Universal Locator Code

You're waiting for a shuttle or something like that. But, you have to wait indoors where you can't see it approach. You want a call on your cell telling you to come out - automatically. How? When you've registered at a hotel (say), they give you a code you can use that will be valid during your stay. Then, when you want to be notified, you dial a number on your cellphone and, since the system also knows where the shuttle is, because it's tagged, and it knows where you are - since the cell-company can get your approximate location by triangulation, you can be notified.

Now Hiring - Get the Best

That should be your logo - the word will spread. If your business is thriving in this recession and you actually need people, use that as your motto and, eventually, the best people will take notice and contact you.

flipblog.com - Better Blogger

One button you can press to have your posts displayed in ascending chronological order - oldest first. Makes sense if you want to tell a story. Duh! Any one out there already offering such?

Signature Hardware - Dell's Comeback Bid

Okay, cellphones are getting more power and more powerful and more powerful. But, the screens can't really get much bigger. The answer - on-demand hardware - at a restaurant, on the plane, whereever. The problem - trust. How do you trust the display device and the input device to not steal your information? Answer - Dell. Imagine a keyboard with just a USB port and nothing else - not even screws to open the thing. Same with the monitor - only a USB port - and maybe a power connector - but absolutely no way to tamper with. And of course, the Dell logo. Now, you carry your computer with you and ask for the hardware, and use it.

American iPod Power

Get your own back at AA by using their reading lights to power your ipod shuffles. A shuffle doesn't need more than about 100 mW of power and those reading lights put out atleast 10 times that. So, rig up something with a suction theme that you can attach around the light and listen without running out of charge.

Accelerated Forging

What better way to prevent counterfeiting than to require that some portion of your product can only be made by a factory whose size and shape can be verified by a satellite. But, how to handle the problem of the thing being located underground? Interesting problem. You should need sunlight to make the product - so you can check for sunlight collection somehow. I can see the Russians or Chinese setting up a state-owned enterprise to actually try something like this to get the Americans. Now, what can of tag can you produce like this? Accelerated comes from linear (or other) accelerator - a machine so big and of such regular shape that it can only be expected to do one task.

Skeleton Startup

Dumb name for a not-so-dumb concept. You're in a lowly position in your organization. But, you've got good ideas. And, there are people in the organization who might be willing to odd jobs if they're paid extra. So, you come up with a plan to create something big and split it up into smaller jobs and ask one of the big bosses if you can advertise the small jobs for people to bid on - and get paid to do. Neat? No need to hire people. No need to think about benefits and all that other junk. You keep building new and useful systems, all while the organization chugs along with its regular work.

Internal Consulting

Virtually every project is strapped for resources. Especially in this tough business environment where you're more concerned with what you're going to tell Wall Street on your next date with CNBC. Instead of thinking of the employment cost as an investment for retaining your employees who you were right to hire, you want to show a smaller loss by laying them off.

Anyhow, considering every designer is faced with a deluge of tasks that he can't completely fit into his deadlines, why not advertise those internally to let other designers in the company bid for? Everyone's looking to make a contribution and some people want to earn more money. Some people want to try something new. Some tasks don't even involve any creativity - you merely need to plough through the time consuming business of simulating a design for some specific case, etc. Spend a little extra money to get it done on time, and let more of your workforce grow faster.

Beagle Assistant

My number one complaint against cellphones - you can't program them to do what you want. The same goes for PCs running Windows. Enter Linux.

When you're actually doing development, you need a good display and a good input device. When your gadget's out in the field, the input and output can be less demanding. Audio is plenty (mostly) and for input - how about location and voice.

Here's what I'd like to do: I record the voices of the people I bump into in the course of a week and get my gadget to recognize them. Then, I put in reminder messages into the gadget telling me what to ask/tell each person. Then, when it recognizes someone's voice, it vibrates (another miss on the beagleboard:) to let me know and I can listen with headphones or hold the speaker to my ear (to save an LCD display interface).

Same with locations. When I drive past a Kroger, I want my gadget to tell me to get milk or groceries.

www.beagleboard.org makes it possible.

BBC - A Worthwhile Initiative to Sell OMAP

That's for Basic Beagleboard Competence. What better than a huge community of support personnel willing to help people develop OMAP applications around the beagleboard? What if TI offered each of its 30k employees a $1k bonus to achieve basic beagleboard competence - of course, there'd have to be a way to measure that. But, this could be huge. If you get 10,000 of them to jump on, you've spent $10m, but the potential reward could be huge.

Beagle DashCam

No one's talked about connecting the beagleboard to a regular hard drive so far. That's been a big miss in my opinion. And how about not putting accelerometers on the board - another big miss.

Anyhow, here's what I'd like to do - put about 4 cameras - tiny, but high resolution eyes that interface to the beagleboard. Then, you build an evidence capture application. You look for simple violations - these shouldn't be hard. Start off by recognizing a car, a line, etc. Look for people going over the limit, crossing the double white line, changing lanes without indicating, changing lanes in an intersection. Then, though you capture at a high rate and resolution into RAM, you only deposit into the HDD based on need - so, if you sense a collision or violation, then, you'll save a few angles at high frame-rate and resolution. Of course, this might need an alsatianboard, not a beagle-board - where you get your basic app running on the beagleboard and then get the basic board design and crank everything up an order of magnitude - 128 MB RAM to 2 GIG, 600 MHz to 3 GHz, etc. You get the idea - 2 Watts to 20 Watts, etc.

Then, I'd like a couple of buttons on my steering wheel that I can use to speak aloud and index each driving session using a voice tag. Also, if I want, I should be able to blue-tooth or USB the videos to my phone or laptop. HDD sits in the car always or it would be too cumbersome.