Better Emergency Radio

You know those ones that make good gifts at holiday time? No batter required - you just crank it. How about one that can also receive crime alerts. So, if there's been a crime in your zip-code, you'll get something blinking and you can listen to a sound bite. Maybe this is more complicated than just a receiver, but I think it's a worthwhile thing for the population to have. The number one problem in the world is crime and injustice. If we make overpopulation (overcopulation) a crime as well, then we just have one problem to solve.

X-Ray Eyes (and PCBs)

This should be a worthwhile business in any town that has a booming electronics business. Oftentimes, an outfit will have trouble with one of their circuit-boards. They can be hard to troubleshoot because it's hard to locate the fault. Here's what you do:

Ask them for the bad board and a good board (if both were good, they'd be identical).

Now, take 3 X-Ray images of both - in the 3 cartesian directions.

Then, get your program to compare the images and figure out where the bad board has shorts or opens.

Send a big bill.

Read People - On Your Laptop

How about you plug something into the USB port - that looks like a small USB drive. Actually, it's an IR camera. Here's the overall application - you're in a meeting and you and you want to get peoples' reactions to what you do. You can run a program that will overlay people's temperature maps over their faces.

Emirates++

This will make travel laptops much lighter. Why not airlines offer passengers head mounted displays with XVGA resolution. So, you carry a barebones laptop - which could be as small as a blackberry for all you care, and, the airline gives you a tray that has a keyboard and mouse and a cradle to dock the cpu in. So, basically all you carry is the CPU and micro-harddrive and some other basic stuff. Keyboard, mouse, etc are available where you go. You might want to carry your own head mounted display if you don't trust the one people lend you to not record stuff - same goes for the keyboard.

The next wave - disposable keyboards. You take if off the plane and drop it into an incinerator and watch it melt:)

Selectively Visible Ink

This might be a hard one to pull off. How do you create ink that only some people, equipped with a certain gadget can see? If you're on a plane and you get an idea and want to write something, you don't want people watching. The very idea that someone might be able to see any of what you write is a distraction more than anything else. If you're putting a fancy head mounted display on the person, then it's not so hard at all.