10,000 Brilliant Ideas

Perhaps this could be seen as just a modification of a suicide hotline, but more from the user's perspective. She can't take it anymore. She goes onto the bridge. Before she steps over the fence she sees a sign that says "Considering suicide? Commit virtual suicide instead. Call 800 - come get me. Location 3453" She calls the number, gives her name and location and is asked to stay on the line for ten minutes while waiting for an unmarked van to arrive. The van arrives, she climbs inside and sits down in the black interior with a trained facilitator. The facilitator begins whatever the best therapy is and obtains a contact name and number. She relays this information to dispatch who informs the family that their loved one has committed virtual suicide. This means that the person nearly committed suicide and has chosen an alternate escape route. While this route is reversible it is still serious. The family is informed of how information will be provided to them and ...

Donate your living body to research! That's what the banner ad will say on your facebook page. What it means simply is that you are willing to give access to your full facebook and other social site history to researchers who can use it under certain conditions (guarantee of anonymity for example). I'm not talking about research of social media which is already plentiful. I'm talking about traditional research that needs to have you remember something about your past. For example, a study trying to determine if yo-yo dieting leads to diabetes. The researcher could contact you, pay you the nominal fee as is done in research studies, test you for diabetes, and then look in your facebook history to see how many times you mentioned being on a diet. Currently these studies suffer from recall bias because it's hard to remember what you did 5 years ago, much less what you ate. But if you're one of those facebook people who posts every time you eat a hamburger, well the...

Okay I'm imagining a public debate platform based on twitter. You set up a time, a topic and a hashtag. Then people can log in with their twitter accounts and say something about the topic. When a thing is tweeted it shows up as a bubble floating at random around the screen. When you hover on the bubble it stops so you can read it. Then you have the option to retweet it . If you retweet it it the bubble get's bigger for you and everyone else viewing. You can tweet a new point, or you can just read and retweet what you agree with. The effect of this is a mass public discourse where thousands of people are 'heard' at the same time in real time.

We hire you. You pick a business plan to develop You make it happen You benefit from growth as well as us You have options later of buying us out or something else. Kind of a business incubator idea, but we pay you. You get job security and get to be your own boss. We own partial rights to your start-up with the ability to negotiate purchase down the road. We put up capital and know-how of senior entrepreneurs on your team. After one of your ideas takes off, you become the senior entrepreneur to help someone else succeed. This idea keeps coming back to me. The ultimate goal would be to hire and make financially comfortable as many people as possible (including me). This idea is also scalable. Scalable like a fractal. Since support is local to the project, once rolling there's no reason it can't roll very quickly. The scope of supported projects is that it has to "make life better for people". It is designed to be socially responsible from the outset and ...

An idea stemmed from my conversation with a friend last night. For teens who's eyes have just been opened to the world, how about an on-line group where each logger-on fills out a profile for where they're from, and nationality, etc. and are then matched into a group with exactly one person from each country/region. The group defines a strong community and each member feels important since they are the only one of their kind in the group. Perhaps this could overcome the insulated effect that teens get into where the rest of the world is just too far away.