Never Miss Again

Ever operated a soap dispenser and wished you knew where the soap was going to come? How about they put an LED or two to create two beams and you position your hands so that both beams intersect? And that's where the best place to catch the soap is. How come I'm giving all these billion dollar ideas away for free?

Concept Cruises

Might exist already.

Instead of a cruise that just takes you round and round in circles, how about one that, say, retraces the voyage of the Bounty, of the Pandora (the ship sent to capture the mutineers), etc? These would be more expensive for sure, but you might get people to sign up.

That's a good way to learn and enjoy learning - retracing the paths of trailblazers - if a kid had a chance to redo all of Edison's experiments and tinkerings, do you think he'd be a kickass inventor?

Better Car Advertising

You joined a network marketing system. So, you need to put a message on your car window saying Do X, Get Y, Call Z. But, you want to be able to switch off the message when you park the car in your company parking lot so that people don't laugh. How?

One way is to use a projector mounted on the ceiling to display stuff on the windows - maybe coat the windows with something that glows when light hits it.

Here's a worthwhile message:

Love your country!
Drive at 55 for better mileage.
Import less foreign oil!

TI-RFID Turns Newspaper Theft into a Game of Tag

Neat? You used to get your newspaper delivered to your door and someone would help himself (women don't steal newspapers). Now, you get the newspaper with an RFID tag. The delivery guy touches it to a smart reader that's part of your door. Now, the reader is armed. It will keep sending bursts to the tag and expect responses in the form of RF modulated backscatter. So, if the newspaper were to vanish, it would set off an alarm. The smart part - the tag is in a random location in the newspaper and part of the newspaper - so, it'll be hard for Mr. Thief to cut it out and leave just the tag on your doorstep. Yeah!

Number Grabber

Picture this - you're in the lab looking at something and you're filling out an Excel spreadsheet (or a Mac spreadsheet or a Google spreadsheet). How about a device that you can use to point at each instrument display and click a button and it fills out a cell in your spreadsheet? This shouldn't be hard at all - the device is plugged into USB and acts like a keyboard. The tough part is recognizing the number - which, considering it's froma 7 segment LED or LCD display, shouldn't be too hard too.

Another idea is to use short range wireless to get all the instruments on your bench to show up on your PC as links. Then, when you're filling out your spreadsheet - you just click on one, then the next, then the next, etc. Or better still, you just put the links in your Excel and click one button and it fills out all the column this row. Nice?