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.

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.

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.

I heard some complaints about kids being glued to their digital media during road trips and missing out on the "that's the way we used to do it"-type scenery watching etc. So how about an app that makes a giant I spy game based on images on google maps? As you're driving, it will tell you what to look out for. Kids can vote up and down the images to keep the good ones at the top. They can also take pictures while they go along to add to the game.

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...

We are quickly nearing the time when the once-cool CD is going to tip its hat and fade out the door into the fog of obsolescence. The CD was a great way to get people data that would be difficult to obtain over the internet - either due to the size of data to be shared or due to poor connections or both. Now we're seeing cheap USB keys fulfilling this function. You attend a conference, and receive the background materials on a USB key rather than a CD-rom. Why? Probably a few reasons, not the least of which is CD drives are heavy and more and more people are leaving them off their laptops. But getting a bunch of the same info on a bunch of USB keys one by one could be a bit time consuming. What is the new mass CD burner for USBs? Why the USB copy coil of coise! Imagine a little USB with a plug part on one side and a receiver part on the other. Then imagine a hundred of these keys hooked to each other in a long train. Then imagine this train coiled up into a snail-like shape. Then i...