Product Idea: Football Clip Database

Problem: Fantasy football players have no way to watch even a fraction of their players, or projected players, on TV each week. So it is difficult to accurately assess the true value of players from statistic alone.

Solution: A video button could be embedded on the player page for each player on the fantasy football website. Users would gladly pay an extra $10 each per season to be able to watch player-specific video by pressing this button. It would be a brief clip, only containing the plays involving that player from each week. It would be accomplished by (1) chopping up TV feed of each game into single play clips, and (2) meta-tagging each clip to indicate the primary players involved, number of yards gained, and number of points scored. I would not be surprised if this is already being done for scouting and game film purposes. It would not seem difficult to make this commercially available.

Research Topic: Vision Claims on East Coast vs. West Coast

Hypothesis: On average, Americans living within 100 miles of the Atlantic Ocean will have higher lifetime vision health claims than Americans living within 100 miles of the Pacific Ocean.

Theory: Communities tend to develop in circular regions built around large cities. Large cities tend to be established close to large bodies of water. Commuters tend to drive toward the city in the morning and away from the city in the evening. Thus, East Coast residents will tend to be driving toward the sun both in the morning and the evening. West Coast residents will tend to be driving away from the sun both in the morning and the evening. Hence, the premise that citizens on the East Coast will, on average, incur more vision damage due to the prolonged direct sun exposure over time.

Product Idea: EZ File

Problem: Many people are faced with the everyday problem of how to file their important papers and records. A common solution seems to be throwing things into piles or boxes. This causes inefficiencies when a particular item needs to be located at a future date (which is the whole reason for retaining the items). This also causes time spent managing the filing system that could be spend on more enjoyable activities.

Solution: EZ File would be a product that files items with minimal effort and then provides assistance in locating these items. There are a few different ways to implement EZ File, each with trade-offs with regard to cost, development effort, and ease-of-use by the end-user.

a) A simple digital camera mechanism could take an image of each document. The user would then select a few meta-tags for the document and give the document a number for storage.

b) A tagging system could simply place a tag on each item and then just file them sequentially intermingled in a single box or series of folder. The user would have to type in descriptive information for each item into the database, so the item could be searched for later.

TV Show Idea: People Watching

Premise: Put a few cameras up at 6 locations in New York City (an intersection, a bar, an elevator, etc.). Staffers comb through the tapes at the end of the day/week to find some interesting footage. Then snarky commentators come on and talk about the incidents.

Tag: Big Brother meets Best Week Ever meets YouTube