Free Idea Factory

Great band name: Binomial Nomenclature

Does everyone share both the irrational fear that others will look in their medicine cabinets when visiting, and, the burning urge to peek inside the medicine cabinets of others when visiting them? How about a blog where users post cell phone camera photos of medicine cabinets anonymously. Visitors could both view others surreptitiously, and, perhaps, happen upon their own and wonder who snapped it.

A T-shirt that says: Searching for Signal

A new press, or an imprint of an existing press, formed to publish only first books written by people with last names that are already famous. The title list could very quickly include Hemingway, Whitman, Clancy, Atwood, Morrison, and Olds. It’s just be Steve Hemingway, Judy Whitman, Carol Clancy, Bob Atwood, Durwood Morrison, and Betty Olds.

To solve a problem particular to contemporary United States culture’s omnipresent “God Bless America” stickers and signs an oversticker that can be applied above/before, as needed, to provide a recontextualizing preface. Sticker says: America Sneezed. Thus:

America Sneezed.
God Bless America.

I read once that Einstein was a napper, and that he had an interesting method of napping. He’d put his keys in his hand and his hand over the side of his chair, and when he’d fallen asleep deeply enough that he’d let the keys drop, the noise of the keys hitting the floor would wake him up. A kind of a mechanically timed nap that can’t get into too deep a sleep.

I don’t think my keys hitting the floor would wake me up, though. So how about a device that would go on a keychain and could be set by a switch to making an alarm clock sound upon impact after a short fall.

Find a person who is both photogenic and enthusiastic with their facial expressions. Set up a camera on top or behind a television to capture their range of faces throughout an extended period of time playing a video game, or, set up a camera to take pictures while they’re rehearsing dialog for a play, or any activity that will run them through the widest possible range of facial expressions. Put together an exhibit of the photos, such that every shot is of the same person making a different face and which includes as many different faces as will fit in the space. One face, a hundred faces.

Products like cigars and wine are extraordinarily complex to shop for as a consumer. The range and selection are so vast, and the subset that any given store carries is so relatively small that it can take decades before the act of shopping can become a comfortable process.

This should be fixable with a web service that would allow consumers to create a profile that would allow them to record, reference, and rate their purchases and then use the aggregate data of all the users to help suggest possibilities for new choices. The web service aspect of it could be further enhanced by an RFID chip in a credit card that could talk to the servers in any given store or restaurant to compare a customer’s total known history with the business establishment’s current on-hand inventory to produce effective recommendations.

Imagine being in a restaurant and having the waiter bring over both a general wine list and a custom laser printed list of suggestions based on the wines you’d already tried, and liked, and the wines others who liked the wines you liked suggested.

Imagine walking into a cigar store and not finding anything familiar. You ask the person behind the counter if he/she can make any suggestions. They ask if they can read your card. You say sure, and they take a look at what you’ve liked in the past and cross-reference those against the products they have on hand to help find an ideal match.

It’s such a massive boon to businesses that membership could be essentially free for the consumer. First businesses get signed on and get their inventory loaded into the database, then consumers get offered free cards and even incentives to start filling in their preferences. Most of the activity could even be passive. The RFID chip in the card announces itself to the POS system and any purchases made get automatically added to the webservice database, and prompts can go out to remind the consumer to rate those recent purchases.

A watch whose dial, instead of being divided into 12 hours that repeat twice, and shows minutes 60 seconds long, is divided into the 26 letters of the roman alphabet, and shows minutes 52 “seconds long” (upper and lower case). No more “one thirty”, instead we can say it’s about “L after C”, or “I’ll be there in a few letters.” or “I have to work until F.”

a vinyl window sticker in a freehand rectangle shape with a colored background done in the colored dots of comic book coloration and the hand lettered text: “Meanwhile…” so that people trapped (by themselves or others) inside and looking out can have a constant reminder that they could and should be out in the world doing.