10,000 Brilliant Ideas

This idea has a sensitive altimeter attached to a pair of glasses, maybe with Bluetooth that can sense when your head is as high as it possibly can be and when it begins to dip. When it does, your phone alerts you and you adjust your posture. It uses smart algorithms to know when you're going up stairs or getting in a car or whatever.

Kid app for smart phones that turns the locked screen into kid mode where the unlockery gets hidden and is brought back with an adult-easy test. Until that happens the app is colorful and touch responsive.

Use our easy peasy system! Gosh its so easy. You get on the web site and select the products that are your staples. Then you put in your payment info and your desired stock (let's say 1 month). The stuff arrives on your door step and you put it in the pantry. When you get one of these things out of the pantry, whip out your phone and scan the provided QR code that we stuck on. That's it! When your stock dips, we'll order you more. If something is nearing expiration we'll alert you. If you try to use a new one when you still have an old one in stock, we'll tell you. And if you forgot to scan it, you can just click "already used". For non-expiring things like Shampoo, we'll send you a stock check now and again. Basically you can rest easy knowing you're always a month ahead should the need arise and your stock will adjust automatically based on your use. And what does it cost? Just the delivery fee! And if you buy enough, we'll waive that! We m...

A grocery service that  monitors  your pantry with an app that scans  bar codes  or let's you check off ingredients when you use them. Alerts you when things will expire or when you're going to run out. Could also be melded with a grocery service that prepares your basket for you with your staples before you come in. This breaks the "put the milk at the back of the store so you have to browse everything else first" model, but it could easily introduce a much more friendly "here's what you usually get and here's what we think you might like" concept. And of course you can have the pick up station at the back of the store too.

In the Philippines, rich people drive up to their gates and honk and wait for their househelp to come open it for them. Can these people be bothered to open their own gates? Of course not. Can they be bothered that they're bothering their neighbors? Not likely. Are they willing to wait long? Not at all. Are these people jerks? You said it, not me. What's a fantastic way to capitalize on this? Repurpose the wireless doorbell. All you need to do is increase the range of the doorbell signal to, let's say 500 meters if possible. Then change the look of the button to fit in a car ala garage door opener. Make the packaging say "Never wait for the gate and keep your neighbors from getting irate!" Make it look like this is what all rich people are using and also market it for neighbors who want to give a "secret" gift to their annoying honker neighbors without being confrontational. Obviously this could also easily be done with a phone app, but if people wer...

This surely must exist, but I've honestly never seen it. We've all put our phones on silent and then forgot about it. Or perhaps more poignantly, we've all tried to call someone who accidentally left their phone on silent. And sometimes that person is the couch hiding our phones in it's cushions. If there was a timer option, we could just wait a few hours until it switched back to loud mode and then call it again to find it.

Mobile phone theft must be huge. Well at least in our family it is. And it seems to be hard to insure from theft since it's difficult to prove one was stolen and not just misplaced or sold. Samsung has samsung dive which I'm currently trying to get to work. It can lock your screen, wipe your data, track your phone and a few other tricks. I would like to add one - melt your phone. If you can remotely melt a phone this would be good for a few reasons. You can really make sure your data are secure You can prove that the phone is no longer useable It will make theft less desireable Insurance then can be practical I assume that the actual manufacturing cost of a phone is much less than what those wires are worth. Let's say a phone "really costs" 20 bucks. The rest is intellectual property and the technology. If you can show samsung that you melted your old phone, then they would handily sell you a new one at cost. Unless they are trying to capitalize on the...

mHealth stands for mobile health and basically means using mobile phone technology to improve health systems. While visiting the MDR-TB clinic yesterday I looked into how they keep their records and how they report them. Basically each patient has a paper file, some data of which is transcribed into a register book, which is then typed into a computer. So basically data is entered 3 times at least. Health workers sometimes don't consider it a priority (surprise!) to enter their numbers in the computer and sometimes let things get backed up. In discussion with the people there, it again seemed clear to me that data should be entered once, electronically. (You may be tempted to think that triple entry improves accuracy, but actually it only reflects the accuracy of the transcribing since data is only taken from the source once.) But there's another problem. Computers aren't so abundant. And even if they were, internet connections and power connections aren't so abundant...