Ice Cream Sundae Flavor

Problem: Everyone loves an ice cream sundae, but it's so much work. You need to buy all the ingredients and then get them out. And then your sundae starts to melt while you're putting everything away.

Solution: "Ice Cream Sundae" flavor in the carton. The carton comes with layers that include multiple ice cream flavors, whipped cream, and chocolate syrup. So with each scoop you get the taste of a full sundae.

Sunk Cost App

Problem

Many "free" apps get people hooked and then get them to use in-app purchases to pay for the ability to advance more quickly through the game.


Idea

This app takes the concept to a new extreme. The app is free, in the sense that you pay $10 for the app and then you collect $10 when you complete the game.

However, the game becomes fairly difficult and time consuming, and we offer you the ability to "buy out" of the game part way through. For example, when you get half-way through the game, you can pay $5 to get your $10 back. So your net return at that point is $5 for quitting the game, and you get the value of your time savings as well.

Crowdsourced Bedtime Story

Problem

Bedtime stories are boring and can get pretty stale after you have read them a few times.


Solution

CrowdStory comes with 10 stories, and is updated every day with new stories. The main characters in the story are:

• Bill, an 11-year old boy
• Nancy, his 7-year old sister
• Jeb, their dog
• Betty, their grandmother
• Uncle Henry

The beauty of CrowdStory is that anyone who has the app or book can submit stories. Each story is a single adventure involving the standard characters, and must be between 100 and 999 words. Stories are ranked with a simple thumbs up/down after they are read by any other owner. Every day, you read the highest rated story that you haven't read yet. A fresh story every day - ranked highest by fellow readers!

Top stories are moderated daily by the CrowdStory team to make sure they are appropriate for a young audience.

CrowdStory can be purchased as an app for Android/iOS or a stand-alone handheld device.

Do Something

Problem

Tinder is a site for people looking to meet up with a local person for a romantic encounter. But what if you are looking to meet up with someone (male or female) to join you for an activity such as playing golf, kayaking, exercising, or going to a local museum?

There are sites like Meetup, but they have a lot of overhead. You need to join a group, wait for activities to be set up, go through e-mails. It can weeks to plan for your first event. And this is typically with a large group, and the associated administrative overhead. What if you just want to meet up today or tomorrow with one person?

Solution

DoSomething.com is the site for you. Simply select the activity you are looking to do from the list. Then select the Date, Time, and location of the suggested meeting place on a Google Map. When someone accepts the activity, it sends your contact info to each other.

Read-Only Logins To Websites

Problem

Sometimes you want to give someone credentials for accessing your account. For example, you might want to give your financial adviser the username and password to access your financial sites so he can see how you have your money invested. However, you would prefer not to give out this secure information because the person could then make changes in your account or steal your money.

Solution

Sites should offer "read-only" logins. These would be separate passwords (with either the same or different usernames) that allow your contacts to log in and view information on the site, but not make any changes or withdrawals. You could feel more comfortable giving out these credentials, because you know that there is not any damage that could be done. Another option could be to set a time limit so that one of these logins can only be used for a limited period.

Great Estate

Great Estate is a website that allows you to buy and sell virtual real estate from anywhere in the USA!

What is Great Estate?

Great Estate is an Open Street Tile Map running on a server. It is broken up into 1 acre squares - 2.4 billion of them. You can purchase any available acre for only 1 cent per acre! You can also purchase any acre that is owned by paying 1 cent more than it's last sales price. 90% of the sale goes to you and 10% goes to Great Estate. Visitors to the Great Estate map will see your space on the map and anything you post to that space.

What Can You Do With Your Great Estate Real Estate?

1. You get bragging rights as owner of that acre. Buy a famous place, your friend's house, or a local park. You are only limited by your imagination.

2. You can make money by buying places that will sell for a premium price in the future.

3. You can decorate your place any way you like on the map! Advertise your business. Post a link to your video that you want to go viral. Or even draw something cool that can be seen from the highest level views of the map.

