Free Idea Factory

Last weekend I saw a Latin band which plays salsa, cumbia, merengue, etc.  I like Latin music but am a horrible dancer.  Especially problematic are the hip movements.

It would be useful to have an iPhone app which does the following:

• Hold your phone up to the music, and it will identify the style and tempo.  If that doesn’t work, you can manually choose the style, but the iPhone should be able to identify the style, i.e., cumbia, bachata, samba, etc.
• Indicate if you’re male or female.
• The app displays male, female, or both figures at once, and demonstrates the basic dance steps for the indicated style. There are a variety of options for changing the perspective, slowing down the step, etc.
• There’s also a ‘clave’ mode which plays a simple tune with clave and shows the steps.

A store in a strip mall with a computer aided machine to custom cut boxes to order. You bring in what you want to ship, it gets 3D scanned, and then your box options appear. You’d have stacks of sheets of cardboard in various weights/colors, and the machine would know how to scale basic designs to suit. There’d be a piece price and a sheet price, depending on if you want one or as many of your design as can be cut from the sheet.

An ink-jet could custom print the boxes to order, as well.

There’s a market, I think, for adult nooks. Instead of being made of safe plastic for baby mouths, make them out of things like Gran Marnier, nicotine, bacon, jerky, you get the idea.

When a teenager would rather downgrade to a less damage-prone cell phone than her iPhone, it gets me thinking. Why would a person rather deal with a feature-deficient version of a device? Because they value something different about that device.

There is a whole class of cell phone users who want something the current crop of cell phones isn’t addressing directly. They want dependibility, durability, reliability. It’s become their lifeline of communication to their friends and they’d rather NOT be able to use the top half of their touch screen than give it up for a couple of days to be fixed. They’d rather do without the internet entirely if it means never doing without text messaging.

The Indestructophone has a market.

Mount a series of wireless cameras at significant points along major commute routes. Make a smartphone app that charges for access to realtime views from those cameras.

Soft cat food packaging could be hugely improved. None of the ones I’ve tried is simple to get out of its container, they all require a lot of futzing or the dirtying of a utensil. And none of them make portion control easy if you want to dispense less than a full container (because you have one cat that doesn’t eat a whole one, or, multiple cats that you want to share a single container).

I’d pay twice what I pay now for cat food if I could pop-out thirds, as needed, quickly and without the need for a utensil or washing my hands afterwards.

Watching Fish Fight

I know that the iphone has a security feature where all your data can be set to be wiped if the user incorrectly attempts to log into the phone several times.

What about a third party app that makes your phone be annoying in the event it was stolen and someone was incorrectly attempting to access your phone.

Maybe on the third attempt it could say “sorry try again”. Then on the fourth attempt a fake home screen jpeg could be displayed, then when they try and select and app, it says, “Just messing with you. You don’t belong inside this phone. Give it back. Really, don’t be an ass, give me my phone back.

Some other ideas after a certain number of incorrect attempts have been tried:

-The credits from Monty Python and the Holy Grail play on repeat with all the flashing and the llama’s
-Random incredibly unexciting histroy facts are recited in a monotone voice
-A recording of Richard Simons repeatedly encourages the theif that they can do it, then the battery dies
- etc.

This wasn’t always the case, but, I noticed that lately the names showing up as the “Sender” in my Spam folder have evolved away from the ridiculous and towards the pretty kick-ass if you’re writing a book, short story, or play and need character names. Here’s what I have in there right this second:

Elizabeth Haskins, Leroy Whittaker, Mavis Darling, Brian Bergman, Rosetta Moore, Rachelle Burkett

All prime candidates for characters, I think.

There are a few metaphor generators out there that exploit the fact that one form of metaphor can be abstracted to:

the [adjective] [concrete noun] of [abstract noun]

It’s a trivial matter to drop in lists of words of each type and then randomize them for fun and profit. I was thinking yesterday how fun it would be to convert the words to images, or visual properties, and instead of making an exquisite corpse sort of generator, make an animated image that fuses (or layer flattens) all the elements into one complete image.