have been less likely to renege to her face.

Even more fun, make two sets of envelopes, one set of $10 bills and one set of $100 bills. The house keeper always gets an envelope, but your weight determines which one. That way, she's not too disappointed when you succeed, and when you fail, you've at least helped out somebody you like.

Although presumably the idea is not to fail.