4. Each acre has it's own link to a page where you can post content (up to 1 MB). Write a story about what you did in that place. Or write about some neat things that people can do when they visit that place. If someone buys the acre, the historical information that you post will still be retained on that space.

5. Set your phone to send you a notification when you travel into a space with a Great Estate page. Click the link to read what people have posted about that place.

Those are just a few examples of what you can do with Great Estate.

How Do I Get Started?

The best time to sign up for Great Estate is right now. The pioneers of Great Estate will have the best opportunity to do a land grab and purchase the most notable places. People are buying places right now all over the US. Remember that anything you post as an owner will always be retained on your space in the History tab, even if the ownership may change in the future. Sign up today and start claiming your space on Great Estate.

Mixed Ripeness Bananas

The Problem

I thought we were the only people who were constantly throwing out old bananas. Then I saw this tweet from Conan O'Brien and realized that this is a universal issue.

Ok, here's the problem with bananas. You buy a batch of 6 bananas that are all at the same stage of ripeness. If they're ripe when you buy them, you can eat 1 or 2 before the rest go brown. If they're green when you buy them. you have to wait 2-3 days then eat 1 or 2 before they all go brown.

The Solution

Find a way to grow bananas that are of mixed ripeness in the same bunch, or split the bunches and sell the bananas individually so you can buy a group of bananas that are of varying ripeness. So you can eat 1 banana a day, and they will all be ripe when you are ready for them.

KidFinder

KidFinder is a smart phone app for parents. When a child calls on the phone, in a single click the app immediately captures the child's current location, and then provides turn-by-turn navigation to the location. The app also then saves the location for future reference.

Sample Applications:

• Child is lost, can call parent from any phone and then wait for parent to arrive
• Child is at a friend's house and needs to be picked up
• Child doesn't know the address of where they are

Design:

Lug Nuts

I had an idea for a device that removes/tightens all 5 lug nuts at the same time. But alas, apparently this has already been issued United States Patent #6305245.

Time-Based Map Regions

Problem: Google maps is presented spatially, like traditional maps. But Google maps has some additional intelligence that I would like to be able to tap into - it knows the speed limits and driving conditions of roads.

Solution: It would be nice to be able to enter a starting point and a period of time, and have Google maps show the entire region that can be reached in that time. There might be two ways to do this. A crazy way would be to visually collapse certain segments of the graph. The map would not be to scale, but a circle would then encompass all of the routes that could be reached. Probably the easier solution is to just draw a colored line on each road of the map, with the color extending to the limit that can be reached. For example, if the starting spot is Philadelphia, PA and the time is 2 hours, there would be red lines going up 95 towards New York, down 95 towards DC, part of the way across the PA turnpike towards Pittsburgh, etc. This would be a great feature for scheuduling a weekend getaway, etc.

Bookmark Meta-Info

Problem: Most bookmark managers do not tell you very much about your bookmarks. They store only a URL, title, description, and sometimes tags related to a bookmark.

Solution: It might be nice to track additional information about bookmarks. For example, we could keep track of how recently you have clicked a bookmark. Bookmarks could be color-coded - green for the most recently visited, gradually ranging all the way to red for those that have not been visited for the longest time. If a bookmark URL seems to be a dead link, it could also be grayed out.

RSS For Sites Without Feeds

Problem: RSS feeds and readers are becoming more and more popular. This is because they allow content from your favorite blogs (and some websites) to be delivered to you, rather than you having to go get the content. This value has been augmented by "pipes", which let you filter and adjust the content that you receive in RSS feeds. However, for sites that do not provide RSS feeds, you need to remember to check them on a periodic basis. Such sites are typically forgotten over time, and you may miss out on valuable content.

Solution: There are a few ways that sites without XML-defined RSS feeds could still be fed into an RSS reader. One way would be to check a site for changes, and then push whatever changes are observed into a manufactured RSS feed. Second, there could be a tool that does a screen capture of a site at a regular interval (e.g. daily) and pushes this into an RSS type feed. Lastly, perhaps a bot can go to a site and push the HTML from the site directly into your RSS reader at some regular interval. It seems to me that any of these approaches, although cludgy, would provide at least some capability for monitoring sites that do not play well with RSS.

