10,000 Brilliant Ideas

This camera you load with polaroid film, It takes a picture straight to print in the classic polaroid style and it also captures a digital version of it. I'm sure with a little imagination there could be a lot of uses for this, but one (where I got the idea) is traveling in poorer places, you could take people's photos and then give them the print and you get to keep the digital. That way you feel like you're sort of providing a service rather than just poaching culture (did I just say that?)

Have you ever been in a speech or something where the speaker fields questions from the audience? If you weren't in a UN-style microphone-at-every-seat equipped room, then you probably saw one or two saps running the microphone around to those asking questions. I was this sap recently in a press conference, and although I consider myself quite agile, it still delayed things and was noisy for the cameras (not to mention my beautimous profile when I had to run in front of them). I've also heard people bragging about shot-gun mics that can pick up someone's voice leagues away. Couldn't these work in this situation, where the sap can just stand at the front with headphones on and point the mic at whoever is talking? Maybe it wouldn't work so well in a football stadium, but surely a 20-person press conference could manage. Right?

Take the volatility out of monthly bills. This service pays all your bills for you and just sends you one total bill. After the first few months of using the one-bill service, the one-bill comes as an average of previous months with a bit of cushion. Thus instead of your expenses changing by 20% from month to month, they only change by say 5%. Possibility 1 - The service could be free, and just makes money on the interest of the "cushion of money". It could also just be a service banks could offer. Possibility 2 - The service could allow for automatically loaning money during an especially high-expense month. This could make it sort of a mix between a credit agency and insurance agency. I'm sure someone smart could figure out the details here.

I'll admit I haven't taken apart my shower faucet to see the mechanics of how the hot and cold are mixed together, but I'm pretty sure it's quite simple. I imagine however many degrees it is from frigid to scalding are divided up evenly over the range of travel of the tap. I live now in 3 areas of this tap, full cold (when filling water balloons or something), full hot (when the hot water is nearly gone and I'm trying to maximize what's left), and ideal warm which I obviously use the most. Full cold and full hot are easy to find, but warm is a trick. Let's say the range of the tap goes from 1 (full cold) to 100 (full hot). I live in 1, 100, and 63 to 63.5. So. I see no reason why the clever engineers at Kohler or wherever can't expand the middle range so the warm temperature has a wider range. Like from 15 to 85. That way it's a whole lot easier to find that ideal temperature which allows me to take way too long in the shower leaving no hot water for

Mimicking the ease and simplicity aspect of Kraft singles (not the nasty taste part), these are bagel shaped single servings of cream cheese, wrapped the same way. If you've ever tried to spread colder-than-room-temperature cream cheese on a should-have-been-toasted bagel, then I think you know the need for this.

Since the telemarketing industry has economized and largely replaced human telemarketers with machines, we can cash in on this and create the phone captcha. A captcha is that thing on web pages with scrambly looking letters and numbers that you have to type in to prove you're a human and not some computer program. Similarly the phone message would start like this: "This number does not accept calls from telemarketers. If you are a telemarketer, please hang up now and remove this number from your call list. If not, please dial the following numbers: three, nine, fifty-one." The person then dials the numbers to get through. The machine keeps a white list of phone numbers that have been cleared so a caller only has to pass the test once (unless their number is anonymous). The dial challenge could of course be made more advanced if it seemed like there was a threat of a counter-system with voice recognition: "please enter the quarter circumference value of a train leavin