Thursday, February 21, 2008

Sports Commentary Contest

Better than a game show - get ordinary people (who have the courage) to look at action replays and comment on them - as if they were real commentators. Who knows how it would be in practice?

Monday, February 18, 2008

Centrum++

Ever wonder if you've already taken your one-a-day for the day? How about they rig the bottle so that, once you've taken your pill, something on the outside changes and indicates that and keeps that state for a few hours before reverting to the not-yet-taken state? Would simplify life by delta, but they all add up.

Saturday, February 16, 2008

World's Most Expensive Basketball Court

Outfits like LA Fitness might make some extra money with this sort of thing - renting the court out to up-and-coming serious hoopsters.

The basic idea is this - you have about 10 basketballs that you use for your practice. You shoot and then, you immediately reach for another ball that's right by you and shoot again and keep on going - practise basically. You get the idea. Now, if you have a partner dedicated to helping you, that's fine. But what if you haven't?

Suppose you had a court that had an elastic surface with actuators (and sensors of course) underneath it. So, you can detect where a ball bounced for the first time and, if you're smart enough, based on _how_ it bounced, where it's going to bounce next and modify the surface a bit to steer the ball such that our budding hoopster doesn't need to move much - he focuses on shooting. If you have about 10 balls on the court, the surface really doesn't have to move much at all - meaning that there' plenty of time for you to get the ball back to where it needs to be after it's first bounce.

This could probably go into the first billion-dollar home. That's a new idea in itself - if no one's done it already. Problem would be taxes I guess - the local government would probably be smiling. Best is to do what Dean Kamen did - find an island and make a separate country out of it and build your house there.

Tuesday, February 5, 2008

Gmail++

Let us save our emails (all of them) to our hard drive so that we can do our own searches (using regexes!)

Make it possible to search for XXX-XXX-XXXX and combinations thereof - to search for phone numbers (subset of a regex of course)

Sunday, February 3, 2008

Watch, What You Want

Imagine this:

You go out to dinner with someone, you talk a bit about movies. How about if you could then go into a theater and watch one of the ancient movies you just talked about?

What sort of technology would support that? You want other people around - that's part of the date. And they're watching something else - they might laugh spontaneously - so you want to cancel that out - it's noise. Then, you don't want to put on some eyewear - you want to be able to notice people around you. Somehow, what you see needs to depend on your position relative to the screen.

But, this could be huge if you could pull it off. A totally new concept.

Add to it, a way of materializing in your seat without distracting the others - because, with this technology, your show could start anytime - which, when you think of it, takes something away from the experience - makes sense to start everyone's movie at the same time - and, this is where bonus/spare footage will come in handy in making everyone's experience the same length.

Neat huh?