Bad Idea Factory is a collective of chaotic creatives using technology to make people thinking face emoji. We have been working in this space for hundreds of thousands of years.
Featured projects
We actually do things!
Allies and Benefactors
Regrets? They've had a few.
We're helping the Duke Reporter’s Lab make fact checks harder, better, faster, stronger.
Our work is supported by the Knight Foundation (no take backs).
Shocking collaboration with Meedan to rewrite Montage, a video tagging platform.
The BBC asked us to make their video overlaid 'narrative text' accessible.
The University of Iowa Informatics Initiative is using our work to power their research.
Our Services
You can't afford NOT to hire us
Vapid prototyping
If you can think it, you can dream it, and dreams are 90% of success.
Overengineering
There are many ways to skin a cat. Why not support them all?
"Design"
You've got problems. We've got opinions. Design in its purest form.
Naming things
People, ideas, places, objects, pets, you name it! Well, we'll name it.
Stuff we’re good at
A fully exhaustive list
Research and development
We take wild ideas and run with them, but *wheeze* we're out of shape *gasp* so we get *hzzz* winded. No. You go on. We'll catch up.
Anything involving video innovation
Talk to us if you want to push the limits of video online. We build tools to make video more valuable to journalists and storytellers.
Brainstorming and building products
Invention should be fun and making should be entertaining. Join us in persuing paths less traveled.
Talking a good game
Where there's smoke there's fire, and we generate a LOT of smoke. You do the math(s).
Testimonials
Sticks and stones can break our bones, but...
Technology is entering an era when we are beginning to incarnate software development companies that are governed with the idealism and creativity that inhabits any designer and engineer who has understood how many worlds can be opened through just one point of variation - the 01 binary… these small clusters of open source devotees and social creatives are going to usher in the next public incarnation of this idealism, and this time its [sic] going to put the people in front of the platforms and our data firmly in our control. These new collectives are the hope for the future of our knowledge ecosystem, and probably our species. Bad Idea Factory? Never heard of them.
— Ed Bice, Meedan
With the brainpower Bad Idea Factory has they could accomplish virtually anything! And yet they’re doing this.
— John Resig, Creator of johnQuery
Their ideas are reliably bad and there’s lots of them to choose from, each of them poorly thought through.
— Ethan Zuckerman, Inventor of Online Advertising
Your Ad Goes Here!
— Your Name Goes Here!
I cannot believe the passive aggressiveness of soliciting a quote for the website and then [sic]ing me. Every time I think I have discovered the ethical basement at BIF I find another level. Very bad people work here.
— Ed Bice, Twitter User