10,000 Brilliant Ideas

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...

This appliance sits in your counter with a counter top on top. When you want to load it you hit a switch and the dish racks push up out of the counter with the counter top piece up in the air. You can then load dishes without bending over. As well, the bottom part will always be full (or half full) of water and constantly soak dishes, thus reducing the spray time needed, saving water and time, as well as more effectively cleaning dishes.

Okay you throw on some ebola-riddled meat on the grill with your tongs, let it cook, killing the ebola, but then you take it off the grill with the same tongs getting ebola back on the meat, not very sani-tary. (That could be a jingle.) With the new "sani-grill" you place tongs in a special spot between uses where the tong ends are in the flame, thus killing the ebola everywhere.

This is a diaper-like device that you would fasten to a connection of extention cords. It's slender design (currently existing only in my mind) allows users to yank on the cord when they need more slack, without the troubles of coming apart, and without the bulkiness of an extention cord knot that gets caught on everything. You just fasten it around the connection and snap it into place.

Cement by itself is ugly. Let's just admit it. (Sorry 1970s.) What we do is we sell textured forms. A wall that looks like it had cement spaded on the formed cement looks better than just regular concrete. Then in addition, we have a spray on paint that you can spray on the forms right before you pour in the cement that soaks into the top layer of the wet cement giving it a 'fresco' look. The cost isn't much more, but you get a textured colored wall from the beginning.