Friend of mine used to try and come up with new ways to do player stats for gaming tournaments. Not just new ways to display the usual win-loss-tie kind of stuff. He actually came up with his own kind of stats and scoring systems. All the data came from reported results from players (submitted via website, which goes into the mysql db), then on each page that showed scoring, he'd code it to do the proper math and simply output that.

It was just cool to work with him because of this way he would think about things. Learned a lot about approaching projects with fresh ideas and such.

Anyway, dunno if that was inspiring at all but I tried. =P