Funding Social Security

Problem: Social Security has no trust fund (aka lockbox). There are going to be many more retirees per worker when baby boomers start retiring than there were when the program was created.The current benefit formula generally gives a much higher monthly payment to the rich than it does to the poor. Is this a problem? The Republicans say there is a problem because at current levels of SS taxation, benefits are expected to far outweigh taxes in the not too distant future. Whether or not you agree that this is a problem just depends on how you feel about raising taxes to pay for the promised benefits. If your rule is that SS taxes must stay where they are, then there is a dire problem because there will not be enough money to pay the promised benefits. The Democrats say that there is no imminent threat, so we'd better wait to fix the problem until at least such time that we can get a Democratic President and some Democrats running Congress. I say that there is absolutely a problem, because if nothing is done too much of our annual federal budget in the future will have to go toward SS benefits and it will cripple our government and our economy. Basically, this small safety net has grown to a huge liability that will be a massive part of our annual budget if it is not adjusted.

Solution: Given my expertise in the field of social insurance programs, I guess it is time that I commented on what should be done about Social Security. The trifurcation fallacy is very commonly heard in the media from people like Tim Russert on Meet The Press. Basically, they say that you must do one of three things to save SS - (1) raise taxes, (2) raise the retirement age, or (3) cut benefits. But that completely overlooks the option that we have been doing and will continue to do, which is to effectively pay for SS benefits by taking money away from other areas in the federal budget. What should we do about the SS problem? The first and most important thing that we must do is create a segregated SS trust fund. Every year we should value that fund and compare it to the benefit obligations to measure the shortfall (or someday, surplus). We should project future annual contributions to the fund that are equal to the current SS payroll tax. Then we need to either pay the annual shortfall from the federal budget on an accrual basis, or systematically change the benefit formula and the retirement age (whichever is deemed to be more desirable to the country's values over time) until the projected liabilities match the projected funds in the SS trust fund. This fund can be used only to pay benefits to entitled individuals, and the government must be banned from using funds in the SS trust for any other purpose. Doing these simple things will solve the entire problem by definition, without requiring an increase in SS taxes. Note, there are some relatively painless ways to cut the benefit formula. For example, don't cut benefit for current payees, but change the formula to use a smaller Cost-of-Living factor when determining future benefits for younger people. Another option would be to change the formula to pay more to those who need it the most. Either of these options would be generally acceptable and result in huge cost savings. The key is to do something now while there is time. If we do it now, we can cut future benefits. But if we wait, we will have to cut benefits to current recipients which will be even more unpopular for Congress to do. What about the Bush approach? There are two issues with SS that most people want to talk about. There is the critical solvency issue, which I discuss above. There is also the less important issue of how the money is invested. This is a sexy issue for politicians to talk about because SS has historically had lower investment returns than most other ways of investing money, which is frustrating to the ordinary Joe Q. Nascar. President Bush has unfortunately muddled the situation by trying to address both issues at the same time. Thus, any reasonably solvency ideas he has are combined with the concept of private accounts where people can invest their own money. This has created a lot of unnecessary opposition to the latter, and thus everyone has thrown their hands up and given up on solving the bigger issue. Congress has done nothing, and does not appear interested in doing anything in the near future. What Will Happen? Probably nothing for a while, since unfortunately the option of "do nothing" exists and has only subtle implications. The best we can hope for is that a future administration will reach a point where they have a strong majority in Congress and can get some of the above solutions enacted. But since senior citizens are the most likely cohort of Americans to vote, and they do so decisively, it may be that the majority of our resources go towards supporting the elderly (SS, medicare, etc.) for a long time - possibly until we have a major war or similar event to require a shift in budgetary priorities.

Belt Labeling

Problem1: Sometimes when you gain a little weight, your belt size increases by one or two holes and you don't even realize it.

Problem2: Some people buy the wrong size pants, not realizing their true size because they cinch things up with a belt adjustment.

