10,000 Brilliant Ideas

All I want is a big scarf with a big pocket in each end. In one pocket is a pair of matching gloves and in the other a matching hat. That's all.

There are people who are late, and then there are people who are really late. Most of us have had a run with showing up 5 minutes late for a series of events - there's just too much to do in the time allotted. But then there are people who are really late - like hours late. I won't pretend to understand the science behind this, but I'll give these people a cop-out and say they are just running on polychronic time. I may be misunderstanding this, but for my purposes, I'll say it's looking at time like when you were a kid. You didn't know when the school bus came. You just waited until you mom said "your bus is here" and then you went outside. 7:52 meant nothing to you. I've occasionally relapsed into this mode as well, but I think the hour-laters are in it much more often. Enter the polychronic watch. It works thusly. You enter an appointment in your watch and it asks you a series of questions: what time the appointment is, how much time do you nee...

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 café is wired. There are cameras and microphones everywhere. What goes on inside is constantly broadcast in real-time on the café's website. There is a bold disclaimer on the front door telling everyone who enters that their conversation and image will be viewable by anyone accessing the site. It is open from 6am to 2am the next morning to maximize global viewing time, without becoming too seedy. It is located in New York or LA or maybe both. Another option: At the same time, monitors in the cafe show analytics in real time of how many people are on the website and where they are located. Maybe it even shows how many people are watching each camera and listening to each microphone. Perhaps people on-line could post chats and be active participants as well. Would no one want to go to a café where their privacy is completely nil? Would no one want to sit at their computer and watch people living instead of doing it themselves? Or do people have an inner desire to be seen, especi...

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?)

Have you ever been in a speech or something where the speaker fields questions from the audience? If you weren't in a UN-style microphone-at-every-seat equipped room, then you probably saw one or two saps running the microphone around to those asking questions. I was this sap recently in a press conference, and although I consider myself quite agile, it still delayed things and was noisy for the cameras (not to mention my beautimous profile when I had to run in front of them). I've also heard people bragging about shot-gun mics that can pick up someone's voice leagues away. Couldn't these work in this situation, where the sap can just stand at the front with headphones on and point the mic at whoever is talking? Maybe it wouldn't work so well in a football stadium, but surely a 20-person press conference could manage. Right?

Take the volatility out of monthly bills. This service pays all your bills for you and just sends you one total bill. After the first few months of using the one-bill service, the one-bill comes as an average of previous months with a bit of cushion. Thus instead of your expenses changing by 20% from month to month, they only change by say 5%. Possibility 1 - The service could be free, and just makes money on the interest of the "cushion of money". It could also just be a service banks could offer. Possibility 2 - The service could allow for automatically loaning money during an especially high-expense month. This could make it sort of a mix between a credit agency and insurance agency. I'm sure someone smart could figure out the details here.