Entries Tagged 'Products' ↓
January 11th, 2007 — Idea, Ideas, Invention, Products
Problem: Flashlights burn through the batteries when left on, especially by children
Solution: Touch activated flash lights
Having come across another dead flashlight today, I find the need to protect my precious source of photons. It would be cool to have a flashlight that has no switch and is on if and only if the body of the flashlight is in contact with skin. There are various skin capacitance measuring methods to achieve this. My favorite, from an pure art viewpoint would be to have two tones for the two halves of a circuit. This could be a pretty pattern or just a grid, and touching two colors would turn on the flashlight. My child would be entertained until the batteries died.
That’s it. A simple, small idea of the day.
December 31st, 2006 — Coding, Idea, Ideas, Invention, Products, Web
Problem: It’s easy to be distracted by the Internet.
Solution: A Back to Work buzzer.
We have a 2006 Honda Accord with a correctly annoying seat belt buzzer. Yes, the little light goes on when you the car is on and the seat belts are not buckled. If you drive off without putting on the seat belts, the car bides its time for about thirty seconds. After all, you might be sipping your coffee, adjusting your phone headset, fiddling with CD Player, and using a pinky and a thin slice of your brain to back into traffic. After a minute or so, the car has had enough and blinks the seat-belt icon and beeps at you. Then it calms down for a minute. Then it starts again. About every minute, the car beeps at you for a few seconds. it is surprisingly effective at reminding us to put on the seat belts.
Now there is a new problem with my computer. It’s connected to all the Internets, which is a complicated series of tubes. Down these tubes come blogs and videos and flash games and all manner of distractions. I don’t want the computer to stop me from following a random link from a mailing list. Still, my will power is weak and the number of videos on YouTube are many. What I want is the annoying Back to Work Buzzer.
If FireFox notices that I’ve been goofing off for too long, a Back to Work Buzzer should buzz at me. Then it should chill for a minute while I finish. Then it should buzz again. It’s my willpower. I just want the reminder to break me out of the infinite Digg crawl.
Implementation is left as an exercise to the reader.
December 30th, 2006 — Coding, Idea, Ideas, Invention, Products, Society, Web
Tome of Naga Summoning
Problem: Learning languages is slow and boring. Immersion is best.
Solution: Make a MMORPG (Massively Multi-player Online Role Playing Game) with languages divided by race.
We know that immersion is the best way of teaching a foreign language. The best place to learn French, in my indefensible opinion, is Quebec. Every street sign, business sign, and label is presented in both English and French. In walking around Quebec, hundreds of words and their English equivalents are pasted into my brain. I would like an analog in computer based education.
How about world where the Hobbits speak English, the Elves speak French, the Orcs speak Spanish, the Dryads speak Hungarian, and the Dwarves speak German? In this scheme, new players would start the game in their own towns, speaking their own languages, and building up characters. As the character progresses, quests and treasures lead the characters into border regions where both languages are spoken, as in Quebec.
On the further fringes of the border regions, the original language drops away and only the foreign language is immediately available. Some spells would be available to temporarily translate speech or writing as ghostly highlighting, but the spells are rigged to be too expensive to continually rely upon. As the player spends more time trading in foreign goods, entering Elvish caves that have awaited a Hobbits for thousands of years, and going about their questing, more and more of the vocabulary and spelling of the language seeps into the player’s brain.
Putting grammar into the game and into the player’s brain may require special constraints. Requiring magic spells and puzzle solving to use correct grammar would augment the grammar learned from reading or interacting with NPCs. Some inconvenient items might require short language puzzles for each activation. The goal is to keep the explicit learning low enough that the gaming and the implicit learning continues.
This idea is certainly within reach. The FSF has been working to GPL an MMORPG infrastructure. That is, an organization is working to make everything free software, so that designing the landscape and quests would bring this idea to reality.
December 20th, 2006 — Coding, Idea, Ideas, Invention, Products, Society
Problem: Spammers Annoys Me
Solution: Me Annoy Spammers (FireFox Plug-in)
“Any energy you send out, it shall return to you three-fold” — Wiccan philosophy
You can make a FireFox plug-in that allows a user to tag some URLs as spam. The plug-in would then visit each link in the spam ten times, loading pages and filling in forms. It would fill in forms with random, possibly plausible, values. It would do this only a few times for each spam received. All this would happen in the background.
There have been various centralized attempts at using bandwidth usage costs against spammers: Lycos launched the “Make Love Not Spam” screen saver; BlueFrog attempted a forcible opt-out method. Most of these attempts have had a centralized, vulnerable component. A Hassler plug-in would have be controlled and selected by the end user.
Technology can be used for good or ill. The same technology would allow a user to pick a website they
disagree with and continually spam the site.
Harmless sites could be hassled to death by random annoying people. This is a cute hack to do more good than bad in the short run. In the long run, the email protocols need rethinking.That said, the core pieces of this hack include:
- A method of scanning the highlighted text for URLs and adding those URLs to a current targets list that records sites to be hassled and how many more times they should be hassled.
- A method of picking an idle time in the browsing process to start loading a page and associated images, cookies, and frames into a buffer.
- Scanning the buffer for forms to automatically fill, or for links to follow.
- Options box for everything.