Solution: A belt that has labels above each of the holes indicating the corresponding waist size. So it will be immediately obvious, for example, if you slip from a 32 to a 33 by going out one hole in your belt. Is there any reason not to have these labels? It would be so easy to do. I think this is a concept like those tagless t-shirts they came out with a few years ago. Once someone starts doing it, it will become an expectation for all belts (except reversible ones).

Teaching Fuzzy Logic

Problem: In life, we commonly find that a little bit of bad information can be far worse than no information at all. Here are some examples of what I mean:

1. One time we were Geocaching, which means we were looking for a small "treasure" that was hidden in about a 20 foot radius. A friendly jogger came by and told us that she had seen people looking for this cache before, and we needed to be looking much deeper into the woods. This turned out to be incorrect, which led to our spending about an hour unsuccessfully searching for the hidden container. (We found it on a subsequent trip, after getting more reliable information).

2. A few years ago, there was a sniper loose in our metropolitan area. Ten people were killed, and three others critically injured, including one man who was filling his gas task a few miles from our home. The police identified a white box truck as the likely vehicle, and weeks went by with massive searches of white box trucks. Traffic was tied up for miles, etc. The suspects were ultimately apprehended in a dark blue Chevrolet Caprice sedan.

3. How often do you hear a company say that you can find more information regarding a certain topic on their website? Then you go to the site, and search hopelessly throughout the site with nothing to be found on the topic - certainly nothing plainly visible on the front page. You would have been better off searching quickly on the site, then just going somewhere else for the information.

Solution: Computers fare much better than people when they are given small amounts of incorrect information. This is because they can implement algorithms based on "Fuzzy Logic", which essentially allows certain facts to be temporarily overlooked or reduced in value when other facts seem to give a more compelling solution. A classic example is those 20 Questions games. Surely you have been amazed that the computer often can ultimately identify your item, even in some cases where you tell it an outright lie for 1 or 2 questions.

Children are not taught fuzzy logic in school. Wouldn't it be interesting to have some logic questions for students to answer where they are presented with some facts, and told that 1 of the facts is wrong? It seems to me that this would be a great skill to develop, given the reality of the world. With so many of the issues you hear discussed today, you need to be able to develop sound conclusions when there are red herring facts vying for your attention. Global warming and evolution are two examples that jump to mind.

So let's get this new brand of teaching started. See if you can solve the example below for x and y! (Exactly one of the statements is wrong)

2x + 3y = 27
4x + 4y = 40
x + y = 9
2y - 2x = 8
5x + y = 22

The Willinator

The Willinator is a fun idea because it is very simple to explain, and most people to whom I have mentioned the idea have liked it!

Problem: Setting up a will is one of those things that we all know we should do, but many people do not seem to find the motivation to do so (until very late in life). It can seem very complicated and expensive to go through the process of thinking about the various pertinent issues, writing a legal document, getting it notarized, etc. And making modifications to a will, once established, also seems more onerous than it should be.

Solution: The Willinator is an online service that lets you create a legal will for a modest fee (much less than it would cost to do through an attorney, as most people now do). The best part of the Willinator is that you can log on any time and make changes. This means that your children must be nice to you at all times. The last thing they want to do is perform some offense to lower their standing in the will right before you die. You can even give shared access to let everyone know where they stand at any given time. This might motivate them to give you the best possible treatment – with immediate gratification.

Caveat: Society may not look favorably on people being able to make adjustments to such an important document in such a whimsical fashion.

"Implement" Tag

I've noticed that some of my ideas on this blog would fall into a "non-implementable" category, because they are one of the following:

• not practical
• not fully-formed ideas
• rely on technology that has not been developed
• require someone doing work/research before they are ready
• probably have already been implemented by someone
• are just stupid

But, for the small number of items that I believe could be implemented at this moment, I will henceforth try to start tagging them as "implement".

Online Timestamp for Predictions/Ideas

Problem: You had a certain idea or prediction, perhaps that you shared with others, that turned out to come true. But after the fact, you have no proof of your early version of the idea, and your friends don’t remember or care about your prescient vision.

