Looking to the future: the value of helium

This is exactly the kind of article I like to see. Thinking critically about the future, people's needs, and flows of materials. Makes me want to buy a lot of helium and wait for 50 years. Not sure iif the time horizon is right. Could be 15 to 150 years or more I guess.
http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/going_going_gone/

Techno rave visuals usine MS. Excel

As you may know (I might have written it on here) I LOVE excel.  For some reason it is so fun and awesome.  Anyway I am frustrated by how all artistic visuals that go along with music performaces tend to be these sallow washed out trippy tie dye colors.  Heres my idea: using conditional formatting and the RAND function, together with some other calculations to add control, you can make colors and boxes that move and jump around.  Gonna have to try it sometime.

High School Elective

Its your life... Let's kick ass!!!
A class in high school about having fun with success, getting things done, making time for work but more time for play.  Give HS students a reason to want to have discipline.  Making big bucks! Doing awesome stuff! Living the life they want to live!  I think it will really resonate.  The kids are calling out for this stuff.

-- Sent from my Palm Pre

Fashion modeling company for any designer

Make a fashion modeling agency that caters to small, independent and home designers.  Give them a venue to show their work, and put on fashion shows that they pay for.

Why do they make subway cars so tough?

Living in nyc now I've been riding on the subway quite a bit.  I've noticed that the subway cars are really strong and heavy, made from lots of steel.  Why do they need to be so strong? I feel like they could have a thin walled skiff and that would mean enegy savings not to mention improved schedules since they could stop faster.  Now, they just seem way ovetengineered.

-- Sent from my Palm Pre

Rfid Memory cards built into post-its

So you can store text files and other information as 'attachments' to the paper post it, on which can be written a note and a description of the attached file. Would be even better if the file could be read by ones phone or computer using hardware that is already present, like bluetooth or wifi.

-- Sent from my Palm Pre

Magnetic paper to be used like post-its

Instead of sticky on the back, its magnetic so it can stick to metal.  

-- Sent from my Palm Pre

Awesome idea to product website

Found this recently as Kluster.com went out of business, and got merged into this company. Cooler idea - people submit product ideas, people vote on them, then winning ones actually get made into products and then sold. The idea generator has to pay $99 to get the idea in, then they get some of revenue as the product is sold. People who vote and comment also get some of the revenue. Looks like they are also generating a lot of data.

Quirky.com


Pretty darn cool.

Heavy lifter fitness machine

Make a fitness machine that lets you use all your muscles at once (including arms, legs, abs, chest, neck hands, all of em!) to see how much you cam lift.  Cables and gears would connect it all together so the energy you exert from every individual part combines into one force used to lift a weight.  

Bathroom diaper dispensers

They have the changing tables in most bathrooms... Why not sell diapers too?

The power and decline of the polymaths

Great article, a little depressing since I identify with the curiosity and breadth of knowledge that these types of intellects develop. I feel that lots of creative thinkers are not, do not want to be, or simply cannot be specialists, and that there is a real value in this versatility and variety. To a large extent it is the breadth, not the depth of knowledge that inspires me.

http://www.moreintelligentlife.com/content/edward-carr/last-days-polymath

Soundproof sleep chamber

Many people need to sleep in noisy places and sometimes ear plugs are not effective because they do not eliminate all the sounds.  Instead a clear plastic bubble could be created which would block sound (keeping background noise out and snoring noise in), hold in moisture, even purify the air  There are many benefits to the head isolation sleep system.  It even has a built in alarm clock, and a travel version can be created with a pillow built in.

-- Sent from my Palm Pre

Ice shoes

Walking on ice in the winter can be very dangerous, especially frozen lakes, streams and rivers.  The primary danger comes from breaking through and getting stuck in the water where you cannot get out.  In a river you could even get sucked down by the current under the ice and be trapped  Breaking through occurs when too much weight/force is focused in one place like when someone is standing or running on the ice.  A solution is to wear a type of shoes that spreads one's body weight evenly over a large area.  This would be useful to people who need to cross questionable ice areas, and emergeny responders who need to help people whp have already broken through.  This is taken from the idea of a water skater bug.

Friend Notes

I'm working with my friend Eric Allen on a facebook application that let's people take notes about their friends, whatever kind of notes they want!

