10,000 Brilliant Ideas

If you live in a town nearby a steep mountain this is great for you to pay all your electric bills. Essentially there's a cable-suspended car elevator that comes down the mountain. A car drives up and can take the quick car-vater down to save on time and break pads. The car-vater generates electricity for the town. Obviously, this would be best for a road with a lot of traffic and you could charge people to go up the car-vater if they want to make the trip quickly.

Could it be possible to have as part of the hotel service clothes for you to wear already there? I imagine something where you book the hotel on-line, and then you also 'book' clothes for you to wear. Using the same interface as on-line clothes shopping, you reserve clothes of brands you trust. When you arrive at your destination with nothing, but a small bag or backpack you are shown your room with your wardrobe already in the closet. Of course the same could be done with specific toiletry items. Even better with the nothing-private-anymore trend, you already have a 'profile' of what you wear and hotels just access that. For some people (like me) how awesome is that to travel around to multiple places on multiple vehicles carrying nothing but a wallet?! A few considerations: - Maybe people like to believe they are the only ones in the world with their clothes and this breaks that paradigm. - Some people are obviously more picky than others. - What do you do for ...

Bail bonds is a system that more or less works. You got bail to pay, they loan you the money and then use every tactic possible to make sure you show up for court. Could the same thing go for Visa applicants? You want to go to the US. The US doesn't believe you'll return when you say you will. You pay me a bit and I guarantee the US government to a certain amount of money that you'll be back on that plane.

If annoyance and frustration are the mothers of invention then I can see why I have so many ideas at the airport. Here's my latest and as usual I haven't actually run any numbers to test my assumptions. Thanks for flying with us. You have 3 baggage options for your flight. 1) Carry-on, which is limited to this this and this. 2) check-in baggage, which is limited to this and this. Or, 3) door-delivery baggage, which is limited to more than First Class of the most generous airline. Door-delivery baggage will be delivered to your door within 3 weeks of your arrival. You don't have to wait at the baggage carousel, you don't have to manhandle it through the airport. What you don't use for carry-on, you can use for check-in. What you don't use for either you can use for door-delivery. And if you need more, you can add as much as you want at a constant rate. Here's why it works (assuming it does). Most of the things people bring on carry-on they don't actua...

How hard would it be to arrange an ad-hoc arrival and departure at an airport for a 747? If the answer is "not impossible", then this idea might work. (disclaimer, I think I already posted something like this. Consider this a refinement.) Get a plane and a web site and a group of admin people who are superb at figuring out arrangements. Then open up for people to join the flying club. You join, then put in possible travel plans way in advance. You can see what routes other people are thinking about to see what's more popular and more likely to actually happen. Then when some cut-off point occurs, whether enough people interested or 6 months ahead or whatever, then an itinerary is laid out and people get the chance to buy a ticket. Those who already expressed interest are given first priority. This works out to the plane flying an irregular schedule around the world. The admin team then arranges arrival and departure with each airport. As long as passengers are buying the...

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.

Perhaps this is only a problem in Switzerland, but here the freeway is 120 and for tunnels and around cities it's 100. Of course, there are a lot of tunnels here. How about a cruise control that memorizes two speeds?

I know this must have been dreamed up before. How can you ride a train and not think of ways of doing it better?. But why doesn't it exist yet? Specifically, why doesn't it exist on my commute? I could sleep in an extra 10 minutes! Basically these are stopless trains. They are made up of several short cars with automatic doors on each end that couple together automatically. There is one of these coupled units at each stop. You come to the stop hop on the short car in front of you and when the train nears the stop, the car takes off on it's own in front of the train. The train catches up to it and couples on and the doors in the back open up. You then walk back through the train to the car of the stop you're getting off on (as seen by the digital notice boards) and sit down. The train drives full speed until your stop when the doors in front close and your segment detaches and slows down to the stop. You hop off enjoying the fastest land commute known to man. Not to ment...

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?)

You join the club. Fill out your profile with places you travel most and places you'd most like to go to along with general dates. When enough people have a similar destination and dates, we charter a plane and split the costs. The communal team spirit results in everyone helping everyone. Pot luck on the plane, loading each other's bags, etc. jetcharterpool.com but bigger.

There is a culture surrounding the globe (my data pool consists of Bay of Plenty, New Zealand, and Moab, Utah) of young able-bodied, unmarried youth with ideas of changing the world in a hippie-like fashion. Basically these guys and girls got time on their hands which is why they are traveling the world, living in cheap hostels. IHCN takes this wealth of untapped man-hours and connects it with the many under-staffed charitable organizations that could use them. Basically, IHCN has a recognizable logo that these gruffians (my word, make sure I get credit when it hits dictionaries) recognize in the many different countries they visit. There is some sort of expectation, like donate a morning as you're passing through, and essentially everyone gets in on this way to change the world. Guys talk about it, girls talk about it, hostel owners talk about it and possibly offer discounts for people who participate in it. And as folks talk around the crappy table eating ramen they say things li...