Free Idea Factory

I have a constant problem with fruit. My fruit bowl allows bugs to occasionally come in and land on the fruit. I have tried a plastic container with a lid. This works but restricts the amount of fruit I can comfortably fit, because of the uneven shapes of fruit. My idea is some sort of zippered mesh bag that fits around the fruit bowl, but comes to a point at the top. This would also comfortably accommodate the odd shaped piles of fruit that fill the bowl. See the picture below for a rough idea:

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.

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.

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.

Tollroads could be subsidized by selling advertising space on the center concrete barriers if the advertisements were optimized for 65mph peripheral vision either:

by being streeeeetched to the proper distortion amount

or

it might work to make flip book style animation frames

Not that I want more advertising in my peripheral vision, but, hey, the ideas come and the genie can’t be put back in the bottle.

I find myself planning to talk to certain people about certain things the next time I see them. I’d love an iPhone application that lets me construct a kind of to-do list but organized around the names of people who may or may not be in my address book. I’d like it to have some scheduling abilities to, so that I could easily enter, store, and retrieve information clusters like:

Bob

• talk about great idea
• ask about his nobel prize
• remind him about the $20 he owes

may see him at party next Friday

Then I’d want to be able to scroll though the list and have it maybe self-sort based on projected time of meeting.

Infinite perfect copyability has always made it a challenge for photographers to make it in the fine art world, because the fine art world is about selling unique items, and a print (analog or digital it doesn’t matter–or at least it didn’t used to matter, this idea may give digital an advantage) is by its very nature one of potentially many.

I’ve seen various photographers adopt various strategies–the most common I see is signing and numbering a limited edition of prints. This is not a bad solution, but, it effectively limits the possible high end. A photographer makes an edition of x number at $x.xx per print and solves for a reasonable value after already recognizing that the value is being artificially reduced by a market that views “copies” as lessening a value. So a search for a sweetspot of pricing happens. The more I make the less each is worth, but, the beginning value is too low because even the theoretical possibility of more is enough to make the item less “rare”.

But what if an SD card were manufactured that were write-only, tamper-proof (well, that would show visible evidence of tampering if it were to occur), and would erase itself after one unlocking.

Now a photographer could offer for sale the SD card and its original contents. The images could be previewed on a digital frame or other device, but to make a copy of any image or all images would require activation of the key that would erase the contents after copying. The buyer would own his copy of the data, along with the ability to make more copies or prints as desired. It breaks the unique-object chain after the first buyer, so it doesn’t totally solve the problem, but it does give a buyer/collector something of far more value than a print of an image the photographer retains.

A laminated business-card sized piece that contains the convention city’s most common (basic) menu terms defined and translated into the major conventioneer languages. Terms like: vegetarian, beef, pork, chicken, etc. would help visitors navigate menus. Recently I was in Germany for two weeks, and when you travel on business you eat out for pretty much every meal. There were quite a few terms in each city I was in that kept appearing, and I would eventually learn them, over time, but having a cheat sheet would have helped a lot. There’s a core set of terms that every city shares, but then there’s also a specialized set of terms that’s unique to every city. Maybe one side of the card is general and one side is city-specific. Philly has cheesesteak lingo (wiz wit?), Scrapple, etc., Chicago has deep dish or thin crust, italian beef or combo (you want that wet?), Dusseldorf has Lieberkase which has neither liver nor cheese in it, even though it translates to livercheese, and the list goes on and on.

Cards could be printed in large numbers and sold by the convention centers, as well as by restaurants popular with conventioneers. Many shows it might even be profitable to have a booth at the show that sells the cards to attendees as well as exhibitors. Lots of potentional ways to bundle/package/market them. Heck it could even be a promo item for a company that offers translation services.

Examine Your Addictions