December 19th, 2006 — Idea, Ideas, Invention, Products
Problem: Some people get paranoid about iodine deficiency and they use less salt.
Solution: Sell “super iodized” salt with twice the iodine.
Some people get paranoid about iodine deficiency. Iodine deficiency is the leading, preventable cause of mental retardation: even a mild iodine deficiency can drop a child by 10 or 15 IQ points. Iodine deficiency causes drawfism, cretinism, and other not fun issues. Combating this problem, $1.50 worth of postatium iodate is added to each ton of salt. Still, many people omit salt from home cooking.
There is a niche for “super iodized salt”. Note that “double iodized salt” exists: it is iodine plus some iron. A full strategy might have various fortified salts and salt substitutes available to a niche health market.
See also: New York Times report on efforts to iodize salt
December 13th, 2006 — Idea, Ideas, Invention, Products
Problem: Sweets are the easiest small treats for children. Candy is available at every retailer and comes in convenient bulk packages.
Solution: Toys should be the easiest small treat for children. Small toys can be found in the bottom of breakfast cereal and Crackerjacks boxes or from coin operated machines at the front of grocery stores. There is a market for jars of 25 or 100 individually wrapped small toys.
There are a lot of times where we want a supply of toys for small children: party treats, Halloween treats, rewards for good behavior, and a wide variety of bribes. The only substitute good I have found are stickers, which are a poor substitute. Having a recognizable yet unique treat would be worth about $0.50 per toy. I believe the toys could be manufactured and distributed for well under $0.25 per toy.
These small toys could include bouncing balls, small cars, little bendable dolls, brain-teasers, plastics parts that click together, and more. To be effective, one would need about forty different toys per line, and have different lines for ages under 3, 3-5, 5-8, and 8+. As the line expanded, the toys could also target small niches: educational toys (Brain Toys), religious toys for various markets, outdoor toys, restaurant toys, gender specific toys, and various level of super toys (at a small additional cost).
The packaging should be cheap. While one could go with the standard egg found in coin operated dispensers or KinderEggs, one could also go with the cheaper paper blister packing of M&Ms. I expect that batches of either 25 for consumer sales or 100 for point of resale displays would be about right.
The business model would be to buy about forty different toys per line from Chineese manufacturers, have them packaged in China, then sell them through wholesalers (if you can get them), toy catalog sales, party stores, and more.
What’s the catch? There is no barrier to entry: the idea isn’t patentable; branding probably won’t keep out competitors; there are many suppliers; packaging isn’t unique; there are many channels and outlets with unique requirements; and lots of niche markets to encourage micro-competitors. On the plus side, consumers really don’t need expensive advertising or education about the product. There should be pent-up demand.
A great one or two person job for someone with low expenses or appropriate experience. I would like to buy some.
October 16th, 2006 — Coding, Idea, Ideas, Invention, Products
Problem: English is a hard language, full of homonyms, odd grammar rules, and spelling that is one step above random. When I was a child, I constantly misspelled “their” as “thier”. Even now, spelling and grammar mistakes creep into everything I type.
Solution: A new spelling checker. I learned, quite by accident, that retyping a word helps me to remember its spelling far more than just hitting the ‘correct this’ button on the spell-checker. Also, some words are more likely for me to misspell. I would like an online spell checker with these features:
- Have me retype misspelled words, instead of just hitting “OK”.
- Show me a few words of definition for words as I hover over them, along with alternate words.
- Highlight words that are often misused, such as “their, they’re, there” or “affect, effect”. Vary the color of the highlighting based on my proficiency in the past.
- Provide the basic grammar checking and complexity guidelines from the 1980s program Grammatik.
- Provide some support of english as it evolves, such as checking with Google to see if “Grammatik” has many hits, or comparing “computer aided” to “computer-aided”.
- Show me my most misused words on demand.
In writing this short paragraph, I misspelled “grammar” three times, and “misspell” once. 
October 10th, 2006 — Idea, Ideas, Invention, Products
Problem: Teachers spend a lot of time grading papers, often papers of the “circle the correct answer” variety. One simplistic speed-up is to make a “mask” that shows the correct answers. A mask can be made with a long-arm hole punch, but this takes to much time.
Solution: Make, or find, a pen that eats a small hole through the material used in overhead transparencies. Transparencies come in various chemistries, and pens come in sometimes incompatible chemistries. There should be a really bad match so that a pen could be sold as “hole punch pen for acetate” or the like.
Our charity, TrueGift Donations, packed about 80 cubic feet of school supplies recently leaving the volunteers sitting down and chatting afterwards. The subject came up.
September 23rd, 2006 — Idea, Ideas, Invention, Products
Here’s one of those simple ideas with absolutely no barrier to entry, and is more of a craft project.
Problem: I have always loved beautiful notebooks and journals leather and wood inlays. I have no excuse to have more. Also, I forget which books I read over time, for I read so many.
Solution: Create an heirloom quality journal to record which books are read over time. It should preprinted pages for remembering what books you have read, much like the preprinting in a blank address book. For each book, you could record the a third of page with the name, author, publication year, genre, notes, and your rating. Over time, this could be a source of nostalgia and to jog ones memory. For young readers, it would also give a sense of accomplishment.
This probably exists in some form already; it’s a simple idea with no new technology. At a mininum, one could make an ink stamp to stamp and existing blank journal.