Solution: WebTimestamp is a service that let’s you simply enter a block of text and timestamp it. Once an item is stamped, it can no longer be edited. One example I wish I had “timestamped” was my opposition to the Iraq war expressed before the war started (back when most were mildly in favor of the invasion). Other examples might be sports or political predictions, suicide notes, etc.

Caveat: A site like this could potentially be abused by people who make numerous predictions - especially on both sides of an issue. For example, someone could predict a bunch of stocks to go up or down, with different user ids, and then advertise just the predictions where they were correct.

Google Search

Problem: It seems to me that one of Google's strengths is also a big weakness. Google returns search results virtually instantaneously. It is pure and immediate gratification. But this begs the question whether Google is really giving you the highest quality results. Clearly, the results you get are based on some massive indexing that Google is doing on a regular basis.

Solution: I am not here to second-guess the secret algorithms generated over years of research by the geniuses at Google. It just seems to me that you should be able to tell Google that it can take more time and give you some higher quality results. Two features one might expect are (1) change the time Google may take on initial search from "immediate" to "n seconds". This way, if you are willing to wait n seconds for your results you can get higher quality links returned. ("Quality" can be based on personal preferences you have configured, or perhaps going beyond the standard index to look at more recent articles that are not yet fully indexed). (2) While you are reviewing results, there could be an option where Google continues to run in the background. You can click a button to "upgrade" your results whenever you like, which would potentially give you better results that have been found since your initial query.

I'm not sure what Google's incentive would be to implement the above, since they own the market on search. However, perhaps they could include a randomization element in the "upgrade" option. This would mean that the same search could yield different results each time (if the randomization option is enabled my the user). This could potentially increase revenues for Google by giving access to a broader number of advertisements for a given search.

Make Your Own Emoticons

Problem: When sending Instant Messages, the available emoticons never seem quite right for the emotion you want to convey. For me, the one I can never seem to find is something on the order of "bemused".

Solution: I would like to see a website that takes an image of you and converts it into an emoticon, suitable for use in the common Instant Messenger applications. Then you click a button and it adds it to your current emoticon list, or at least gives you some simple instructions for how to access your new emoticon.

Televised Golf Slopes

Problem: In this day and age, televised sports benefit from incredible technology. The strike zone pitch replays in baseball, yellow first-down line in football, replays from all angles, etc. Golf even has the super slo-mo replays of tee shots, bunker shots, etc. However, they have never come up with a camera that comes even close to properly representing the slopes on the greens. If the announcers don't tell you, you have almost no concept of the steep slopes on the greens until you see which way the ball rolls.

Solution: I am not an expert in video/photography. But it seems to me that they show all of their shots from overhead cameras that show the entire green, but which flatten out all of the slopes. I think they could properly demonstrate slope by using more cameras that are at the ground level. To me, this would be much more valuable than some of the other junk they waste money on, like all the slo-mo analysis they do of the golf swings.

Quote: Linus Pauling

"Well, you just have lots of ideas and throw away the bad ones. You aren't going to have good ideas, unless you have lots of ideas and some principle of selection."

- Linus Pauling

Blog Expirations on Blogger

Problem: It's always disappointing when someone takes a primo blog name on Blogger and then doesn't do anything with it. Here are some random examples of great keywords for which I found existing blogs, which turned out to be quite lame and abandoned (as you can see for yourself). I included a short excerpt from each blog to give you a general idea.

MoreCowbell - (last post October 2002) "Apparently I missed the memo, but Rosie O'Donnell is back in the news.
LOL - the only post (from April 2001) is "this is the flufy puiff blog.... it has everything from Harry Potter to Limp Bizkit"
Sublime - (last post July 2001) "i'm bored and grumpy. i just cleaned my room, yuck. dried flowers rot. dum dee dum"
Preschool - only post from 10/13/04 is "my son goes to pre-school at 8:00"
PhiladelphiaEagles - There are a total of 5 posts, from November 2003
RantsAndRaves - A single post in 2000, completely worthless and with no redeeming value

Obviously most of these people had 5 minutes of interest a few years ago, and have no intention of ever posting to that blog again. Yet they are squatting on a prime blog name.

