Apply for a grant from the Bitcoin Foundation:
https://bitcoinfoundation.org/blog/?p=58
Deadline is February 15'th.
Good grant proposals are for things that are clearly a benefit to the whole Bitcoin ecosystem and that are the kind of "common good" thing that doesn't have a clear business plan. (if you have an idea with a clear business plan then you should talk to an angel investor or venture capitalist to get some funding).
Examples (I'm sure you can think of better):
- I'd love to see somebody run a free input-mixing service. A grant could cover server costs to run a server that takes connections over tor to coordinate mixes.
- Know any economists? A grant could pay to write some tools to extra bitcoin transaction data for an enterprising economist who might want to study the Bitcoin economy.
- There have been some very interesting research papers suggesting possible changes to core Bitcoin. A grant might pay for somebody to actually implement the ideas and demonstrate them on the -testnet.