I think it's really cool because it lets you now build your own content about your friends. They present themselves, and you record and interpret it through your own lens. For now, all notes are confidential to the user, so the friends and others can't see them, but we're thinking about creating some sort of sharing or collaboration capability in the future... thoughts?

Here's a link!
http://apps.facebook.com/friend_notes/

Book idea: how to get rich with any profession

Thinking that working in any field offers lots of opportunities for financial success.  Artists for example often are early residents in neighborhoods going up in value.  If they buy some of the places they live in they can capitalize on this.  Same thing goes for non profit social welfare workers if they invest in the positive results they are working towards.  Not sure if this would work all the time, but should be enough for a book at least.

Fun combo business #1 Paws and Laws

A law office and a dog sitting place in one.  Good because the lawyers need some distractions to boost up their hourly rates, and they're sitting around most of the time anyway.

Anti-brand Idea

So much energy is devoted to branding yet so many brands are annoying and have strong weaknesses. Brand Hitmen would be a services company that is hired by companies to target these weaknesses in their competitors. Any number of actions could be taken to erode the brand of the target company including publicly poking fun at its name, leading a negative PR campaign against the quality of the brand, turning the brand name into a synonym for poor quality/something gross/etc., doing things to make the brand cheap/trendy/etc., and so on. An example would be making negative connections between the similar sounds of IP phone company "Vonage", and the word "Bondage" such that every time consumers hear the company name Vonage they think of S&M sex, building (for most people) a negative connotation. Viral marketing tactics would be used for them most part. Everything would be legal, and the focus would be on de-branding rather than corporate defamation, like drawing attention to the fact that the company uses sweatshops for example. The focus instead would specifically be on using the target company's own marketing message against them.

Income study of Kiryas Joel

This is a town in new york, orange county I think.  It is supposedly the poorest or one of the poorest municipalities in the US.  It is a hasidic jewish community though and it doesn't seem that poor.  Would be interesting to find out why that is, there could be some economic lesson that would apply to the nation at large.  Apparently the whole town collects welfare, and it may have something to do with the large number of children each family has.  Efficiency or exploiting the system?  Subject for further research.

Idea for a basic trend description website

So there are always these trends like "cloud computing", "Social Media", and "Mobile Internet" that us tech involved people hear about, get pumped about, and understand to some extent, but what about everybody else? I feel like there are lots of places that provide technologist/very early adopter news (focused blogs lets say), and lots of places that only cover things that have become big trends that the general public can understand (the New York Times for example), but what about a place that makes the biggest trends instantly comprehensible to the larger public that can make use of it? I'm talking more basic than Wired, and with a real focus on not only what the tech is, but what the heck its for and how it can help people. Specifically. Concretely. Like Twitter for example, its powerful, but so many people don't even understand what the heck it is for. Sure some of the nuance will be lost in this, but so what? We sacrifice a little richness for a lot of reach. Ok.

Cloud Computing has been the Hot Stuff, but now what? Application Ideas? Post em!

Ok so some readers who have a lot better handle on this may find a mistake or two, but here is a basic description I wrote up for my father, who was asking about what it really was. He needs to know, he works in publishing. The question is, what are some great applications for the cloud that cannot be done with our normal infrastructure?

"Cloud Computing I understand it reasonably well. Remember that before computers became PCs on the desktop, they were mainframes? Then, every user had a terminal, but all the processing was done on a larger computer - the terminal was just the control station where you interacted with the mainframe. Cloud computing is very much going back in this direction. Instead of processing being done on your home computer or your smart phone or whatever, it is done by a larger "computer" somewhere else. The difference now is that this larger computer is not one mainframe, but a giant (and I mean giant) network of computers working together. This is the cloud. Together they have the power to process lots of requests. You can think of what Google does as cloud computing sort of since they have vast warehouses of servers stacked up, each of which is really a pretty humble machine, but working together they form a supercomputer, and with it, they give people access to services. Google docs is a very cloud computing type application, because they take what is normally a desktop application (word processing lets say) and make it into a network application - you just access the internet and use the program running in the cloud. This is why Microsoft is afraid of Google, because if Google does enough of this, the valuable windows operating system becomes obsolete. The crazy thing is that in cloud computing, your computer can become part of the cloud too though. Conceivably, the cloud could be the whole internet if everyone participated."