Solution: Blogger should have a rule where someone can apply to wait list a blog name, in which case Blogger sends an e-mail to the "owner" of that blog indicating that if they don't make a single post for a 2 year period, the name will be transferred to a new owner.

Federal Corporate Insurance System

Problem: It seems unfair that certain industries get federal bailouts as part of their revenue model. An example that came up recently in the news is the citrus industry. California suffered an unusual frost that killed a large percentage of the annual orange crop. Now they are asking the government to grant them emergency disaster bailout funds. However, when they have good years I do not see them lining up to pay any extra amount to the government. You also hear about farmers getting bailed out from time to time, for floods or other disasters. So these industries are receiving an unfair subsidy that other industries do not receive. I am not unsympathetic to the people experiencing these disasters - it just seems that there should be a more equitable way to handle this than random bailouts.

Solution: Create a federal insurance fund that can be applied to any industry. Corporations in that industry pay into the fund at an agreed-upon level. For example, maybe the citrus farmers pay 2 cents per orange, or a dollar per basket. These funds are kept in a trust. When there is a disaster, the government pays out some of the money in the trust. Everything is budgeted. If the funds fall short over time, the premiums can be increased. This sort of idea is already in place for the pension industry (Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation), so it seems like a reasonable idea for other industries to start funding their own disaster relief as well.

Webcam RSS Feed

Problem: You have a webcam that you would like to keep tabs on, but you don't have time to watch it like a security guard. You would just like occasional updates on the status of something. For example, maybe you are expecting a package delivered and want to know soon after it is there and have some general idea of when it arrived.

Solution: A webcam that captures images at a selected interval, and then makes them available as an RSS feed. Then you can just look in your RSS reader and see all of the captures with the appropriate timestamp.

The Perpetual Line

Problem: You want to open a new hotel in Las Vegas, and are looking for a unique hook to attract visitors.

Solution: The "Perpetual Line". This is just a line where people go to wait. One person goes through the line every 10 seconds, and gets a paper with their number and maybe a handstamp or some sort of collectible ("I did The Vegas Line"). The unique thing about the line is that it never ends as new people are always entiring the back of the line. It is a place to meet people, hang out, be a part of the event, etc.

Webcam Screensaver

Problem: You would like a more interesting screen saver. Also, you have something you want to watch when your computer is not actively running.

Solution: A web cam feed that displays as a screen saver. The feed is gradually and imperceptibly moved around the screen, so that it performs the necessary function of a screen saver. But perhaps more interesting to look at.

Disclaimer: This idea was suggested by a friend.

Google Patents

Check out another cool new Beta feature from Google - it is called Google Patents.

What are some cool things you can do with Google Patents?

1. Browse through and find interesting patents to read about. Here is an application I found from Groundspeak for something that sounds very much like Geocaching.
2. Search for a product idea you have, to see if it is already patented.
3. Look at how similar patent applications were filed, to prepare for filing your patent application.
4. Instead of buying a service, just get the pertinent information you need from the patent application. Here is a good example.

Hitbot, a Weblog Traffic Maximization Tool

Problem: You have a weblog, with revenues generated based on number of unique visitors and advertising click-throughs. You would like as many people as possible to be driven to your site after searching for common terms in search engines.

Solution: Hitbot is a software program that reviews a blog post, and suggests ways that the wording could be changed that would not change the gist of the entry but would increase the likelihood of matching common queries in search engines. Or it could generate keywords at the end of a post. So if you are reviewing an ipod, for example, it might list "mp3 player" and "Apple" as tags in the post. Customers could pay for the use of hitbot via a subscription or pay-for-use model.

Disclaimer: This idea was suggested by a friend.

Lights / Wipers

Problem: Many states now have laws that you must turn on your headlights when using your windshield wipers. But in daytime, it is easy to forget to turn on your lights.

Solution: An option to have the lights come on automatically after 30 seconds of using the wipers.

Disclaimer: This idea was suggested by a friend.